Glory for Giulio Ciccone on opening stage of 2025 Tour of the Alps ahead of Decathlon duo Felix Gall & Paul Seixas

Lidl-Trek's Giulio Ciccone has climbed to a brilliant stage win on the opening day of the 2025 Tour of the Alps ahead of Decathlon duo Felix Gall and Paul Seixas, moving into the overall lead of the race as a result!

An exciting trio of young talents, Andrew August (INEOS Grenadiers) and Finlay Pickering (Bahrain - Victorious), plus former Giro d'Italia stage winner Davide Bais (Team Polti VisitMalta) rode their way into the day's early breakaway. As the trio worked well together, they quickly built up an advantage of over four minutes. Following the day's big Cat 1 climb at the Campo Carlo Magno, the leaders still had three minutes with around 60km to go.

That didn't prove enough for them to battle it out for the win though, as on the final categorised climb of the day, the break were caught with 25km still to go. Pickering though, clearly still had something left in the tank as he countered with another attack and pushed back on again solo at the front. A few kilometres later though, the Brit had finally been reeled back conclusively.

As the GC men then started to come to the fore, it was EF Education - EasyPost's Jefferson Alexander Cepeda that proved strongest, summiting the Passo Durone solo, with a narrow advantage ahead of his nearest chasers Paul Double and Paul Seixas, with the remainder of the peloton around 30 seconds down on the Ecuadorian.

Whilst his young teammate Seixas was flying, on the descent there were problems for Felix Gall. Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale's big GC hope for this race seemingly had a puncture on the downhill and with the pace so high and just around 15km to the finish, it was panic stations for the Austrian momentarily.

As they entered the final 10km though, Cepeda, Double and Seixas had all been caught, meaning a reduced bunch was all back together ahead of the final little kicker towards the finish line. Early on that last climb, Mattia Bais, whose brother had been in the break earlier in the day, attempted to sneak away solo. At 5km to go, he'd built up 15 seconds. By 2km to go, that had been cut to 8 seconds, but still the Italian held the lead. Inside the last 2km though, Bais' brave effort was ended. At the line, it was then Giulio Ciccone who emerged victorious ahead of the recovered Gall and his teammate Seixas.