Victor Campenaerts (LottoNL-Jumbo) confirmed his huge progress as a time triallist by winning the Belgian Championships in the individual discipline. In a thrilling finale, he beat Yves Lampaert (Etixx-QuickStep) by 3 seconds while Ben Hermans (BMC) was 12 seconds behind in third.

Since he joined the WorldTour at the start of the season, Victor Campenaerts has been part of the great TT improvement that LottoNL-Jumbo has enjoyed during the last 12 months. Today the Belgian talent underlined his status as one of the best Belgian time triallist by claiming a maiden national title in the discipline.

Having taken fifth in last year’s race, Campenaerts was the penultimate rider to roll out on the relatively short 38km course in Mol-Postel but he was off the pace in the first part of the race. At the first time check, he was only third behind last year’s runner-up Yves Lampaert and pre-race favourite Ben Hermans but he gauged his effort well. At the second check, he was still third, eight seconds behind Lampaert and three seconds behind Hermans, and it was clear that it would be a close battle between the three best riders.

Campenaerts was still riding hard when Hermans reached the finish to beat previous leader Thomas De Gendt (Lotto Soudal) by a massive 45 seconds and it looked like BMC would have a chance to win their second TT title in two days following Manuel Quinziatoøs victory in Italy. However, Campenaerts had managed to increase the speed in the final 14km and when he stopped the clock in 46.18, he had gone 12 seconds faster than Hermans.

Everybody was still waiting for Lampaert to arrive but unlike the LottoNL-Jumbo rider, the Etixx-QuickStep talented hadn’t managed to up the pace. In a thrilling finale, he reached the finish in 46.21, missing out on the gold medal by just three seconds. De Gendt finished fourth and a sick Sep Vanmarcke made it two LottoNL-Jumbo riders in the top 5.

Campenaerts takes over from Jurgen Van den Broeck who chose not to defend his title. He will be back in action on Sunday in the road race championships where Preben Van Hecke will try to defend his title.