Victor Campenaerts has never been a boring rider, neither on the bike nor in his free time with his Visma-Lease a Bike teammates. Belgian, 34 years old, already the hour record holder, he was a formidable time trialist (two-time European champion) and then transformed into a team player like few others.

In 2026, he will support Jonas Vingegaard at the Giro d'Italia (which he has already raced 5 times) and at the Tour de France (4 appearances): no cobbled classics this time. The request came directly from the Danish rider, who has great faith in Campenaerts. "I have an excellent relationship with Van Aert and I was looking forward to helping him in the classics last year, but I didn't manage to do so. Although I can certainly congratulate myself on my work at the Tour - he said jokingly - Just as Matteo Jorgenson was incredibly happy with me at Paris-Nice. Or Vingegaard at the Tour and Vuelta. I joined the team with the dream of crossing the finish line on the Champs-Élysées in yellow with Jonas."

The Visma-Lease a Bike managers said it at the presentation: "We are convinced we can win the Tour". Campenaerts is a man who doesn't beat around the bush and goes straight to the point: "If the team were to sit here and think: 'Ugh, we'll try to finish second again', I would do the same as Simon Yates and quit racing. I'm not extremely rich, but I earn a good living and I definitely want to work after the end of my career. I no longer have personal ambitions: the only thing I still want is to win the Grand Tours with the team."

The question is always the same: how do you beat Pogacar? "Look, last year we tried to make the race extremely hard, yet Pogacar won. Our data analysts have analyzed everything: how much time Vingegaard spent above his FTP (threshold power level, ed), what we estimate Pogacar's FTP to be and how much time he spent above it, how many sugars both burned. I love working with data, but when I heard all this, I was happy not to have to deal with it."

And then: "The impressive thing about today's cycling is that the top riders, who are few - Pogacar, Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Van der Poel - are growing faster than the others. This is precisely the difficulty of all these analyses: you can't predict what Pogacar will do. The only certainty is that they will race even faster again."

Campenaerts returned to Visma in 2025: he had been part of the historic Jumbo core in 2016 and 2017, when Roglic, Gesink, Kruijswijk were there. In recent years, however, the Dutch formation has lost part of its budget and is not among the richest in the World Tour. Campenaerts says: "There's no big difference in terms of riding, planning, and expertise compared to then, when the budget was very small and the top riders were very few. In all the other teams I've ridden for, I never experienced the same structure as here. I thought: we've gone back ten or twenty years. In short: money and performance don't always go hand in hand."

The team has lost Benoot, Van Baarle, Kooij, Uijtdebroeks and Simon Yates has retired. "Richard Plugge has literally admitted that it's not possible for the team to offer exorbitant figures and it's crucial to make smart signings. Like Matthew Brennan, who made a sensation last year for less than a hundred thousand euros. I'm sure Grischa Niermann and the other team managers have the right eye for choosing talented guys. Today in sports there are many data, but I can say honestly: if they looked only at the data, I wouldn't even have been selected for the Tour, we still laugh about it at breakfast. We should do a kind of Belgium's Got Talent with the team, where we find a new rider by organizing an elimination race on the Col des Rates."

To confirm his words, Campenaerts often surprised friends and opponents with his climbing performances last year, and in stage races. But wasn't it just a matter of watts per kilogram? "Initially yes, but it's also about who can give their best when the team management comes to your room the day before and tells you: At that point, you'll be at the head of the group with the rest of the team behind you and you'll ride until there are no more domestiques from other teams. Many give their best on rollers, but then can't manage it in the race."