There's logically been a lot of discussion in these past two weeks about Visma-Lease a Bike and the Giro d'Italia, given Jonas Vingegaard's recent announcement that he'll be taking part next May. But while Vingegaard wearing pink would become one of the standout images of the 2026 season, it shouldn't be forgotten that over the winter one of Visma's three former Giro d'Italia leaders – Wilco Kelderman and Steven Kruijswijk being the other two – quietly left the ranks of Vingegaard's squad for a fresh start.
Even if there wasn't much of a hubbub when the third of this trio, Attila Valter, ended his three-year stint at Visma-Lease a Bike, in some ways, it wasn't surprising.
After a very promising 2023, where Valter had helped the team leaders take all three top spots in the Vuelta a España overall, and then a third straight Hungarian National Championships road race victory and fourth place in the Olympic road-race in 2024, Valter suddenly lost traction in 2025. Not only were there no significant results in his own right, for the first time since being a Continental pro, the 2021 Giro d'Italia pink jersey-wearer and established GT team worker found himself not doing any Grand Tours at all.
The writing wasn't necessarily on the wall in terms of his time at Visma-Lease a Bike and the 27-year-old believes he likely could have continued there as a team worker – although the team, subsequently, told Cyclingnews they'd already said to his manager as far back as January 2025 that Valter could look for another squad for 2026.
That might have changed had he started racking up the wins, of course – but either way, as the year ground on and the performances failed to match up to his or the team's expectations, it was clear he was at a crossroads. Rather than stick with what he knew for 2026 – or try to – Valter opted to quit.
When asked by Cyclingnews at his new Bahrain Victorious training camp why he had left one of the biggest teams in the world, Vallter is at pains to emphasise that he partly opted to go simply because he wanted to chase his own personal goals more, while remaining fully prepared to work for his leaders when needed.
But both these options were, hypothetically at least, possible at Visma-Lease a Bike. Which begs the question: why did he switch to a team which is, with no disrespect intended to Bahrain Victorious, currently not operating in the same league financially or in terms of results as the Dutch squad?
Valter would be the first to recognise that ever since they began building for Grand Tours – essentially since the rise of Primož Roglič in the late 2010s – Visma-Lease a Bike have worked diligently and effectively at strategies and team practices that produce major stage racing results.
However, he also argues that where the team perhaps is at a disadvantage is that as they have succeeded with those strategies in so many ways, the room for personal freedom of initiative has correspondingly dwindled. Or as he puts it, "the lines were too narrow."
The three Grand Tours
"I'm trying to be really careful with criticism because Visma is a team that won three Grand Tours in one season. I was part of it," Valter says, harking back to 2023 when it looked like Visma – then Jumbo-Visma – were simply unstoppable in almost every major stage race.
"Even if I have my own thoughts and everything about them, in terms of teams, they are way better than I am in terms of a rider. So this is my idea, but who am I to criticise them when it's working for them?
"And honestly, I like them. It's just that at the end of three years, it was not a good combination."
Yet it turns out that's not the whole story. Valter immediately goes on to pinpoint two big changes in the team in 2025 that he feels did not favour the squad's attitude towards free thinkers like himself. Firstly there was the departure of the longstanding head of sport, Merijn Zeeman towards the end of 2024, and secondly, the fact that even while Visma managed to produce some outstanding results in 2025, including 40 wins, the Vuelta, the Giro and a Tour de France podium, the challenge of getting back to as high as their 2023 position of dominating the sport proved impossible.
"When Merijn left, it changed, and the team also felt a lot of pressure from outside, that we wanted to get back to the top, but we weren't at the top. We were not the best team [in the world] in 2025," he says.
"And the more you force it, the more you start to burn your hand. At least I and certainly [some] other riders in Visma definitely felt it.
"It's not about they didn't listen to us. They listened, but they didn't know how to change."
Valter comes back repeatedly to the idea that globally in his opinion, Visma-Lease a Bike's strategies and protocols – what he calls 'the recipe' – can't be faulted. Rather, when it came down to certain individuals like him, there were complications that just couldn't be resolved.
"For them, it's like numbers and performance in science are the way of working. But when I do exactly what they tell me to do and I'm not improving, then it's also science that says it's not working with me," he says.
"So then I said: OK then let's approach it in a different way, and it was just 'No we don't do that.' So then there was a bit of a friction, let's say."
When Valter found himself failing to get the results he was looking for, he found the way the team was run couldn't help him, he said. The consequence was that he found himself going round in circles.
This was further compounded by his being in a minority. Had the team being doing really badly, he might have had more of a soapbox to stand on. As it was when he found himself swimming the tide, the team could point to their run of success through more across-the-board strategies – even if, as Valter says, 2025 did not go totally as planned for Visma.
"I think the team is missing a bit of individualism, and this is not about I want to eat a cake or I want to eat that or I want to do this or that," Valter explains
"Scientifically, it's not possible that 30 riders have to eat the same way. It's just not. But they have found that this is the best way in general, and you see 23, 24 riders – out of a roster of 30 – have such good performances. So it's not like, it's not working.
"It's more like long term you start to question things and you start to feel like maybe I need a different amount of vitamins when we all have the same. And the same training and the same methods and the same philosophy."
Given the standout names were doing brilliantly in general, Valter suggests, also meant that riders like himself were eclipsed and had a harder time explaining that for them 'the recipe' wasn't as effective.
"You see the guys who is on top like Matteo [Jorgenson], for whom it's working super well, for Ben Tulett it works super well, for Jonas it's working super well.
"So when you are the one who is like 'yeah, I also want to improve 10% the next year', and you don't, then you obviously start to think that for me it doesn't have the same benefits." Then, perhaps damningly of all, he repeats: "And in this mindset there is no way to change that."
'Never just one side of the coin'
Valter points out that he believes he wasn't alone in this predicament and to back up his argument, he adds that a significant number of other riders left Visma at the end of the season: nine out of a roster of 30, or almost a third.
"I think the correct way to put it is that I was not fitting, specially in the last year in terms of bringing the best out of myself. I mean, it's never just one side of the coin, I also felt that I could definitely be much better than I was. [But] I didn't get the right mindset or the right help from Visma because they had their own aims.
"There are a lot of parts to it. At one point, I felt we should question things, do different things, because the [Visma] recipe is working, but I felt like it could work even more.
"But there was no option to change the mindset there, so I tried to move between the lines the best, but the lines were really narrow at Visma. They are super, super narrow there," he emphasises.
"Obviously, I cannot change that team and I don't want to change the team. They are good because they work between these fine [narrow] lines."
At Bahrain, on the other hand, precisely because the team doesn't have such rigidly established methods for producing results, he believes he'll have more freedom of manouevre, and will be able to flourish more.
"My goals, my directions, my physical capabilities are completely the same here at Bahrain. It's just the lines are wider and so we find more individuality in this team," he says.
This criticism could perhaps just be put down as sour grapes from a rider who failed to make the most of his time, although there have been some other statements over the winter regarding Visma's prior, alleged, inflexibility. The crunch difference, when Matteo Jorgenson recently said that the team had changed, was that it was only in the liberalisation of some race programs. Although as Valter has put it, in Jorgenson's case, the American is clearly happy with how things are run in the Dutch squad in general - and succeeding, too.
"The management sat down last fall, and they thought a little bit about what we can improve, and they definitely realised that they want to listen to our desires a little bit more this year," Jorgenson told reporters during the team training camp this January.
"You can see in the calendars that as riders, we were given space to choose a little bit of our own calendar, and they really listened. I think, especially in Jonas' case, because it was difficult for them to let go of this formula that they had perfected for so long, and because they also know that it works – they won the Tour twice with it – so it was difficult for them to give that up.
"I honestly applaud them for it, because it's not an easy thing to do when you know you have something that works."
Equally team sports director Grischa Niermann recognised that there had been an easing of the team's structured, rinse-and-repeat approach, when asked about the same subject, saying: "I think every once in a while it's also good to to adapt the plans a little bit and do something, maybe not exactly the same as you did the last two, three, four years."
When asked for a reaction to Valter's comments, Visma told Cyclingnews in a short statement that "Team Visma-Lease a Bike decided not to extend Attila Valter’s contract and informed his manager already in January last year that he was free to look for a new team."
Fail better?
Whatever change there may have been at Visma, it has come too late for Valter, who points out that just because he wants to pursue his own goals, he's still ready and willing to work as a domestique for the leaders at Bahrain. Just as he was at Visma. But relying more on his gut feelings and past experiences is definitely the way he wants to go, and he cites the example of Bahrain's former Giro d'Italia podium finisher and Valter's camp roommate Damiano Caruso – "such a legend", is how Valter describes him – as one to follow.
As he explains, Bahrain had a test day showing that Caruso already had really "good numbers", but it was all through adopting a less scientific approach. As Valter admiringly put it "It's as if was five years ago, he didn't even know that calories exist!
"He just knows how to eat, he knows how to train, he knows how to do things. It's an instinct. But when I felt like 'this is not how I should train', but science says this is how I should train, then who is right?" Valter asks rhetorically. "It's a classic case of head versus heart.
"If I measured everything, if we try to measure everything, then sometimes we are trying to measure the unmeasurable. And me, I'm not a big fan of that."
He is also warming to the approach Bahrain has across the board, which he says is more similar to Caruso's empirical philosophy than the scientific attitude he found at Visma.
"I've just here for a week and then yeah, it's like 'this training is good, this protocol is good, should we do it? Should we change it?'
"It's not like 'yeah, this is the best'. But it's clearly not and [yet] we say it is."
All of this left him looking towards the door at Visma, but now, he says, his objectives are multiple, because as he puts it, "I'm thinking about my own goals, my personal results and that's why I changed."
Having "definitely failed" to add results to his palmares, as he says, his idea is to focus on the Classics, particularly Strade Bianche. But as he says, the aim is bigger, it's to get back "the spark and the explosivity, the urge, the motivation, the fire in the ice let's say. The results should come later."
"Honestly, if I wanted to work, then I would have worked for Jonas or Wout [van Aert], I've done that and I enjoyed that. It's more about discovering what I can do on my own with my own results But this also doesn't mean that on certain races I'm not willing to help Lenny [Martinez] or Antonio [Tiberi] or Santiago [Buitrago] or any of our leaders who are definitely better than me, especially in climbs.
"At the same time I'm here to chase my own personal goals and then the focus is on that. But don't get me wrong, either: I will do my job."
With Bahrain's 'broader lines' to move between, maybe Valter will have a greater opportunity to shine on his own account, too. Or at the very least, to quote the great Irish author Samuel Beckett, he'll be able to 'fail better.' Watch this space.
