“Ben Tulett should replace Wout van Aert at the Tour de France”

Wout van Aert will not start the 2026 Tour de France. An elbow wound he picked up before the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes turned infected, and after winning a stage there he abandoned the next day. Visma | Lease a Bike say they will name his replacement on June 23. It is the third change to a Tour eight that has already lost Simon Yates to retirement and Christophe Laporte to injury. "Wout is one of the most important riders in our team," said race coach Marc Reef. "In recent days we have explored all options, but ultimately his health comes first." So who steps in? One camp says the answer is Ben Tulett. The Tour is won and lost in the high mountains against Tadej Pogačar, the argument goes, so Visma should put another climber next to Jonas Vingegaard. Tulett, 24 and in his third season with the team, was groomed for exactly this role. He was lined up to fill the gap Yates left, finished second at Milano-Torino last year and came 13th at Liège-Bastogne-Liège this spring. The motivation is there too. "Would I like to ride the Tour? It's a young boy's dream, the biggest race there is in our sport," he said earlier this year. Even neutral analysts expected a climber like him to "make the cut." The other camp says that misreads what Van Aert actually did. His value was not climbing. It was flat-terrain power, lead-outs, positioning in crosswinds, closing gaps and controlling breaks. A pure climber fills none of that. Visma already look deep in the mountains, with Sepp Kuss, Matteo Jorgenson allready on the list. The team's own recent choices point the same way: when Yates and Laporte dropped out, the spots went to time-triallist Edoardo Affini and Norwegian Per Strand Hagenes, an engine rather than a climber. Hagenes, 22, was second to Mathieu van der Poel at E3 this year. There is wider context. Tulett has never ridden a Tour, and three weeks in July is a different test from a one-week race. Then again, Visma have form here: when Tom Dumoulin paused his career in 2021, a young replacement named Vingegaard stepped up, and the rest followed. With Vingegaard arriving off a Giro win and the margins against Pogačar so thin, every seat in the car matters. So the trade-off is easy to state and hard to settle. Pick Tulett, and you strengthen Vingegaard where the race is decided, but you leave a hole on the flat that Van Aert used to plug. Pick an engine, and you protect the leader in the chaos of week one, but you carry one climber fewer into the Alps. Should Visma hand the spot to Ben Tulett and double down on the mountains, or bring in a Van Aert-style engine to cover the flat? Where do you stand?