Andy Devaney
At the sharp end of endurance sport, you used to need a stopwatch, a good eye and an iron stomach to survive a mountain stage. Now you also need an AI. Vekta, an AI-powered training and coaching platform, has quietly become part of the inner circle for some of the biggest names in professional cycling, stitching itself into the daily routines of WorldTour squads and their development teams.
New for 2026, Lidl-Trek, DECATHLON CMA CGM Team and Team TotalEnergies have all signed on. They join existing users Team Jayco AlUla, Live AlUla Jayco, FDJ–SUEZ and Team AMANI in trusting Vekta as a core piece of their performance puzzle.
For an ecosystem that lives and dies by marginal gains, this is no minor software update. It’s a shift in how decision-making happens across an entire endurance sport programme.
AI Moves Into the Team Car
On paper, Vekta sounds like yet another platform promising to “bring everything together”. In practice, it’s becoming the extra staff member who never sleeps.
The platform pulls together performance data, AI models and coaching tools into one environment that teams use daily for training plans, race preparation and performance review. Coaches, performance staff and riders get a shared, live view of workload, execution and readiness rather than juggling a small army of spreadsheets and apps that refuse to talk to each other.
At WorldTour level, where every training session is logged, tagged and analysed, the data stream is less a tap and more a fire hose. That’s where Vekta is being asked to earn its keep.
From Data Deluge to Decisions
The problem is no longer collecting data in endurance sport; it’s not drowning in it. Lidl-Trek’s Head of Performance, Josu Larrazabal, puts it bluntly: “The capacity to collect data has increased exponentially in recent years, far beyond what we can realistically analyse. At our level, we need more than a communication platform.
We need powerful analysis, and we need it quickly. Working with Vekta allows us to spend less time processing data and more time on the human connection with our riders, which is what really makes the difference in the long term. That is a core value for us.”
That human connection line is telling. Vekta’s pitch isn’t that AI replaces coaches, but that it sits in the background, doing the thankless work of rapidly interpreting large volumes of performance data.
Instead of weeks of manual review, patterns and signals are surfaced quickly: changes in workload, trends in execution, hints of fatigue, or a rider quietly trending upwards. The idea is simple: get the right insights in front of the right person while there’s still time to act, rather than after a rider has already gone backwards on GC.
Talent ID in the Marginal Gains Era
One of the more intriguing uses of Vekta sits away from the television cameras: talent ID and scouting.
The platform’s scouting tools have been used to spot emerging riders whose performance markers might previously have been buried in the noise – riders in development squads or junior teams whose data suggests they’re ready for more ambitious programmes.
In an era when endurance sport pathways are global and crowded, spotting “the one that got away” in someone else’s kit is an expensive mistake. By streamlining how data is collected, interpreted and shared, teams are trying to shorten the gap between potential and opportunity.
The day-to-day impact here is more mundane than it sounds: less time spent dragging files between platforms, more time discussing how to actually develop a rider. That administrative untangling is where a lot of performance is often lost.
WorldTour Validation: Lidl-Trek, TotalEnergies and DECATHLON CMA CGM Team
For Lidl-Trek and Team TotalEnergies, this isn’t a toe-in-the-water trial. Vekta has been appointed the Official Training and Coaching Platform across the men’s WorldTour team, the women’s WorldTour squad and their development programmes. In other words, it’s embedded in the performance workflows, not just parked on a laptop in the back of the bus.
DECATHLON CMA CGM Team have also hit the go button, using Vekta across their WorldTour, development and junior structures as part of a wider push on high-performance systems. Head of Innovation Paul Barratt is clear about why: “As we continue to expand our high-performance approaches, we recognise that a strong data infrastructure is essential.
We are thrilled to have Vekta as our data partner to assist us on this journey, and to drive data-informed decisions to support our World Tour and NewGen riders.”
Team TotalEnergies are taking a similar view, as Scientific Director & Training lead, Maxime Robin, explains: “We are excited to begin our collaboration with Vekta. This partnership will help us work more efficiently and extract deeper insights from our performance data.”
For endurance sport insiders, those are not small endorsements. They suggest AI-driven platforms have moved past the trial phase and into the long-term planning documents.
The Direction of Travel for Endurance Sport
From Vekta’s perspective, this cluster of partnerships says something about where the sport is heading. Co-founder and CEO Paul-Antoine Girard sees it as a marker of the new normal: “The decision by Lidl-Trek, DECATHLON CMA CGM Team and Team TotalEnergies to adopt Vekta reflects where performance in elite cycling is heading.
These aren’t trials or experiments, they’re long-term commitments to modern, data-driven coaching and athlete development. We’re proud to work with world-leading organisations and to play a part in how performance and coaching evolve in the sport.”
In simple terms, endurance sport is becoming less about gut feel and more about systems – not in place of instinct, but alongside it. Power meters, heart-rate files and GPS traces were the first wave. Platforms like Vekta are the next step, turning all that raw material into something closer to a shared playbook for coaches and riders.
And while the current roster is cycling-heavy, the logic applies across the endurance spectrum: triathlon, marathon running, gravel, ultra – anywhere that training load, recovery and adaptation decide careers.
What It Means Beyond the WorldTour
For now, Vekta sits firmly in the high-performance end of the market, but its availability to athletes and coaches worldwide – complete with a 14-day free trial – hints at a broader ambition.
If WorldTour teams are building their performance ecosystems on the same infrastructure that serious amateurs can access, the gap between elite and non-elite endurance sport might narrow in at least one respect: information.
Coaches at national level, continental teams, or ambitious privateers could use the same tools to manage training load, monitor readiness and review race execution with a level of structure that used to be the preserve of fully staffed performance departments.
You still need the legs, of course. There’s no AI for surviving a crosswind or hanging on to the back of a group when gravity turns nasty. But the scaffolding around those efforts – planning, monitoring, deciding when to push and when to back off – is increasingly being shaped by platforms like Vekta.
The Human Element in a Machine Age
There’s a quiet irony in all this. The more sophisticated the data systems become in endurance sport, the more the leading teams talk about “the human connection”.
Larrazabal’s point is hard to miss: technology is useful only if it gives coaches and riders more time to talk, not less. If Vekta and platforms like it can keep the laptops open but the conversations flowing, the sport might just get the best of both worlds – sharper decisions, earlier warnings, smarter scouting, and relationships that aren’t reduced to a spreadsheet.
For now, Vekta sits in that interesting space: not the star of the show, but increasingly essential to how the show is run. In a peloton where the difference between winning and wondering what went wrong can be a few watts or one bad rest day, having an AI quietly combing through the noise is starting to look less like a luxury and more like part of the standard kit list for modern endurance sport.
