Months of altitude training, weeks of surviving through a brutal Tour de France, hours of frantic racing, a little bit of bluffing, and a few seconds of sprinting culminated in the biggest win of Victor Campenaerts’s career on Thursday.
All that buildup left the Lotto Dstny rider with plenty of pent-up emotion when he finally achieved his goal, which came pouring out in a tearful post-race interview.
“This was a stage I aimed for December already,” Campenaerts revealed after his victory. “‘Stage 18,’ I said, ‘is the only stage I see for me to win.’ I went into the breakaway with only one bullet.”
The 32-year-old Belgian took his shot on stage 18 and hit his mark in the end to take his first ever Tour stage win and his second Grand Tour stage in a career that has seen him make 10 career starts in three-week races. His day out serves as a reminder of just how elusive even a single Tour stage victory can be for those who are neither mountain goats nor sprinters.
A Tour without multiple wins might feel like a disappointment for someone like Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck); for Campenaerts, everything came down to this one chance. Making it count was a family affair for the a Belgian, who just welcomed his first child with his girlfriend. She was with him “every day” at training camp even while nearing her due date.
“We were nine weeks at altitude together. She was highly pregnant,” Campenaerts said. “She gave birth to our son in Granada at the bottom of the climb. She is the hero of this story.”
Campenaerts credited her support and the joy of life with his newborn son, which he described as feeling like “blue skies,” as the driving force in a turnaround in his morale ahead of the race. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the first thing he did after crossing the line was to call them on FaceTime.
Of course, the fitness gleaned from his huge training block and that confidence boost from his family could only get him part of the way to the victory. Getting into a breakaway at all requires a bit of luck; just ask pre-stage favorite Mathieu van der Poel (Alpcein-Deceuninck), who made numerous attempts to get off the front at the start of stage 18 only to miss the break that would actually stick.
The tactical prowess garnered from years of experience also played a huge role in Campenaerts’s win. In an interview before the start, he presciently called Kwiatkowski “the perfect breakaway companion” – and he proceeded to follow the former world champ’s decisive surge in the day’s final climb.
Campenaerts also admitted to a bit of deception after skipping quite a few turns throughout the day.
“I maybe played it a bit dirty, showing everybody that I was hurting a lot in order not to take many pulls,” he said. “I followed the move and we had a great attack in the final and we cooperated super well today until the last kilometer.”
All of those contributing factors came together in the end to propel Campenaerts to victory in a three-rider sprint, and it’s hard to imagine anyone not being emotional under the circumstances. Adding even more weight to the stage battle was the fact that it might be the last one in this Tour for the break, injecting an air of desperation into the proceedings. What’s more, this is also Campenaerts’s final Tour with Lotto, as he explained with surprising candor after the win.
“I had a verbal agreement with the team about extending my contract, but I got ignored for a long time,” he said.
“I’ll be leaving the team this winter, but I’m happy I can finish my spell in the team with the highlight of my career. I think I played it very smart and also the team gave me a lot of confidence.”
When all was said and done in Barcelonnette, nearly 40 riders – possibly including others who for months had this day circled on their calendars – were left to swallow the bitter pill of defeat after a long day in the break, but Campenaerts tasted victory at the Tour for the first time in his career. Seven months after he first saw his chance in the Tour road book, he made it count on Thursday.
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