Visma-Lease A Bike Confirm Dark "Architect" Jersey For Barcelona Grand Départ After 100,000-Vote Fan Poll, Unveil First-Ever Tour de France Rest Day Jersey
Visma-Lease a Bike have formally confirmed the winner of their fan-voted 2026 Tour de France jersey poll, with the predominantly black "Architect" design taking 52 percent of more than 100,000 votes cast in late April. The dark Gaudí-inspired edition will be the team's racing jersey from the Barcelona Grande Départ on 4 July through to the Champs-Élysées on 26 July, with the runner-up light yellow design now formally announced as the squad's first-ever Tour de France Rest Day Jersey.
The Rest Day Jersey is the more interesting of the two pieces of news. Visma have decided to keep the second design in active use rather than retire it, and the rest-day version will be worn by every rider in the squad on the two scheduled rest days of the 2026 Tour: Monday 13 July in Pau and Monday 20 July in Annecy. The team have stopped short of confirming whether the rest-day kit will be available to general retail, but the team's webshop has begun pre-listing both the dark and light variants under "The Architect" collection.
The decision to commission both pieces is, the team has acknowledged, a direct response to the closeness of the fan vote. "Forty-eight per cent of you voted for the light edition," Jonas Vingegaard said in a short video posted by the team on Wednesday afternoon. "It would have been a strange thing to take that work and put it in a drawer." The Dane confirmed he had personally requested the rest-day variant be added to the squad calendar, citing the symbolism of riding in the runner-up colours on the days the team is recovering rather than racing.
The design itself draws directly from Antoni Gaudí's structural sketches, with the honeycomb motif present on both editions in slightly different scale. On the dark "Architect" jersey the honeycomb sits as a subtle tonal pattern across the chest and shoulders, with the team's traditional yellow accents reduced to thin contrast lines on the collar and sleeves. On the rest-day version the honeycomb is rendered in a brighter contrast and the panel work is built on a soft sand-yellow base that more closely echoes Gaudí's Casa Milà façade.
The kit will make its competition debut at the Lille Grand Départ on 4 July, but Visma confirmed that Wout van Aert and Matteo Jorgenson will both wear early-season test versions of the Architect at the Critérium du Dauphiné in early June. Vingegaard, who is currently focused on the Giro d'Italia Grande Partenza this Friday, will not wear the new design at the Italian Grand Tour and will continue in Visma's standard 2026 jersey through to the end of May.
The fan-vote campaign itself is the most successful Visma have run since the team's rebrand from Jumbo. The original 48-hour voting window between 21 and 23 April attracted 67,000 unique voters, before being extended an additional 24 hours to capture late entries. Final tallies came in at 52 percent for the dark version against 48 percent for the light, the closest poll the team have run, and well above the previous record set in 2021 when an early-Jumbo orange-and-yellow campaign drew approximately 38,000 votes.
The other competitive question — what the team will be racing in for at the Tour — remains the more important of the two. Visma's provisional eight-rider squad is built around Vingegaard, with Van Aert, Jorgenson, Sepp Kuss, Christophe Laporte, Bruno Armirail, Victor Campenaerts and a final climbing-domestique slot still being decided between Tiesj Benoot and a young Dutch climbing card the team have not yet named publicly.
For the squad's commercial side, the Architect launch is the most ambitious 2026 Tour activation Lease a Bike have run since signing on as title sponsor. The full clothing collection — a road jersey, the rest-day jersey, a Gaudí-themed bib short, and a special-edition pre-Tour helmet — will retail through the team's webshop and selected partner stores from Saturday 17 May, with a portion of the proceeds going to a Casa Milà restoration fund administered jointly by the City of Barcelona and the Gaudí Foundation.