Four Grand Tour riders, a set of tweezers and a running camera are not the training-camp scene most WorldTour teams would want in the public domain.

Campenaerts, the Belgian time-triallist and one of cycling’s most-watched vloggers, filmed the whole thing before last August’s Vuelta and put it out.

The reasoning starts with a strip of plastic. Campenaerts is convinced that nasal strips do something useful in the last brutal minutes of a climb, and nose hair, in his logic, gets in the way.

He set out the theory in an interview with the Belgian daily Het Nieuwsblad, carried in English by Domestique Cycling.

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“When you are really suffering you normally start to hyperventilate through the mouth, but if in those moments you force yourself to breathe through the nose you give your body a signal to relax.”

He is not selling a breakthrough.

“You should not expect wonders from those strips, but once you master the use a little, you still gain a fraction.”

That fraction, in his accounting, is worth an appointment with a professional epilator.

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“For that reason I also had my nose hair epilated especially for the Vuelta.”

Vingegaard supplies the punchline

The habit has spread across the Visma squad. In the same Het Nieuwsblad interview reported by Cycling Up To Date, Campenaerts said Jonas Vingegaard had been very direct about how essential he was to the team’s Vuelta plans.

“Jonas told me I must come to the Vuelta to provide nose strips every day.”

Campenaerts treated the compliment as a joke, but he was on the plane, and so were the tweezers. Kuss, Jorgenson, Tulett and Kelderman all sat still for the same treatment.

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9.6 kilometres through Monaco on 22 August

Campenaerts is registered as rider 13 on Visma Lease a Bike’s 2026 Vuelta line-up. The race opens with a 9.6-kilometre individual time trial through Monaco on 22 August, running past Place du Casino, the Fairmont hairpin and Port Hercule before finishing in Granada on 13 September, the first time La Vuelta has ever started in the Principality.

The nasal-strip habit itself shows no sign of shrinking: industry write-ups from the 2025 racing season now describe the strips, without much irony, as part of every serious marginal-gains toolkit. Whether Campenaerts films episode two from the Monaco start line is up to him; the tweezers, on current form, will be in the kit bag.

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