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.

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.