Victor Campenaerts

Victor Campenaerts is a Belgian road cyclist who rides for Visma | Lease a Bike. He was born in Hoboken, a district of Antwerp, on 28 October 1991. He is known as a time trialist and rouleur and as a former holder of the UCI hour record. The team’s website lists him as under contract until the end of 2027.

Campenaerts began as a swimmer and a triathlete before choosing cycling. In 2013, riding for the Lotto Belisol under-23 team, he won the Belgian and European under-23 time trial titles, which led to a professional contract with Topsport Vlaanderen–Baloise for 2014. He joined LottoNL–Jumbo for 2016 and 2017, then Lotto Soudal for 2018 and 2019. He rode for NTT Pro Cycling in 2020 and Team Qhubeka NextHash in 2021, and then came back to Lotto, later Lotto–Dstny, from 2022 to 2024.

His time trial record is strong. He was Belgian champion in 2016 and 2018, European champion in 2017 and 2018, and won the bronze medal at the 2018 World Championships in Innsbruck. On 16 April 2019, at the velodrome in Aguascalientes, Mexico, he rode 55.089 km in one hour, improving the record Bradley Wiggins had set in 2015.

In stage races he won the stage 7 time trial at Tirreno–Adriatico in 2019. He won stage 15 of the 2021 Giro d’Italia after attacking from the start and beating Oscar Riesebeek in a sprint between the two leaders. He was named the most combative rider of the 2023 Tour de France and won stage 18 of the 2024 Tour.

For 2025 he returned to the team he had first ridden for in 2016 and 2017, now called Visma | Lease a Bike. The team says he rode that year’s Tour de France as a domestique for Jonas Vingegaard and helped Wout van Aert win a stage in Paris. In 2026 he finished the Giro d’Italia in 43rd place and the Tour de France in 82nd. Visma | Lease a Bike won the opening team time trial of the Tour in Barcelona on 4 July. In October he won the overall classification of the Eneco Tour, finishing second on stage 3 on the way.