Tinkoff-Saxo had to settle for 14th place in the opening team time trial of Tour de Romandie, where the squad, according to sports director Bruno Cenghialta, didn’t get up to speed on the 19.2km parcours. With hills and climbs on the upcoming menu, Tinkoff-Saxo is determined to try and make up lost ground.

In the wake of the team time trial, Bruno Cenghialta asserted that many of the riders on the squad probably felt the effects of Sunday’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

“Today we weren’t able to race the way we would have wanted and the squad wasn’t as fast as we would have liked. Probably, some riders were still tired from Liège-Bastogne-Liège and didn’t have the form necessary to be at the top. We were fast in the flat part of the race but we lost some time in the last three kilometers. We could have done better, maybe aiming at the top five but at the end, the guys didn’t go as fast as we had counted on”, says Bruno Cenghialta.

Stage 1 of Tour de Romandie confronted the teams with 19.2 kilometers contre-la-montre as well as an opportunity to create differences between the GC-contenders from the get go. Ultimately, it was Team Sky that proved the strongest beating Orica-GreenEdge by just 0.63 of a second. Tinkoff-Saxo finished 14th and recorded a time loss of 55 seconds, which the team will now try and make up for in the coming stages.

“We will now focus on tomorrow’s stage and see how we do there. It’s quite a demanding parcours with a climb not far from the finish and we

will try to make up for the lost ground. We will try to see what we can do every day in order to finish the Tour de Romandie among the top”, finishes Bruno Cenghialta.