Victor Campenaerts keen to do all he can to help Arnaud De Lie next spring: "These are – in pencil – the first major goals"
Cycling
It's fair to say that Lotto Dstny duo Victor Campenaerts and Arnaud De Lie are at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their career. As such, Campenaerts is keen to help his younger compatriot.
“Unlike last year, I am already riding a race for the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. I'm going to do the Ruta del Sol," Campenaerts reveals in conversation Het Nieuwsblad. "Then the Omloop and then Paris-Nice or the Tirreno Adriatico, depending on which race offers the best chances for Arnaud. Then the E3 Saxo Bank Classic, Dwars door Vlaanderen and the Tour of Flanders. These are – in pencil – the first major goals.”
After winning the most combative rider award at the 2023 Tour de France, Campenaerts has developed into something of a breakaway specialist in recent years. In 2024 however, the Belgian is keen to return to his time-trialing roots. “I'm going to pay a little more attention to the time trial. I am certainly not going to specialize in it again like I used to, but I do want to get back on that time trial bike once or twice a week.”
“At the end of this year I did that a little more to ride a classification in the Tour of Luxembourg. I had an off day in the queen stage, but won the time trial, ahead of Brandon McNulty who was fourth at the World Championship," he recalls. "That gave me morale to start working on it more. It could come in handy to try to defend a classification in the Tour of Belgium or the Benelux Tour."
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024