'I'm no Tadej, I'm just a good cyclist' - Victor Campenaerts discusses his radical change of Tour de France ambitions with Visma-Lease a Bike

Strange but true. While some riders are best remembered for how they won a race, for others, it's their reaction to the triumph - the celebration and the immediate aftermath - that lingers longest in fans' collective memory. Such was surely the case for Victor Campenaerts, whose victory last year on stage 18 of the Tour de France against fellow breakaways Michał Kwiatkowski and Mattéo Vercher was widely remembered not so much for him outsprinting them, but for his huge outpouring of emotions and explanations that followed.

As the Belgian said at the time, the period at the 2024 Classics had been very tough for him, with his then team, Lotto-Dstny, failing to discuss a promised contract extension even as he embarked on a nine-week altitude training camp in Spain. It was an exceptionally long camp, but as Campenaerts recounted, "My girlfriend" - whom he called, in tears, on the phone from the stage 18 finish line - "was there and she supported me every day, while pregnant, as I was struggling to even fulfil my training program. I doubted I had a future in cycling even as I was about to become a father," he added, explaining why her support had been so important.

A first Tour de France stage victory under those circumstances must feel like a massive emotional landmark and also a closure of a key career chapter, but it also begs the question: what happens next? Do you even want to try to repeat that kind of success? 

Fast forward six months and to Campenaerts' first training camp with Visma-Lease a Bike, his new team, and it's perhaps no surprise that the 33-year-old, who is famously meticulous, already has the next instalment of his professional road map planned out.  But it doesn't involve winning more Tour stages - at least for him.

"I am very happy about last year because I wouldn't say I'm an average rider, but I'm not the next Remco [Evenepoel] or Jonas [Vingegaard] or Tadej [Pogačar], Campenaerts explained to Cyclingnews during the Visma training camp. "I'm just a good cyclist.

"So to win a stage in the Tour when Tadej got what, six or seven stages, and Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) got another three or four -  you know, not so much is left.

"It's always been extremely difficult to win a Tour stage, extremely prestigious too, so that was perfect timing for me because I also really have the ambition to be 100% domestique, too, and now I can close this other chapter" - of fighting for individual wins -  "in the best way possible.

"I've got a Tour stage win, a Giro stage win, I've broken the Hour Record, and I've been a multiple European Champion, and I've been on the podium of a World Championships as well.

"But that's a chapter that's closed, and now I've got a very different goal ahead of me: I want to be on the Champs Elysées of the winning Tour de France team."

Changing course at the Tour

As Campenaerts sees it, then, he's now done everything he can do on an individual level. Hence his signing for Visma, where he is fully dedicated to their Grand Tour and stage racing cause, in particular that of Jonas Vingegaard.

Campenaerts has already played an important role in Paris-Nice this week, in particular - but not exclusively - in the team time trial.

"I am very nervous. I have never been as nervous for a TTT as I am for today's. It will be very important," he told Sporza before the team race against the clock. But afterwards, with Visma-Lease a Bike celebrating an important victory by an unexpectedly large margin and putting last year's winner Matteo Jorgenson into the lead, the Belgian was in a very different frame of mind. And not just because it was his first ever win in a 12-year-career in a TTT.

"Winning together is the motto," he told Het Laatste Nieuws afterwards. "And how can you do that more as a team than in a team time trial? With seven riders and the entire staff around us, such an experience... It is my fifth day of racing for the team, but this was really the definition of winning together."

After Paris-Nice, Campenaerts is taking part in the bulk of the Classics, but he'll be reunited with Vingegaard at the Dauphine and, it seems very likely, the Tour. But his plan for the summer will not be to repeat the same radical nine-week altitude camp that so dramatically marked his build-up to July last year.

"Not really, the team has its own very clear plan, it's nothing new under the sun, but it starts after the Classics with a long block in Sierra Nevada, going to the Dauphiné, followed by more altitude work in Tignes and then doing the Tour. That's a combination which has proved successful on several occasions," he explained to Cyclingnews.

"Also, in my Spring Classics and season for the beginning of the year, I'll do more racing focused on climbing." Apart from Paris-Nice, then, he'll also be racing in Itzulia, Amstel Gold and Liège, all hilly events which, in a career stretching back to 2014, the 33-year-old has only ever raced once before. All of it, in any case, is "more focussed towards the Tour."

Yet if Campenaerts is moving in a new direction by working as a stage racing domestique, in some ways on Visma-Lease a Bike, he's turned full circle. The Dutch squad were his first WorldTour team back in 2016 and 2017, after all, but as he says, the team has moved on notably in the last 10 years.

"Rider-wise, only Wilco Kelderman and Steven Kruijswijk are still here from that time," Campenaerts points out. "I know quite a few staff members, still, but it's totally different in the way that when I was there, I was riding for personal success in time trials.

"But that was also why I left the team, because I had a clear ambition for personal success, and that didn't fit in with the team's goals with Stevie [Kruijswijk] and Primož [Roglič].

"We never had a fight about it, that's just how it was. But now I'm very keen to be a 100% domestique, so this chapter with Visma is very different from the last one."

It's also very different, he agrees, to his time at Lotto, where they had mainly sprinting, breakaway and Classics objectives. The era of GC goals was either largely before his time, with Australian Cadel Evans or - when Lotto did occasionally go for stage racing success with riders like Lennert van Eetvelt or before him, Tim Wellens - Campenaerts mostly did not form part of the lineup.

"When they had those goals, I was riding for my personal success and from 2018 to 2024, I achieved nice things. I'm quite satisfied with them and I can tell my son, when he grows up, all about them. But I also want to tell my son - I was on the Champs Elysées with Jonas in the yellow jersey."

Campenaerts has not completely sacrificed all his personal goals, though. As he explains, he feels very ambitious about getting a place in the Tour - "and we're a big team, lots of people want to be in there, so even that's a big fight" - he does add, "but when I can cross the line in first place, I will take that chance."

However, his priorities are what have changed completely at Visma, with that Tour de France participation being the one which matters by far the most.

"Now I'm just thinking about pulling on the front in the Tour de France, with the whole team on my wheel and all the other teams behind them," he says. "With Jonas in yellow."

Yet stage 18 of the Tour de France will always remain a treasured memory, too, where things went so right, in fact, that he remains a little baffled how it was possible. But that is surely something that adds to the perpetual appeal of cycling in general: that it doesn't ever all come down to pure science and maths or clear explanations, there's always an element to success that remains concealed within the rider's personality, too.

"Everything I learned in my career, I put it into practice there," is how he attempts to explain the win. "Physically, I was really prepared 100%. I was super strong, but I can honestly say I was not stronger than Kwiatkowski. But I played it to perfection, and better than he did.

"I've watched the stage once at double speed with my girlfriend, but I've seen it so many times on social media, people have sent it to me so many times, the Tour de France is so big it keeps on turning up one way or another no matter what. And Honestly I still have to say, though, that some moments I have wondered: how the fuck did I pull that off?"