Tour de Suisse 2016: Stage 1

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January 1 - June 19, Baar, Switzerland, Road - WorldTour

The Tour de Suisse opens today with a short time trial – flat but technical.

Welcome to the Tour de Suisse, part of the final countdown to the Tour de France! Today we take on a 6.4km time trial starting and ending in Baar. Will the win go to Fabian Cancellara in his final appearance in his homeland race?

There is only one tiny climb today, too small to be ranked as a climb – so no advantage to the climbers today. The middle part of the race is the technical part, with many turns. We don’t expect any major time gaps today.

The first rider is scheduled to go off at 14:37 is Kamil Gradek of Verva ActiveJet Pro Cycling Team. The final rider is defending champion Simon Spilak of Katusha, at 17:32. You might also want to catch the next-to-last rider – Fabian Cancellara (Trek).

They are calling for thunderstorms today – but in the morning. It looks as if most of the afternoon is expected to be around 18°C and mostly cloudy.

The whole listing of who is starting when can be found here.

Hollenstein still has the best time. Second is 
Ariel Maximiliano Richeze (ARG/EQS), 11 seconds back.

One interesting new aspect of this race is that Velon will be publishing live the “real-time data showing speed, power, cadence, heart rate and acceleration stats for the 11 riders” for each stage. Today’s candidates include some pretty obvious ones: Tim Wellens (Lotto Soudal), Tobias Ludvigsson (Giant-Alpecin), Fabian Cancellara (Trek-Segafredo), Rui Costa (Lampre-Merida), Zdenek Stybar (Etixx-QuickStep), Robert Gesink (LottoNL-Jumbo), Samuel Sanchez (BMC), Andrew Talansky(Cannondale), Peter Sagan (Tinkoff) and Geraint Thomas (Sky).

We have Velon data on Stybar and Ludvigsson. Stybar covered the course at a speed of 61.2 km/h and Ludvigsson with 50.3 km/h.

Many top riders are skipping this race in favour of the Dauphine or training, but we still have some very big names here, some names which hope to be in contention at the Tour de France – like Geraint Thomas (Sky) and Tejay van Garderen (BMC.

Van Garderen currently 14 seconds down in sixth place at the finish. 

A knee injury has held Leo König (Sky) out of racing since February, but the Czech rider is finally back in action here. He has his eye firmly fixed on the Rio Olympics.

Curious about this race? Who is riding, who will do well, what are the stages like? Check out our race preview here.

The entire start list for the Tour can be found here.

This is Peter Sagan’s last race before the Tour de France, and he has proved that he loves it – and it seems to love him. He has won 11 stages here over the years and won the points jersey for five years in a row. We can reasonably expect him to add to both of those again this year.

Geraint Thomas (Sky) doesn’t get the chance to captain many races, so when he does, he is willing to go “full gas”. He wants to take advantage of the opportunity in this race, in which he last year finished second.

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