With three Grand Tour riders heading to the Tour de France in July, Jumbo Visma has put his trust in George Bennett for the Giro d'Italia.

Bennett, a New Zealand native, was not selected for the Tour de France along with Tom Dumoulin, Primoz Roglic, and Steven Kruijswijk, but with the Dutch team focused on ending Team Ineos' dominance at the Tour, the 29-year-old Bennett will be given a chance to run his own race in Italy.

Bennett, who will also lead the team in the Tour Down Under later this month, has top-10 finishes in both the Giro d'Italia (2018) and Vuelta a España (2016), but will be used primarily as a superdomestique in 2019, with Tour Kruijswijk's third place overall finish.

Surgery at the end of 2019 helped to resolve a slipped rib issue he has had for several years, and Bennett told Cycling News in November, "I had major surgery two weeks ago. I've had stitches in my side for a long time, and I've slowed down a lot this year."

"Every time I play hard, I get a stabbing pain in my side. The surgery was a pretty drastic measure, they practically had to pull three ribs out. When I say that, it sounds worse than it really is, but each one was about 8 cm long and made of cartilage."

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At Jumbo Visma's winter training camp in Spain, team director Merijn Zeeman emphasized that Bennett is a back-up rider for the team in the Giro. Along with the New Zealander, the team will send sprinter Dylan Groenewegen.

"George Bennett, for example, was very clear about his ambition to make the Olympics his goal. That was important to him, so we focused on his performance plan and worked towards that. As a result, we were able to give him a chance to compete in the Giro," Zeman told Cycling News.

"Of course, he doesn't have the track record of Dumoulin or Roglic, but we think George has great potential. We believe he can do very well. He is not a strong contender for the Giro, but we have ambitions for him."

"In the Vuelta, Dylan is a strong sprint train, we have a strong team for the TTT, and Steven will be the GC leader.

Jumbo-Visma spent much of the off-season devising plans around the Grand Tour, ensuring that the riders were involved and committed to the project.

"We had an idea and a strategy for the Tour," Jumbo-Visma said. And we chose the riders we thought we needed to go into the race and compete against the best in the world."

"Once we had the team, we went over the preparation and with input from all the coaches, we came up with an annual plan for all the riders," Zeman said. It took us about two months to get everything ready, but we were pretty much set. We wanted to create a plan that everyone would commit to."