After a month and a half of racing break, Tadej is returning to the start line. After celebrating victory at the Tour de Romandie on May 3, he will fight for the yellow jersey at the Tour de Suisse from June 17 to 21. His team UAE Team Emirates – XRG will be chasing a third consecutive win there, as last year João Almeida was the best, and the year before that Adam Yates.
For Tadej, in his eighth season among the pros, this will be his debut at the Tour de Suisse—one of the few major »big seven« one-week races he has not yet won. To complete his prestigious collection, he is still missing victories at the Tour de Suisse and the Tour of the Basque Country.
»Training has gone very well, both individually and as a team, and I’m arriving at the Tour de Suisse feeling strong and motivated. It’s my first time racing here, which makes it even more exciting. We’ve had a good block of training done at altitude over the past few weeks, and after watching our teammates racing and doing well at other races, we can’t wait to put our race numbers on and put that work into action,« said Tadej.
He spent most of the time after the Tour de Romandie at altitude training in the Sierra Nevada, where the first task was preparation for the Tour de France, which will start in Barcelona on July 4. »This race is good for getting back into a racing rhythm. The first three stages aren’t extremely hard, they’re not mountain stages, but they’re demanding enough that you will need to push really hard on the pedals. The time trial will be the test before the Tour, and the last stage is a real mountain one, with huge elevation gain, and that’s probably where the race will be decided,« Andrej Hauptman, sporting director of UAE Team Emirates – XRG, said about the Tour de Suisse.
Together with Tadej, before arriving in Switzerland, they reconed the routes of the 19th and 20th stages of the Tour, which finish on Alpe d’Huez. But now is not yet the time for that famed French climb, but for the Tour de Suisse, which is presenting itself in a new format. It will start in Sondrio, Italy, and after 634.5 kilometers and 11,751 meters of elevation gain, it will finish in Villars-sur-Ollon. The key will be the last two stages: a flat individual time trial (23.8 km) in Aarburg, and the queen 5th stage with 4,226 meters of elevation gain and three climbs of the Col de la Croix (19.1 km, 7.1 percent average gradient).
Tadej, who this year has already celebrated 9 wins in 11 race days, will have a very strong UAE Team Emirates – XRG team alongside him: Felix Großschartner, Brandon McNulty, Jhonatan Narváez, Domen Novak, Nils Politt, and Tim Wellens.