Ethan Hayter: "To finish it off with a win is amazing"

Ethan Hayter has finished the first stage in first place, the second in last, and today has returned to the first place. The INEOS Grenadiers won what may be the only bunch sprint finish at the Tour de Romandie, after a great collective effort to leave him in the perfect position.

"We knew [the stage victory] was possible but I didn’t know how I’d be after yesterday. I rode my way into the stage and the team were amazing today. It’s probably my nicest win – they took it on and we were in position to take the race on like that. To finish it off with a win is amazing," he said in a post-race interview. INEOS took the head of the peloton in the final hilltops to harden the race. Although they failed to distance Hayter's rival sprinters, he still had the upper hand in the finale.

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With Magnus Sheffield and Luke Plapp delivering him into the finish, Hayter was forced to launch his sprint early but had the power to resist and take his second sprint win of the year. "I was really lucky yesterday. Obviously I crashed, but to come out with nothing broken and still be able to ride today was fortunate."

"It was planned to take the race on if I felt okay and obviously we did the same last 40km right at the start. We’d seen it already so we pushed down the descent and on the climbs as well. It wasn’t necessarily to get rid of riders, but maybe to put people under pressure because the climbs are good for me, and I recovered well before the sprint," he concluded. Tomorrow's stage will see him once again as a main favourite, but as the race hardens the team will also be looking into the general classification ambitions of Geraint Thomas - who was penalized in 20 seconds due to illegal feeding on stage one.