Is there anything that NTT Pro Cycling's Victor Campenaerts can't do? The former European time trial champion, two-time Belgian time trial champion and current Hour Record holder has this week released a video on his YouTube channel that shows the 28-year-old handing over a €50 note to a fellow cyclist while out training as a reward for them putting their energy-bar wrapper back in their jersey pocket.
There's more to the above footage than that, though: with a friend doing most of the filming of the English-language video, Campenaerts starts his day with a lovely, not-at-all-unusual cup of granola and coconut milk before heading out for a training ride in Belgium on – we learn – part of the Brabantse Pijl one-day-race course.
The race has been postponed from its scheduled April 15 date this year, but Campenaerts stops along the way to pose with the statue of Eddy Merckx – "the last other Belgian rider to hold the Hour Record" – in the Flemish town of Meensel-Kiezegem, where Merckx was born. And it's here that the environmentally friendly gesture by a passing cyclist is made, with Campenaerts stopping the rider to reward him with his cash 'prize' – handed over very carefully in the current coronavirus climate.
Campenaerts then finishes his day with a bit of riding around a deserted skate park on his road bike. Don't think that we didn't notice his Namibia socks, though. The NTT rider spent time training in the south-west African country in the build-up to successfully setting the new Hour Record last year, and returned there to train earlier this season, when he won the Nedbank Road Challenge race in Windhoek and donated all his prize money to a local after-school programme for disadvantaged communities.
