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Having already missed out on this year’s spring Classics, suffering with cytomegalovirus, Visma-Lease A Bike rider Christophe Laporte will also now miss this summer’s Tour de France.
The Frenchman, a stage winner in Cahors at the 2022 race, won’t recover from his illness to make a return to the race in July, even if his condition is improving.
Visma-Lease A Bike directeur sportif Grischa Niermann provided an update on Laporte’s health in an interview with L’Equipe, which confirmed that the 32-year-old racer won’t be making the Dutch team’s Tour squad.
“Unfortunately, he’s been out for a while. He’s already missed the entire Classics campaign, and he won’t be fit for the Tour,” Niermann said.
“We hope he’ll get back in shape and be able to train as quickly as possible. But, for the moment, he’s not 100% yet.”
Laporte hasn’t raced yet during the 2025 season as a result of the illness, which reared its head just before he was set to join the team on a training camp in January.
“Right before I was supposed to go on an altitude training camp at the end of January, I started feeling unwell,” Laporte said back in March. “Tests showed that I have the cytomegalovirus. Since then, I’ve been recovering, and you have to take things day by day.”
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Several of Laporte’s Visma teammates, including Jonas Vingegaard, Matteo Jorgenson, Sepp Kuss, and Tiesj Benoot, are currently training at altitude in Sierra Nevada for the Tour, though Laporte isn’t part of that group.
Laporte’s last racing action came at the tail-end of 2024, when he scored the 32nd win of his career in a two-up sprint to take victory at Paris-Tours.
Niermann conceded that Laporte and the team don’t have a set return date in mind.
“He’s really, really slowly improving,” Niermann told L’Equipe. “It’s getting better and better, but it’s taking time, much longer than we’d like and he’d want. But that’s life.”
At the end of March, Laporte admitted that a return date would be up in the air, such is the unpredictable nature of recovery from the virus.
“The frustrating part is that you can’t predict how long it will take,” he said.
“With a broken bone, you have an estimate of how long recovery will be before you can train again. With this virus, you can’t determine that in advance, which makes it mentally tough.”