Giro d'Italia 2019: Victor Campenaerts hits back at Bradley Wiggins

In the latest edition of Eurosport's The Bradley Wiggins Show, podcast it was suggested by the 2012 Tour de France champion that Lotto Soudal were "still acting like it's 1974".

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Campenaerts struggled with a bike change during the stage nine time trial of the Giro d'Italia on Sunday, and Wiggins believes the gear was too high on the spare bike as Primoz Roglic went on to win the stage.

Wiggins said: "If he went to Sky [Team Ineos], he'd see the difference. What will happen is that they [Lotto] will offer him a load of money, he'll re-sign for three years, and he'll stay there, and it's, like, you could be so much more, Victor.".

When asked by Cyclingnews for a response to those comments, the Belgian, however, was somewhat surprised - and couldn't resist a swipe back at Wiggins.

"He can of course say what he wants," Campenaerts said. "I don't have a lot of idols, and he's a bit of one to me, but I don't think he's been involved with many of the time trials we've done with this team, or for the Hour Record, so I don't really know if everything he's said is right.

"I think it's a really good podcast, and it's really interesting to listen to him, and of course we are quite a traditional team compared to Mitchelton-Scott, Sky or Sunweb – teams like that – but I think we've taken some really big steps in terms of taking a scientific approach.

"I'm definitely not as good a cyclist as Bradley Wiggins is, but I broke his Hour Record just because we did it more scientifically than he did."

Campenaerts went further in his response to Wiggins when speaking to Belgian website sporza.be.

"I don't think he saw how we broke the Hour Record as a team," the 27-year-old said. "We broke his f****** hour record, didn't we?"