Luke Plapp was brave, as he was in Paris-Nice, attacking a stallde GC group and producing a huge performance to gain time over his GC rivals. However the Australian could not drop the best breakaway riders, Nys and Vendrame, finishing third in the Tour de Romandie stage 2.
Tour de Romandie has a stacked start list with UAE Emirates star climbers Adam Yates and Juan Ayuso, Damiano Caruso, Thymen Arensman and Giulio Ciccone who are preparing for the upcoming Giro d’Italia. There are also many other strong GC riders such as Aleksandr Vlasov, Enric Mas, Simon Yates, Egan Bernal. Despite the deep field and mountain top finish, all of the peloton rode fairly easy the whole day giving the breakaway more than a two-minute lead before the final climb Les Marecottes (7.6 km, 7.5%). At the base of the climb Pavel Sivakov had spent 3,316 kilojoules for 3:42h, a low-intensity day of 12,87 kj/kg/h.
The peloton was riding passively with no big teams committing to a high pace, despite there being many possible contenders. Jayco – AlUla was the most active with Eddie Dunbar pulling and Simon Yates later unsuccessfully attacking the peloton. In the last three kilometres, his teammate Luke Plapp attacked to obtain a gap over the peloton with newly extended Florian Lipowitz joining the Australian champion.
Plapp did terrible performance in the technical prologue, finishing 130th but he was climbing at fast rate, dropping Lipowitz and catching the last breakaway survivors Thibau Nys and Andrea Vendrame who are both punchy. Plapp could not distance them in a headwind and paced until the final few hundred metres where the young Nys won the sprint.
Plapp did a massive 6.68 ᵉW/Kg for 20:15 min to beat Juan Ayuso and the big GC group by 12 seconds in an easy stage by World Tour standards. Lipowitz finished two seconds ahead of Ayuso, doing 6.49 ᵉW/Kg, while A. Yates, Vlasov, Ayuso and other stars did in the peloton 6.44 ᵉW/Kg. Nys and Vendrame had a two minute handicap before the final climb and they averaged 6.02 ᵉW/Kg for 22:26 min.
The stage might have been easy for this time of year but Jai Hindley, Thymen Arensman, Giullio Ciccone and other good level climbers lost some time to the GC group. Tomorrow features the hilly time-trial which will influence the race for the overall classification much more than today's stage.
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