An incredible hour!

Victor Campenaerts has written a piece of cycling history at the Velodromo Bicentenario in Aguascalientes! The Lotto Soudal rider cleared the world hour record of Bradley Wiggins, who managed to cover a distance of 54,526 kilometres in 2015, from the tables with a distance of 55.089 kilometres.

Victor Campenaerts can call himself the new holder of the world hour record after months of intensive preparation. After a safe start, the European time trial champion was perfectly on track to break the world hour record. Moreover, the Belgian rode almost the entire attempt at a speed above 55 kilometres per hour.

Finally Campenaerts crowned himself with the final distance of 55.089 kilometres to the new holder of the world hour record!

Victor Campenaerts: “It is extremely satisfying to see the months of preparation rewarded. Today all the pieces of the puzzle fell together. The entire Lotto Soudal team and all our partners supported me in this venture, which of course created the necessary pressure. But that only motivated me even more to make something beautiful out of it. Already after 10 to 15 minutes I felt that it would be possible to break the record. In the end it became exciting to reach the magical limit of 55 kilometres. Between fifteen and ten minutes before the end, I experienced a difficult moment, but the adrenaline that runs through your body means that you can do that little bit extra. You also know what is at stake and that makes it a little easier.”

Of course the record had also an enormous media impact. To valorise this, A New Agency World monitored all generated exposure and came to an amazing result.

The successful record attempt achieved 89 numbers of print outings where the main sponsor is visible, over 146 online articles and over 20.000 online mentions and more than 7850 seconds in television exposure, and this only calculated on the Belgian market.

To put euros behind all this, the multiple logistic regression model Scirix (based on gross media value against realised impact) valorised these numbers to an astonishing € 2.214.426 net value (Belgium only), making the world record not only a sportive masterpiece, but also a sponsor marketing highlight.