Hayter wins Romandie prologue

26 Apr 2022

Hayter wins Romandie prologue

Tour de Romandie prologue: Lausanne › Lausanne, 5.12km

Ethan Hayter powered to an impressive time trial win in the opening prologue at Tour de Romandie to take the race lead. 

Hayter recorded an impressive time of 5:52 on the 5.12km course, with the British time trial champion finishing four seconds ahead of former teammate Rohan Dennis (Jumbo Visma) and going 10 seconds quicker than Felix Großschartner (Bora Hansgrohe) to record his first WorldTour stage win. 

Geraint Thomas put in a strong performance on the short, explosive course to finish fourth (+10") to place him ahead of some of the other GC favourites. 

Magnus Sheffield made it three Grenadiers in the top 20 finishing 13th (+20") in his first WorldTour TT of the season. 
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Reaction 

Ethan Hayter 

"I've had few setbacks at the start of the year, so I’ve taken a bit of a break from racing and gone away and trained really hard. To come back like this is really nice. This TT suited me, I thought I'd give it a crack and it worked out well. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve last been racing, so it was a shock to the system! I spent a lot of time at 600w on the uphill drags and I actually cornered quite fast too. I went out hard and pushed on a few of the corners, though I took the last one quite steady as I was hitting 70km/h.

“G did a really good TT as well today and it's looking good for the week ahead. We’d like to win as many stages as possible this week as well as the GC too.”
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Geraint Thomas 

"It's a funny feeling doing a prologue like that, especially after Liege on Sunday,  I felt ok but I felt like I lacked that little bit at the end. I’m happy with it, I gave everything and it's great that Ethan won.  

"My shape is a lot better than a few months ago improving all the time. we’ll see how this week goes. I want to try and win the race again, but there's a lot of strong guys here - we'll see at the weekend. Form-wise, I’m still on the way up, but we'll give it a good go and we've got other guys who can be in the mix on GC too."