Olav Kooij takes first career Grand Tour win: "This was the step I was looking for"

Team Visma | Lease a Bike was close to losing Olav Kooij last year as the Dutchman looked for further opportunities. He was given a big one this season with a Giro d'Italia debut, and he has now made the best of it as he won stage 9 into Napoli ahead of Jonathan Milan.

“This is what we were working on within the team, achieving a stage victory. Things did not go perfectly in the first sprints in this Giro, and there was still a bit of uncertainty today," Kooij said in a post-race interview. "We weren't sure at all whether it would be a sprint, but the team was still behind me like a rock to get me into position.” Ultimately Visma have plenty teams to thank for who, in the hilly finale, worked to bring back Jhonatan Narváez.

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Visma did not have men to do this job, but Kooij did a superb sprint in the final meters to beat Maglia Ciclamino Jonathan Milan to a stupendous win. “We knew we had to improvise, especially in the final kilometer. Normally, with Christophe [Laporte] you have someone who will almost certainly put you in an ideal position. Now that disappeared," he explains. However that was not a limiting factor for the 22-year old who also won at the UAE Tour and Paris-Nice earlier in the year.

"We did not have a plan, but mainly wanted to see how the race evolved and respond well to that... This was the step I was looking for, that stage win in my first Grand Tour. I already had a lot of victories under my belt, but this was the one that came to my mind," he concluded.

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