Peter Sagan will target the yellow jersey at the Tour de Suisse this week when he returns to action following his surprise win last month at the Tour of California. The nine-day WorldTour race begins Saturday with a 5.1km prologue time trial in Risch-Rotkreuz.
Climber Rafal Majka will join Sagan on the Tinkoff-Saxo Tour de Suisse roster, along with Matti Breschel, Daniele Bennati, Michael Mørkøv, Nikolay Trusov, Pavel Brutt and Michael Valgren.
Sagan, who took an extended break in the US following the California race, will try to repeat his result from the 2012 Tour de Suisse, when he won the prologue time trial and wore yellow for stage 1.
“It’s a matter of keeping momentum,” said Tinkoff-Saxo sports director Sean Yates, adding that Sagan “will get the backing of the team in Tour de Suisse.”
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That will be welcome news for Sagan as he heads into a race that has traditionally served as a tune-up for the Tour de France. Before Sagan’s run of two stage wins and the overall in California, team owner Oleg Tinkov stated publicly that the Slovakian would be working for Alberto Contador in July rather than chasing stage wins or his fourth green jersey.
“With the form Peter Sagan has been showing, he’ll naturally have the support from the team to go for stage wins,” Yates said of the Tinkoff-Saxo's goals for Tour de Suisse.
“It’s a race that suits him well with several lumpy stage finishes, and we know that Peter is very good at sprinting uphill. Looking at the profile of the prologue, it suits Peter as well, so he could win there and take the yellow jersey, where we would then defend it to a certain extent.”
Sagan has won several prologue time trials in his career, including the 7.3km opener at the 2012 Tour de Suisse, where he beat Fabian Cancellara by four seconds. Sagan also won the shortened 10.5km individual time trial in California in May on his way to taking the final general classification of that race.
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