Adam Yates cemented his position at the top of the Tour de Suisse GC with a virtuoso victory at Carì on stage five.
He now leads by 35 seconds, but it’s not quite as simple as it could be – hot on his heels is UAE Team Emirates team-mate Joāo Almeida, who did not only pace Yates up the steep, 10km climb, but shredded the lead group too. Then, after Yates took flight alone at 1.7km to go, Almeida stayed in touch to take an impressive second place, just six seconds behind the Briton.
With Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) now 1:11 down on Yates, Almeida is the closest challenger by some margin, and as Yates insist, he’s not the boss.
“Yeah of course,” he said, when asked if Almeida might be allowed to win. “If Joāo was stronger than me then he can win. You saw today he really put the pace on. If he has the same legs for the next two days then for sure he can take a win.”
He added: “It’s a good position to be in, to have two riders in great shape. From the beginning we were both co-leaders and so far it’s working well.
After an impressive mountains victory Yates was happy just to revel in the strength in depth the team possesses, on a day when they overcame the best efforts of Ineos Grenadiers to ultimately prevail.
“It was a really strong performance,” Yates said. “Right at the end there Joāo was putting on a crazy pace. I only had to follow for four of five k’s and he was still there. He’s obviously in great shape and the whole team’s super motivated for the rest of the week.
“You saw today it wasn’t easy for us,” he added. “Ineos set a pace on the first two climbs that was really hard to try and flick us, but we came back as a team, got organised and we could do our pace in the final.
The stage – the second in a run of five consecutive days out in the mountains – took riders 148.6km from Ambri to Cari, bookended at each end by major climbs – different approaches to the same Alpine resort.
How it happened
With the race embarking on the category-two climb of Altanca almost from the gun, followed immediately by the day’s first ascent to Carì, the peloton was never going to stay together for long.
An eight-rider group was established within two kilometres, though that quickly became smaller and by the time they crested the first-cat to Carì only Alexey Lutsenko (Astana Qazaqstan) remained, followed shortly by Tom Pidcock and Egan Bernal, as Ineos Grenadiers attempted to put the thumbscrews on Yates’s UAE team.
A five-man group of Einer Rubio (Movistar), Stevie Williams (Israel-PremierTech), Nans Peters (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale) and Lutsenko eased clear with around 100km to ride, joined shortly afterwards by Johannes Staune-Mittet (Visma-Lease a bike).
They were never really let off the leash, but nevertheless this quintet survived the long, flat central section of the stage, all the way to foot of the foot of the final climb.
Ineos took some early turns on a climb that was eight and nine per cent most of the way up, before UAE Team Emirates took the bull by the horns and Almeida began to systematically decimate the mid-sized front group. By the time he moved over to let Yates go at 1.7km, only four or five riders were left in total, and though Bernal and Enric Mas (Movistar) made valiant attempts to keep up, they were short-lived, with Almeida coming round to take second behind the man in yellow.
Results to come…
