If you’re on Instagram, the chances are that you follow at least a few Tour de France riders. You just can’t resist Tadej Pogačar’s daily reports, and chuckle yourself to sleep watching Victor Campenaerts’s vlogs.
How many of you follow Intermarché-Wanty’s Vito Braet? Actually, how many of you have actually heard of Vito Braet?
While Pogačar has in excess of 2.4 million followers – and Remco Evenepoel and Mathieu van der Poel also boast seven-digit figures – 24-year-old Braet only has, at the time of publication, 1,709 followers. He is the least followed of the 184 riders who started the race three weeks ago, and the Flandrien is therefore probably the most unknown rider in the biggest bike race in the world. Because, as we know in 2025, your popularity is entirely based on your social media presence.
This revelation of how unsung a bike rider he is does not – sadly, we may add – surprise the Belgian. “I can imagine this because I’m not posting so much and I don’t know why you should follow me actually,” he laughs, doing a disservice to his revealing and insightful posts such as “First week @letourdefrance ✅”.
So who is the Tour’s most unheard of rider, and can he increase his number of followers at @vito_braet before the race ends on Champs-Élysées this Sunday? “I’m Vito Braet, I’m from Belgium and live in Harelbeke, the region of the spring Classics, and it’s my first Tour de France,” he says, a biography that is five words longer than his Wikipedia bio.
We’ll add in the filler: hailing from a cycling family, his older brother Vinnie raced for third-tier Continental teams from 2010 and 2016. Vito, though, has surpassed Vinnie: signed to Intermarché from Flanders-Baloise for the start of the 2024 season, this is his second season in the WorldTour. He specialises in the Classics – he was fifth at Koksijde Classic and 12th at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne this spring – and finished third in a stage of the Vuelta a España last year.
These are promising results that deserve more fanfare, and Intermarché’s press officer informs us that Braet has been more in demand with the press this Tour than the team’s two French riders “because of his Classics performances”.
But Braet has not spotted many people screaming his name at the side of the road. “I saw my name on a piece of cardboard one time but it was family. It still counts, right? We start with that and maybe in the next years there will be more. Maybe even next year I can be above 2,000 followers – it’s a big dream of mine,” he adds, really getting into the spirit of this unimportant nonsense.
Has he got any ideas of how he can move past the 2k milestone? “Every rider says that when they’re in the breakaway they get a lot more followers, so maybe I need to go in the break.” That isn’t going to happen though – his job is to protect Biniam Girmay, both in the mountains and the sprints.
Any other ideas? “Or crash. [Teammate] Georg Zimmermann said he got 400 or 500 more followers when he crashed. The public see you and your name on television and they follow you. But I prefer to stay with 1,700 followers than crash.”
He’s not going to be in the breakaway and hopefully he avoids a crash – it’s down to us good cycling folk to get Vito past 2,000 followers. You know what to do. @vito_braet.
