Victor Campenaerts is set to fine-tune and double down on his team worker status in 2026 at Visma-Lease a Bike, with the Belgian racer further strengthening his resolve to limit his own personal goals in order to produce even better performances for leader Jonas Vingegaard.
Campenaerts has triumphs in his own right, one standout victory being when he took a memorable transition stage win at the Tour de France in 2024, but more for what happened afterwards than the win itself.
He first dedicated the biggest triumph of his career to his family, demanding a phone from a journalist on the line to do so – "You can't imagine how much they supported me," he said.
As he explained in a massive outpouring of emotion afterwards, his win was only taken after months of personal challenges, an uncertain future with Lotto, his team at the time, and a massive altitude training camp at Sierra Nevada, during which time in Spain his son was also born.
However, Campenaerts then switched to a much more team-focussed role in 2025 with Visma-Lease a Bike. He told Cyclingnews last year: "I also want to tell my son 'I was on the Champs Elysées with Jonas in the yellow jersey'."
With that in mind, in 2026, the former European Time Trial Champion and Giro d'Italia stage winner explained to Het Laatste Nieuws at this week's Visma-Lease a Bike team media day that he will not be repeating his programme of Spring Classics like in 2025, and will instead be focussing exclusively on the Grand Tours with Vingegaard.
Campenaerts said his 2026 race programme will be so closely aligned with Vingegaard, that the Dane even joked in November that he already knew the Belgian's race program before Campenaerts himself.
"I don't really have any ambitions of my own anymore," he told Het Laatste Nieuws. "I find it quite prestigious just to be on the Visma-Lease a Bike Tour squad. And to set the race on fire in a mountain stage.
"My ambition is to win Grand Tours with the team, with Vingegaard that is. If Jonas sets the ambition to ride and win the Giro, I'm eager to join him. Last year, my role as domestique, which is exactly why I joined this team, went well."
As for his decision to end his work for Wout van Aert in the Classics, Campenaerts added to Nieuwsblad that "I have a great relationship with Wout [van Aert] and think he's a fantastic rider, but my Classics weren't successful last year. I'm afraid Wout can't name a single moment where I was able to do a fantastic job for him."
The Grand Tours were another story, he said and there were plenty of occasions when he was happy with what he'd done there.
"Lots of them. Moments where I can pat myself on the back and say: 'Matteo [Jorgenson and Jonas were incredibly happy about that work in that Grand Tour'. So now the focus has shifted even more to the Grand Tours. If you want to do the Giro and the Tour, and haven't lost much in the Classics, then it makes sense to leave those aside."
Campenaerts will be racing only stage races in the first half of 2026, starting with the UAE Tour like Vingegaard, then doing Paris-Nice, the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France – where his long-established skills as a time triallist presumably mean he'll surely be a key player for the opening TTT in Barcelona on July 4.
