Damiano Caruso will lead Team Bahrain Victorious at Tour de Romandie for a fourth consecutive season in a race that has seen him finish in the top 10 overall in the last three editions and where he rounded off the GC podium last year.
The six-day race in the Romandie region of Switzerland opens with a 2.3km prologue before proceeding with five stages, including a 15km ITT in Oron on stage 3. Characterised by its hilly terrain and often challenging weather conditions, the Tour de Romandie is the perfect race to fine-tune ahead of the Giro d’Italia.
Including the prologue and ITT, the race features 657km of racing over an elevation gain of nearly 11,000 metres. Stage 4 is the ‘queen stage’, which features five categorised climbs totalling 3,512m of elevation gain across the 151km parcour and will ultimately define the GC on the long final cat 1 climb to the finish in Leysin, which is 13.1km and averages 6.1 per cent.
Road captain Nikias Arndt will support Caruso and look to test his speed should there be any sprint opportunities, particularly on Stage 5. Matevz Govekar, Rainer Kepplinger, Johan Price-Pejtersen, Cameron Scott, and Edoardo Zambanini will support Caruso’s GC ambitions and look for opportunities across the five stages.
Sports director Neil Stephens said: “We look forward to returning to the Romandie region in Switzerland. We’ve got six days of racing, including the Prologue and ITT, with two intermediate stages and two mountain stages with summit finishes.
“We head there to support Damiano Caruso, who has run in the top 10 in the last three editions and is a very constant performer in Romandie. He is in great shape and looking forward to his final test before the Giro. He will be motivated to run high in the GC.
“The Prologue stage is a twisty urban circuit in Payerne, and interestingly, we will not be riding Time Trial bikes, but our fast aero Merida road bike, the Reacto, which is the advice from our aero and performance experts,” Stephens said.
“We want to be positioned amongst the best there and set ourselves up for stage 1, where we expect a sprint finish, but there are never dead flat stages, so there aren’t any pure sprinters that line up for this race, and typically, it will be the fast men who can get over the climbs. We have Nikias and Matevz, who could look for a result.
“We’ve got a well-rounded team to keep us competitive across the different stage profiles. We will look to fight for a result every day and place Damiano high up in the GC as he prepares for the Giro,” he added.
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