Belgian rider Victor Campenaerts has won the Eneco Tour, the first multi-day race victory of his career, riding for the Dutch team Visma-Lease a Bike. He told NOS Sport that he had been ready to abandon the final stage and drive home if his heavily pregnant partner had gone into labour.
What happened
Campenaerts is best known as one of Visma-Lease a Bike’s most dependable support riders. In the Eneco Tour the roles were reversed, and the team rode for him. According to NOS Sport, the 34-year-old held on to the overall lead through the final stage on Sunday to claim the first stage race win of his career.
The final day could have gone very differently. Campenaerts and his partner, Nel, are expecting their second child, and he spent the stage half expecting a phone call. “I told my teammates that being at the birth was more important to me,” he told NOS Langs de Lijn on Sunday evening as he drove home. “Then I would have climbed off and driven to Belgium as fast as possible.”
The call never came during the race. Using the English phrase himself, Campenaerts called the outcome “the best of both worlds”. “I was able to win the race and I can be there for the birth,” he said.
He told NOS that the situation at home had caused him more stress than defending the overall lead. “I have to say I was fairly confident,” he said. “The stage was probably going to end in a bunch sprint, so it was not very difficult to keep the jersey.”
Campenaerts does not rank the result above his earlier victories in the sport’s biggest races. “A stage in the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia ranks above it, but I think this one is very cool,” he said. “It is certainly something I will tell my sons about later, when they ask: Dad, tell me another story about racing.”
A support rider in the spotlight
NOS Sport notes that Campenaerts had not expected to win a stage race as a Visma rider. He signed for the Dutch team in 2025 mainly to work for Jonas Vingegaard, and he described that as a deliberate choice. “My ultimate goal is to win the Tour de France with Jonas,” he said. “I really get a kick out of working for that.”
That experience proved useful in the past few days. Campenaerts said he had thought a lot about how the Danish team leader approaches a race like this. “How does Jonas handle a race like that? When does he stop for a toilet break, when does he dare to drift to the back of the peloton, that kind of thing. That is quite different from being a domestique, of course.”
He said he did not feel pressure from the team. “We can say there is a bit less at stake in an Eneco Tour than in a Grand Tour,” he told NOS. “Still, you are a professional and you feel a duty to put enough pressure on yourself. When your whole team is riding for you, with riders like Christophe Laporte, it feels like an enormous privilege.”
Why it matters if you live in Netherlands
For readers in the Netherlands, this is a win for a home team. NOS Sport describes Visma-Lease a Bike as a Dutch team, and it is the squad built around Vingegaard’s ambitions in the Tour de France. A stage race victory for a rider normally hired to work for others shows how deep the team’s line-up runs, and it gives Dutch fans another name to follow beyond the team leaders.
The story also shows how a top team shares out its chances. Campenaerts said the whole team rode in his service, including Christophe Laporte. In smaller stage races, where there is less at stake than in a Grand Tour, support riders can sometimes race for themselves. That is worth knowing if you follow the sport and want to understand why the names on the podium change from race to race.
There is also a human side that many working parents will recognise. Campenaerts said openly that he would have left the race for the birth of his child and that his teammates knew this in advance. In a sport where riders spend long stretches away from home, he made his family the priority and said so publicly.
If you want to follow Dutch cycling in Dutch, NOS Sport and its Langs de Lijn programme, where Campenaerts gave this interview, are the main sources for the story.
What to watch next
The most immediate news for Campenaerts is personal. According to NOS Sport, he was heading home to Belgium on Sunday evening with the birth of his second child still to come.
On the bike, his stated priority has not changed. Campenaerts told NOS that his ultimate goal is to help Jonas Vingegaard win the Tour de France, and that working for the Danish leader is the role he signed up for in 2025. Fans of Visma-Lease a Bike can expect to see him back in a support role, now with a stage race win of his own.
It will also be worth watching whether Visma gives him more chances to lead in smaller races. He said the experience of racing as the leader, and thinking about how Vingegaard handles that position, was quite different from his usual work. Whether the team repeats that approach is a question for the coming seasons.
Source: NOS Sport
Sources
- NOS Sport: 'Ik heb de Eneco Tour kunnen winnen én kan bij de bevalling zijn', jubelt Campenaerts, accessed 19 October 2026
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