Inside the Visma-Lease a Bike “Control Room”

Much has been said about the legality of Visma-Lease a Bike’s brand new ‘control room’, and in recent days the UCI has opened an investigation to examine it and banned it from the TDF premises.

But what exactly is it? In response to the UCI’s announcement of the aforementioned investigation, team general manager Richard Plugge said: “They are very welcome to come and visit us.” The day before the start of the Tour of Florence, Cycling news I visited the Visma Hotel in Pistoia to do just that.

On the screen in the middle right, some interesting software is being used. In simple terms, it is an automatic jersey recognition software, which is superimposed on the live TV images. The software counts the number of jerseys each team has in an image and updates itself continuously as riders disappear from view or disappear from the group altogether. The count is then listed below, allowing the passengers in the van to see how many riders each team has in a breakaway or peloton.