Just 76 cyclists have finished the Tour of Switzerland. They are less than half of the 154 who started and left Küsnacht last Sunday the 12th. The heat and the coronavirus have wreaked havoc on the peloton. Some teams abandoned the race completely, such as Alpecin, Jumbo or UAE. Without going any further, Vlasov had to leave as the leader for testing positive. However, his team, Bora, came very close to winning the race with Sergio Higuita. On the last day Geraint Thomas deprived him of the yellow in the Vaduz time trial.
The entire season of Remco Evenepoel (Quick Step) has been a constant yes but no. Leaves sparkles but does not explode. He excelled in Liège and dominated in the Algarve and Norway but he can't beat the best in the seven-day races. He was unable to fight Pogacar in the Tyrrhenian. He choked his sterrato in the Antenas de Maigmó in the Valencian Community. He failed in the last stage of Itzulia.
Even so, at 22 years old, the Belgian already has 31 victories as a professional. From Switzerland he said goodbye with a victory in the last time trial after not being up to the task in the mountain stages. “It has been a difficult week with many ups and downs. I have lacked freshness. Today I saw that my legs worked better and I finally won the first time trial in the World Tour”, he acknowledged. By three seconds he overtook Thomas.
The British of the Ineos is the opposite. At 36 years old, he continues to show off his regularity. His great virtue is never failing, knowing how to suffer and giving up as little time as possible in the mountains. He didn't have a bad day on the Novazzano slopes, on the Moosalp finish or on the Malbun climb. And in the time trial, his specialty, he recovered the two seconds that Higuita took from him, who could not repeat the final triumph of the Volta, where there was no goat.
In a Tour without Bernal, who continues to recover from the very hard accident he suffered in January in Colombia, Ineos does not have a clear leader for the Tour. Well, the winner of 2018 and second in 2019 aims to be his trick if they manage to impose their style of race control that they like so much over Pogacar's long-range attacks.
He does not lack a resume: he already has four of the seven one-week tests: Paris-Nice (2016), Dauphiné (2018), Romandy (2021) and Switzerland (2022), in addition to having been on the podium in the Tirreno and in the Volta. Not even the thermometer could with him. "It was the hottest race I've ever run," said the Welshman. And he has won it, although without the two Slovenians.
