How Team Visma | Lease a Bike and McKinsey are racing smarter with AI
When Jonas Vingegaard crossed the finish line to win the Giro d’Italia, the race was loud in all the obvious ways: the crowd shouting, cameras closing in, commentators calling the moment for fans watching at home.
But some of the most important noise was in his ear: his coach on the radio, translating a live stream of race inputs—time gaps, weather, road conditions, rider effort, recovery, and tactical options—into guidance he could act on in real time.
Behind that voice was a race-intelligence AI system developed by Team Visma | Lease a Bike to help coaches see what is happening live, understand what could happen next, and decide what to do next by bringing together race feeds, weather, course information, rider-performance data, radio inputs, and scenario simulations.
As Team Visma | Lease a Bike’s official technology and performance partner, McKinsey has been working with the team to scale this AI system, turning complex race inputs into usable insight, bringing distinctive AI, data science, engineering, and technology capabilities from QuantumBlack, our firm’s AI arm.
Our partnership is grounded in a simple idea: Performance improves fastest when technology is embedded directly into how decisions are made. It is also informed by shared values: innovation, trust, and the belief that how a team works together ultimately drives performance. That is especially meaningful in cycling.
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“In our sport, small decisions can have a massive impact,” says Richard Plugge, CEO of Team Visma | Lease a Bike. “By combining our racing expertise with McKinsey’s change management experience with organizations—and QuantumBlack’s AI and technology capabilities—we’re creating a new way to race.”
“Elite sport is fundamentally about strategy and making the best possible decisions in high-stakes environments,” says Lieven Van der Veken, co-leader of QuantumBlack at McKinsey. “Our work with Team Visma | Lease a Bike is a classic example of core strategy being deepened and accelerated by AI. That combination of strategy, human adoption, and cutting-edge tech is what helps any organization navigating complex, competitive environments unlock sustained, winning performance.”
Building a ‘digital twin’ of performance
Our work began in 2024, when a couple of McKinsey colleagues based in our Amsterdam office read a behind-the-scenes book on the team. “Many of us are big cycling fans and we wondered how we could help make a great team even better,” says Sven Houthuys, a McKinsey partner.
For the 2024 Tour, our firm worked with the cycling team to develop a Rider Digital Twin, turning what used to be a full day of analyst work into thousands of race simulations in the same amount of time. The impact was tangible: race-scenario were set up 36x faster while accurate fatigue prediction improved by 10 percent. The model informs race strategy and decision-making, and has contributed to recent team performances, from Jonas’s historic Plateau de Beille ride to Wout van Aert’s Vuelta stage win in Córdoba and Simon Yates’s overall Giro d’Italia 2025 victory.
Our collaboration in the lead up to this year’s Giro d’Italia built on that earlier work and expanded the way Team Visma | Lease a Bike embeds technology into performance. The team sought to help Team Visma | Lease a Bike’s coaches turn noisy, fast-moving race data into tactical decisions when seconds, watts, weather, fatigue, and positioning all matter.
“Great technology is only useful if it’s trusted in the heat of the moment. Instead of handing over a one-size-fits-all tool, we co-created the platform directly with the team’s coaches,” Houthuys says. “By tailoring the design to exactly how they operate on the road, we ensured the technology isn’t just a fancy dashboard, but a practical, trusted asset built right into their pursuit of victory.”
As the peloton moves to its next phase, McKinsey will continue to support Team Visma | Lease a Bike, believing our joint work is a blueprint for how AI can transform strategy, operations, and competitive advantage at scale.
Our shared ambition is not just to win races, but to modernize how teams understand and respond to ever-shifting dynamics. In a sport decided by seconds, that shift could make all the difference.
