Yves Lampaert (Soudal-QuickStep) blasted to the opening victory in the Tour de Suisse, a short, ultra-fast individual time trial through the streets of Vaduz.
Second was Stefan Bissegger (EF Education-Easy Post), three seconds back, with Ethan Hayter (Ineos Grenadiers) in third.
Averaging a speed of over 56kmh, the flying Lampaert established an early best time of 5:05 for the technical, flat 4.77 km course, held over a mixture of bike paths, rural lanes and city streets.
The former Belgian National TT champion held on throughout the afternoon of variable weather conditions to take his first win since the 2022 Tour de France opening TT on the streets of Denmark.
Lampaert will now lead the Tour de Suisse into its second rolling stage from Vaduz to Regensdorf, likely to end in a reduced bunch sprint.
“I didn’t expect to beat the Swiss specialists like Bissegger and [Stefan] Kung,” Lampaert said afterwards. “I’m really proud to do it, I know this distance suits me well.”
With his previous win now nearly two years distant, Lampaert said that he was delighted to be able to add a second stage victory in Suisse to the time trial triumph he captured back in the 2019 edition of the race.
“Yes, absolutely, nowadays the level is so high in cycling, at one moment I started to doubt myself. But I never gave up believing and kept training as well as possible. So it gives me a lot of satisfaction that I could take the victory today.”
How it unfolded
Racing started at just after 2 pm, with plenty of the top names opting for an early time to try and beat the difficult weather conditions forecast for later in the day. Of the 162 riders taking part, Jan Sommer (Switzerland National Team) was the first to go down the start ramp, but double Portuguese TT national champion Joao Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) quickly went top of the leader’s board with a time of 5:12.
With riders off at minute intervals the changes to the provisional ranking looked set to come thick and fast. The first surprise, though, was that local TT star Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) failed to oust Almeida from the top spot, the former European Time Trial Champion falling four seconds short. An even bigger one came when after beginning his race just over half an hour after the first starter, Lampaert put no less than seven seconds into the Portuguese racer’s time, consequently gaining a spot in the hot seat the 33-year-old Belgian was destined to keep for the rest of the day.
The strength of Lampaert’s top provisional time of 5:05 became steadily clearer as riders of the calibre of Ethan Hayter (Ineos Grenadiers) and reigning Swiss TT champ Stefan Bissegger (EF Education-EasyPost) were unable to topple it. Try as they might on a course which featured a little of everything in four kilometres, from city roads to country back lanes to a segment of bike path running alongside a river, Lampaert continued to rule the rankings.
The rain that set in with around an hour’s racing left certainly played in Lampaert’s favour, just as the change in weather from dry to wet had done in Copenhagen two years ago. But the fact of the matter was that he had set a very impressive time and regardless of the favourable circumstances, that was the bar that had to be broken.
In fact none of the final wave of riders came close to troubling Lampaert with former Tour de France stage winner Søren Kragh Andersen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) the only late starter who broke into the top ten.
Barring disasters, such a short course was never going to have a huge impact on the GC. So although Almeida now goes into the remainder of the eight-day course as the best-placed overall favourite, last year’s overall winner Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) at 11 seconds, Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates) is at 15 seconds, Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) at 19 seconds, and none of the other favourites is too far distanced.
What is certain is the four summit finishes to come in the second half of the race, as well as an uphill time trial on the final day that still await the 2024 Tour de Suisse peloton will surely establish far bigger differences.
Prior to the feast of Alpine climbing on offer in Suisse this year, stage 2 from Vaduz to Regensdorf will be finely balanced between favouring the breakaways and the sprinters, with two cat.2 climbs early on and a cat.3, the Regensberg, peaking out just 12 kilometres from the finish.
“I think tomorrow [Monday] is a really nice stage, probably a lot of the sprinters can make it also,” Lampaert observed. “Let’s hope it’s a sprint stage with a small group and I can try to keep the jersey.”
Results
Results powered by FirstCycling
