Follow Your Heart replaces Unibet on cycling jerseys
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4 Mar 2025 •
Reading time: 3 minutes New Belgian regulations banning gambling advertising have led cycling teams to adapt their jerseys. The Unibet Tietema Rockets team has replaced the Unibet logo with ‘Follow Your Heart’, an initiative to raise awareness of heart health.
A strategic alliance with Unibet
In 2023, the Tour de Tietema cycling team (now Unibet Tietema Rockets) took a major step forward by teaming up with online gaming operator Unibet as its main sponsor. This partnership has provided the team with increased resources to develop its sporting ambitions.
However, since the beginning of the year, Belgium has introduced strict rules on the promotion of gambling, notably banning the display of betting company logos on sports equipment. The aim of this measure is to reduce public exposure to gambling advertising, particularly in the sporting arena. Belgian football clubs have already had to adapt to these new directives, and it is now the turn of cycling teams to comply with these regulations.
Faced with the gradual ban on advertising for sports betting companies in Belgium, Unibet Tietema Rockets has had to adapt its communications strategy. During the Belgian races, the team replaced the Unibet logo with that of ‘Follow Your Heart’, a joint initiative aimed at raising awareness of heart problems in the world of sport.
‘Follow Your Heart”: A campaign for heart health
In recent years, the world of cycling has been marked by a number of incidents linked to heart problems. These include :
- Mark Groeneveld, a 20-year-old Dutch cyclist, died in October 2023, most likely as a result of cardiac arrest.
- Belgian cyclist Nathan Van Hooydonck suffered a medical emergency at the wheel in September 2023, revealing a heart muscle defect that ended his professional career.
These events prompted the founders of Unibet Tietema Rockets – Bas Tietema, Devin van der Wiel and Josse Wester – to realise their own lack of knowledge of first aid. So they decided to use their fame to educate the public. The ‘Follow Your Heart’ campaign was launched to educate the public and raise awareness of heart problems, in particular by teaching life-saving gestures.
Bas Tietema, owner of Unibet Tietema Rockets, shared his personal motivation behind the campaign:
‘I try to follow my heart in everything I do, but I’ve noticed, both in cycling and outside of it, that a less well-functioning heart can also make you very unsure. Unfortunately, we hear more and more stories about heart problems in the cycling world. But not everyone knows what to do when something really goes wrong. We in the team didn’t know how to carry out life-saving actions. With our cycling team, we reach a lot of people, so we wanted to use that reach to draw attention to this current problem.’
Campaign objectives and actions
The main aim of the campaign is to teach the public how to recognise and react to cardiac emergencies, in order to increase victims’ chances of survival.
One of the campaign’s major innovations is an Augmented Reality experience guided by digital versions of the team’s owners and accessible via a QR code. This interactive tool guides users through an eight-step process for carrying out effective resuscitation, with the aim of increasing survival rates in the event of cardiac arrest.
Thanks to their large audience on social networks and cycling competitions, the Unibet Tietema Rockets and Unibet hope to spread essential information on prevention and intervention in the event of a cardiac emergency.
Unibet Tietema Rockets on its way to the Tour de France
Unibet Tietema Rockets has set its sights on taking part in the Tour de France by 2026. To achieve this goal, the team has obtained a UCI ProTeam licence and has strengthened its squad with promising talent.