Tom Dumoulin of Jumbo Visma told the Dutch media that he believes he made the right choice in signing with the new Dutch WorldTour team for 2020 after a frustrating 10 months of not racing due to illness and injury He said he believes he made the right choice in signing with the new Dutch WorldTour team for 2020.

"With Jumbo Visma, I feel like I've joined the Real Madrid of the cycling world," Dumoulin said in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad on Sunday. Besides, they are Dutch, and what more could you want?"

"I just wanted to go to a team where I wasn't the only leader all year." Steven Kruijswijk, Primosz Roglic, and myself want the same thing. That's the team's goal, and we will all have to accept that our teammates may be better than us during the Tour."

First, Dumoulin must race. Last June 14, the Criterium du Dauphiné was his last race.

After his recovery, the start of the 2020 season was subsequently postponed due to illness caused by an intestinal parasite. The mandatory suspension from professional cycling was a further blow to Dumoulin, as he had been training at a high-altitude camp in Tenerife, Spain, in preparation for his return to competition at the Volta a Catalunya at the end of March.

"With the coronavirus outbreak, I feel like I'm half unemployed," he said. I'm training, but not too hard. But I'm still a cyclist. That's the positive thing I've taken away from the past year. I've remembered how fun cycling can be.

"I've been a (professional) cyclist since 2012. I've lived with blinkers on all my life. I kept improving, but the pressure got bigger," Dumoulin continued.

"I started to feel the weight of it all going into 2019, so in that respect it was good to force myself away from cycling and the cycling world. What do I like? What don't I like about it? How do I deal with it? It gave me a lot of answers.

Asked if he still thought he could win a Grand Tour, Dumoulin assured him that he could.

"I fully believe I can," said the 2017 time trial world champion. 'The 2018 Tour didn't have that many time trial distances. I had some bad luck on stage 6, Mule de Bretagne, and lost some time, and it was far from ideal preparation, but I still finished second."

"Time trials are welcome but not necessary for me," Dumoulin said. 'In 2018 I was better on the uphills than in 2017. There was an upward trend, but it was relentlessly interrupted."