“Hard to be a domestique for someone you don’t admire” – Victor Campenaerts full of praise for Visma leader Jonas Vingegaard

Victor Campenaerts has ridden for many leaders in his career. But not many, he suggests, are easy to follow unless you truly believe in them.

Speaking to Anders Mielke for Eurosport on Team Visma | Lease a Bike’s press day in Spain, Campenaerts summed up his relationship with Jonas Vingegaard in one simple line: “It would be hard to be a domestique for someone you don’t admire.”

That sentence says as much about Campenaerts as it does about Vingegaard.

When asked to describe Vingegaard in a single word, Campenaerts did not hesitate. “Focused.”

For Campenaerts, that focus is not abstract. It is something he sees every day. He explained that riding for Vingegaard means committing to the highest possible ambition, winning the Tour de France, and that comes with a unique level of pressure.

“He has to fight for every single second until the last metre of every race,” Campenaerts said, adding that this is already demanding even before you factor in everything else that comes with being a Tour contender.

“He has so much going on besides just the race,” he explained, pointing to constant media attention and external noise. In that environment, Campenaerts believes focus is not optional. “If you’re not focused and get carried away, you’ll never survive the Tour.”

What impresses him most is how Vingegaard handles that load. “He knows what he has to do, where he has to spend his energy, and where he shouldn’t.”

Campenaerts is not just a helper. He is one of the riders Visma trust in their biggest races, including Grand Tours, where every detail is controlled and every role is sharply defined.

In such a structure, belief matters. Campenaerts made that clear when Mielke asked whether he is a fan of his team leader. His answer was immediate: “Yes, of course.”

For him, admiration is not about celebrity. It is about credibility. He is a rider who prides himself on suffering for others. Doing that day after day only works if you trust the person you are working for.

This fits neatly with what Vingegaard himself has said elsewhere about pressure and burnout, and how hard modern cycling can be. Campenaerts’ comments show what that looks like from the inside. A leader fighting for seconds, surrounded by distractions, relying on riders who must believe in his process as much as his talent.

Campenaerts is not watching this from the outside. He is part of it.

He has already spoken about how riding for Vingegaard in major races changed his own expectations of himself, especially in the mountains, where he surprised even himself with how strong he could be. That growth has pushed him into the core of Visma’s Grand Tour structure.

In 2026, he is expected to support Vingegaard at both the Giro and the Tour. That means weeks of riding at the front, controlling pace, responding to attacks, and burning energy so that Vingegaard can save his.

Doing that without admiration would be almost impossible.

Campenaerts also described himself as more than just a rider. “I’m of course a cyclist, but I’m also a fan of the sport,” he said. Watching Vingegaard operate at the very top, from the front row, has only deepened that respect.

For Visma, that dynamic matters. They are not just building a team around power numbers and tactics. They are building around trust, belief, and shared ambition.

And as Campenaerts made clear, in the hardest races in the world, admiration is not a luxury. It is part of what makes a domestique willing to give everything.