It’s exactly five weeks before the start of the Giro d’Italia in Sanremo. The Lotto Soudal roster is almost ready. Jurgen Van den Broeck, André Greipel and Maxime Monfort are definitely part of the selection. Van den Broeck returns to the Grand Tour where he conquered a top ten place in GC for the very first time.

“Of course I’m really pleased the team selected me for the Giro. It was already obvious for a while now that I won’t go to the Tour and that’s fine. Taking part in the Giro is a return to the place where it all began for me as a GC rider (in 2008 Van den Broeck finished as sixth, ed.)," he said.

“On Wednesday I’ll head to Tenerife for two and a half weeks to optimally prepare myself. Then I’ll try to be as good as possible in the Tour de Romandie and then the Giro starts. The past few weeks I took part in two WorldTour stage races as planned: Tirreno-Adriatico and the Volta a Catalunya. In Tirreno I was eleventh. Top ten would have been nicer, but I was close. In Catalunya the focus of the team and me changed when Bart De Clercq took the leader’s jersey.

“Of course I will do everything I can to do well. I urged the team to select me and now I want to live up to the expectations. The Tour de Romandie will be a reference to see if a top ten in Giro is a realistic goal. I now feel much better than last year at this time of the year, because I had a tough winter period then due to the combination between my rehabilitation after my crash in the Tour and working on the basic condition. It was a long and hard road and I underestimated the impact.”

“I was pretty pleased with the performance of Jurgen in Tirreno," manager Marc Sergeant said. "There’s not much difference between the eleventh and tenth place. He lost a few seconds in both time trials and at the summit finish, at the end that was the small difference between the sixth and eleventh place. If he had been 40th it would have been different.

"Jurgen let us know he really wanted to go to the Giro, we spoke about that and we all can benefit from a good result. Also mentally this is important for Jurgen, I think. He can do what he loves most, ride a Grand Tour.

“First he’ll ride the Tour de Romandie. Two years ago he finished in top ten and we hope he can repeat that performance. If you want to be good in the Giro, you already have to be good in Romandie. That will also be the goal in the Giro. With a place in top ten I will be satisfied. That seems a correct goal to me for a rider who finished in top five of the Tour the past years and was thirteenth last year in difficult circumstances.”