Dutch rider Olav Kooij won a bunch sprint finish after a crash in a chaotic conclusion to stage five of the Tour de France. <\/p>\n
The 24-year-old, who is competing at the event for the first time, held off Germany’s Max Kanter, with Belgium’s Tim Merlier crossing the line in third.<\/p>\n
Norway’s Torstein Traeen retained the overall race leader’s yellow jersey despite being caught up in a pile up just over five kilometres from end of the 158.3km run from Lannemezan to Pau. <\/p>\n
The Norwegian ended up 14 seconds behind Kooij, along with reigning champion Tadej Pogacar and the other main general classification contenders – two-time winner Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel.<\/p>\n
France’s teenage star Paul Seixas and British duo Tom Pidcock and Adam Yates were also in the same group. <\/p>\n
Traeen leads the standings by 28 seconds from American Sean Quinn. <\/p>\n
Bidding for a fifth Tour title. Pogacar sits in fourth place, seven minutes and 53 seconds down on the same time, along with fifth-placed Vingegaard.<\/p>\n
However, the day was all about one of the Dane’s former team-mates, Kooij, who was a late addition to Decathlon CMA CGM’s squad after his start to his season was hindered by illness.<\/p>\n
“After a couple of hard days here already we’ve had to wait for this day to get this first chance to sprint in the Tour – and to immediately win is unbelievable,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I think it means a lot just in general after a pretty tough spring to get back to this level, to keep believing in yourself and just a few people who believe in you as well is all you need.<\/p>\n
“To be here with the support of the team today is all I could ask for. It was an easy day until the final. I just managed to find my way, find the right wheel and I just wanted to have the chance to win. I will enjoy this.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dutch rider Olav Kooij won a bunch sprint finish after a crash in a chaotic conclusion to stage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-539689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}