PREVIEW | Tour de Suisse 2025 stage 1 - GC battle or sprint in explosive first stage? Almeida and more headline

From the 15th to 22nd of June the World Tour peloton will tackle the Tour de Suisse, one of the hardest races in the calendar and the last of the 'big 7' one-week stage-races in the calendar. We preview stage 1.

The first stage of the race will be a very short one, rather quick, but with quite some difficulties added into the mix. In classic Swiss fashion, it's a day that is well suited to those sprinters who can climb, but equally these are the days that favour attackers.

There is not a huge amount of climbing and most of the day is indeed flat however there will be action in the ascent to Michaelskreuz. The ascent is 3 kilometers long at 9%, enough for differences even amongst the strongest climbers in the race.

This ill be tackled on two occasions, the first of which early in the day, and the last with only a mere 14.5 kilometers to go. Taking into consideration that most of the finale is downhill - or similar - then it will be very hard to close differences created previously.

The GC will certainly be at play in the final climb, and if a rider like João Almeida or Felix Gall has the legs, they will certainly try to blow things up and already try to make a difference. The downhill finale makes it very hard to chase back anyone and this could also lead to a stage win.

However it must be taken into consideration that the climb is not overly long, and so if any team wants to do this, they have to push quite hard from early on, or overall have a very fast day on the bike.

*** João Almeida, Mauro Schmid
** Roger Adrià, Neilson Powless, Ben O'Connor, Oscar Onley
* Jan Christen, Felix Gall, Aleksandr Vlasov, Pello Bilbao Michael Woods, Joe Blackmore, Andrea Bagioli, Christian Scaroni, Alberto Bettiol, Tiesj Benoot, Javier Romo, Marc Hirschi

Pick: João Almeida

How: Solo win