This year’s edition of the Tour de Suisse got underway with a short opening time trial around Liechtenstein’s capital city of Vaduz on a technical 4.5km-long course. With a time of just over five minutes, Yves Lampaert flew around the course at an average speed of around 56km/h to take the victory as well as the overall lead of the race.
The Soudal Quick-Step rider set the benchmark fairly early on in the stage, with nobody able to better it throughout the day. This marks Lampaert’s first win since his time trial victory on the opening stage of the Tour de France in 2022 and shows that he is in good form ahead of this year’s race, which starts later this month.
It was an upset for the Swiss riders at their home race, as Stefan Bissegger (EF Education-EasyPost), Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) and Mauro Schmid (Jayco AlUla) all finished in the top ten, but narrowly missed out on the stage win. Bissegger came closest in second place, but even he finished three seconds down on Lampaert, a rather large margin over that sort of distance.
A strong performance from Ethan Hayter (Ineos Grenadiers) saw him finish in third place on the stage, whilst the likes of João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates), Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) and Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) all made good starts to the race, as they look to contest the overall victory later in the race.
More to follow…
