Visma-Lease a Bike Confirm Vingegaard's Giro d'Italia Support Cast: Kuss, Kelderman and Campenaerts Anchor the Dane's First Ever Corsa Rosa
Visma-Lease a Bike have confirmed the eight riders who will line up alongside Jonas Vingegaard at the Giro d'Italia on 8 May for the Dane's first ever Corsa Rosa start — a support cast built around three-time Vuelta domestique Sepp Kuss, veteran Dutch climber Wilco Kelderman and versatile road captain Victor Campenaerts, with Italian road-race champion Filippo Fiorelli earning a home Grand Tour start and 24-year-old Tour de l'Avenir winner Davide Piganzoli handed a long-awaited break into the WorldTour Grand Tour selection ladder. Bart Lemmen, Ben Tulett and Belgian neo-pro Timo Kielich complete a squad that performance director Mathieu Heijboer has described as "the most carefully selected team we have ever put together for a Grand Tour Jonas has not ridden before".
The selection, confirmed at a media day in Herentals on Wednesday, is the culmination of an eighteen-month planning process that began at the 2024 end-of-season review meeting in Girona and ended with Vingegaard personally approving the final eight names late last week. "We have been working on this Giro team since before Jonas committed to racing the Giro at all," Heijboer said. "Every single name on this list is a rider Jonas has specifically asked for. Every single combination has been trained together, tested at altitude together and ridden together in the Tirreno-Adriatico and the Volta a Catalunya. This is not a committee selection. This is Jonas's team."
Kuss's inclusion is the most obvious and the most important. The 31-year-old American has been Vingegaard's mountain lieutenant for six straight Grand Tours, and the partnership's results — two Tour wins, a Vuelta win, a second place, a third place and a fourth — speak for themselves. At the Giro, where Vingegaard faces his first GC week against Tadej Pogačar's UAE Team Emirates B-squad in the form of Juan Ayuso rather than the world champion himself, Kuss's role will be exactly what it has been at every previous Grand Tour: ride the penultimate kilometre of every mountain stage at a speed nobody else in the peloton can follow.
Kelderman's return is more poignant. The 34-year-old Dutchman rode the Giro in 2020 for a Sunweb team that wore the maglia rosa for two days thanks to him, and has now been recalled at a moment when his 2024 season of back-to-back crashes looked like it might push him out of Grand Tour selection entirely. "Wilco's experience in the Giro is the reason he is here," Heijboer said. "He has ridden the Corsa Rosa five times. Jonas has ridden it zero times. That is a relationship that needs to exist inside this team and Wilco is the only rider who can fill it."
Campenaerts, the one-time world hour record holder, earns a road-captain role that has been expanding in every Grand Tour he has ridden since joining the team in 2024. "Victor is our radio," Heijboer explained. "He is the rider who is talking to Jonas on every single climb, telling him when to eat, when to drink, when to move up, when to sit in. His road-race brain is why this team has won as many Grand Tours as it has, and he will be shoulder-to-shoulder with Jonas from Bulgaria to the final podium in Rome."
The Italian-flavoured second half of the selection is the most intriguing. Fiorelli, the reigning Italian road-race champion, earns what Heijboer openly called "the home wildcard slot" — Vingegaard wanted at least one rider who could wear the national tricolour jersey in the mountains of Trentino and Lombardy, and the 32-year-old from Treviso has ridden himself into the form of his career this spring with top-tens at Trofeo Laigueglia, Strade Bianche and Milano-Torino. Piganzoli, the 24-year-old who has been Visma's great Italian development project since his transfer from Polti-Kometa last year, will be the youngest rider in the team and is being briefed as a long-range support rider for the final week rather than an early breakaway presence.
The final three places go to the engines. Lemmen, the 30-year-old Dutch ex-soldier who has become a Visma cult hero, will do the front of the peloton work in the flat Bulgaria stages and on the long transitions through the middle week. Tulett, the 24-year-old British climber, was the team's best-placed rider in the high mountains of the Itzulia Basque Country until he cracked on Tuesday and is being given a free role in the final week to chase a stage. Kielich, the Belgian neo-pro, earns a dream Grand Tour debut after a spring in which he finished top-fifteen at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne.
For Vingegaard himself — who spent the last week of March at the Tignes altitude camp and will ride the Tour of the Alps plus the Tour de Romandie back-to-back before flying to Nessebar — the confirmation of his Giro team represents the final major piece of planning for a Grand Tour debut that will make or break his 2026 season. "I am very happy with this team," Vingegaard said in a short Herentals statement. "These are my friends and these are the riders I trust. If this team cannot help me win the Giro d'Italia, then no team can."