After starting the 2020 season on a high note with stage wins at the Tour Down Under and Paris-Nice, NTT Pro Cycling's Giacomo Nizzolo had to watch as race after race was cancelled due to a coronavirus outbreak.

While one of Nizzolo's former Dimension Data teammates, Mark Cavendish, has been mostly inactive for the past few seasons while recovering from the Epstein-Barr virus, Nizzolo has taken on heavy responsibilities as the team's main sprinter In 2019, Nizzolo has managed to take stage victories at the Tour of Oman, Tour of Slovenia, and Vuelta a Burgos.

And now, with the team morphing into NTT Pro Cycling, Bjarne Riis as the team's new coach, and Cavendish moving to Bahrain McLaren, Nizzolo appears to have stepped up his game. In the shortened 2020 season, he already has stage wins at the Tour Down Under and Paris-Nice, and the 31-year-old Italian from Milan has his sights set on Milan-San Remo, which will take place on August 8 on the 2020 UCI race calendar.

"I already have special feelings because I think it's a great race for a rider with my characteristics and it starts in the city where I was born," Nizzolo said on the team website on Monday.

"It will probably be sunny this year," he said of the race's new summer schedule. So after 300km, San Remo is unique. Sanremo is an iconic race, so it's very special for an Italian rider to win."

Nizzolo's best finish in Sanremo was 20th last season, but like any one-day race, he knows that everything has to come together at the right time.

"I'm confident I can win the race," he said. I have a terrible relationship with racing and I've never been on the start line in the conditions I want to be in. Most of the time I've either been injured days or weeks before, or I've missed a race because I've been sick or something." [For example, in 2013, it was snowing. The race started, was interrupted, restarted again, and my current team won (Gerald Ciolek of Germany on a team then called MTN-Qhubeka).

"The year after that I broke my collarbone a few weeks earlier, the year after that I broke my leg. And in 2016, his best year before 2019, he got sick in Tirreno-Adriatico just before."

The season resumes with the Strade Bianche on August 1, followed a week later by Milan-San Remo, and Nizzolo said, "I am ready, as are my teammates and colleagues."

"My approach is to be hyper-focused, hyper-aggressive, and try to do everything possible on the road. 'I think a lot of us do that. It's going to be something new for everyone because no one has ever been through something like this before, and I think people who are mentally strong will get a lot out of this situation."