Groenewegen after stage 5 in the Saudi Tour: "It’s a really good start of the season"

After a bad start to the race the Dutch sprinter bounced back to take two stage wins and start off with the right foot with his new team.

“The boys did a really good job, they’ve learned really soon and have tried to do things as good as possible and now we have two victories. I think it’s two out of three, so it’s really nice," said Groenewegen after completing his first stage-race of the season.

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"We lost each other a little bit, but in the final we found each other and Luka and me came together on the roundabout. It was a really good job from the team, they put me in a really good position in the end, I think maybe 200 metres before the finish, Luka put me in position, he made a really good move to go to the right and I had some space to go very well and very free, so it was a good sprint."

After a rough couple of seasons and a last-minute team switch from Jumbo-Visma to Team BikeExchange - Jayco, there was a lot of speculation wether we had seen the best of Groenewegen already. But with these two wins in the Saudi Tour, things seem to be heading in the right direction.

"It’s a really good start of the season, I was a little bit nervous before the start of the season in a new team, but everyone has learned so fast and everybody did a really good job today.”  

The Dutch sprinter has his eyes on a return to the Tour de France this summer where he is planning to add to his tally of four stage wins he's gotten in the past few years. In the spring, he is outlined to take to the start in Paris-Nice aswell as some of the Belgian cobbled classics.