Rui Costa’s affection for racing in Switzerland is a well recognized fact, so there is no better event in the middle of a spring for the world champion to overcome recent setbacks and finally claim the first victory sporting the rainbow jersey, than Tour de Romandie. Following a disappointing appearance at the Vuelta al Pais Vasco and in Ardennes, the 27-year old Portuguese headed to the Swiss WorldTour event and finally has overcome bad luck to come up with promising performances during its two opening days.

Costa rode a decent time trial in the Tour de Romandie opening prologue, losing 16 seconds to unattainable Michał Kwiatkowski (Omega Pharma-Quick Step), and early shown his intentions to fight for a stage victory and bonus seconds despite the bad weather, when he sent his team-mates to dictate a fierce pace on the only ascent left on the shortened yesterday’s route.

Even though the 27-year old Portuguese didn’t manage to finish off a teamwork with a victory,  Lampre-Merida’s efforts on the second category climb paid off as they dropped most of fast finishers and allowed their leader to claim seventh place in yesterday’s stage and gain four second advantage over most of the Tour de Romandie GC contenders in likes of Chris Froome (Team Sky), Vincenzo Nibali (Astana), Jean-Christophe Peraud (Ag2R La Mondiale), Rigoberto Uran (Omega Pharma-Quick Step) or Rafał Majka (Tinkoff-Saxo).

Thus, the Lampre-Merida sports director Joxean Matxin expressed his satisfaction with a work done by their riders, admitting that they tried to “dictate a pace uphill to string out the peloton”, what he assessed as a “good move”.

Lampre-Merida sports director also praised Costa for his fighting spirit and claimed that the confidence boost should make for a successful event for the 27-year old Portuguese.

“Today’s stage certainly will provide Rui with a great boost of self-confidence for the latter part of the race,” Matxin concluded.