Victor Campenaerts wins Tour of Leuven

Ronde van Limburg 2022 - Hasselt - Tongeren 202,6 km - 06/06/2022 - Victor Campenaerts (BEL - Lotto Soudal) - photo Dion Kerckhoffs/CV/SprintCyclingAgency©2022
Victor Campenaerts (Image credit: Dion Kerckhoffs/CV/SprintCyclingAgenc)

Victor Campenaerts (Lotto Soudal) outsprinted Zdenek Stybar (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl) to win the Tour of Leuven-Memorial Jef Scherens race, held on many of the same roads that hosted the 2021 World Championships in the Belgian city.

Campenaerts and Stybar got away together with 24km after an aggressive race and worked together to hold off a group of chasers.

Alexander Kristoff (Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux) won the sprint for third place, 20 seconds behind after a chase group was unable to catch the two attackers. Jasper De Buyst was fourth, giving Lotto Soudal even more ranking points.

“I’m extremely happy. We’re building on something in this young team,” Campenaerts said.

“I’m not young anymore but we have a lot of young riders and we were always present in the race today and had control of the race. I’m so happy I could finish it off in the sprint against Stybar.”

“Points come in handy. We don’t race for points but if we take points they’re handy,” Campenaerts said.

With 50km kilometres to go the break lead by less than a minute and that was the moment for Sep Vanmarcke to launch a counter-attack. Campenaerts, Florian Vermeersch, Dries Van Gestel, Stybar, Loïc Vliegen and Clément Russo and Arnaud De Lie jumped into the chase too, putting Lotto Soudal in a commanding position.

A slight headwind gave Campenaerts an advantage as he sat on Stybar’s wheel and he used every drop of energy left in his legs to win his first ever one-day race of his career.

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Stephen Farrand
Editor-at-large

Stephen is one of the most experienced members of the Cyclingnews team, having reported on professional cycling since 1994. Before becoming Editor-at-large, he was Head of News at Cyclingnews. He has previously worked for Shift Active Media, Reuters and Cycling Weekly. He is a member of the Board of the Association Internationale des Journalistes du Cyclisme (AIJC).

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