It was a bad day for the Schleck brothers in the Tour de Suisse. Having crashed on a descent in yesterday's stage, Frank abandoned the race with a concussion while Andy lost time after his splendid showing in Sunday's second stage.

The news out of the Trek Factory Racing camp Monday morning prior to the third stage at the Tour de Suisse was not encouraging: Fränk Schleck would not take the start, a result of the concussion he sustained in yesterday’s crash. However, the team - down to six riders with Stijn Devolder also out with illness - rallied for the 203-kilometer stage: it was game on as usual.

“I tried an attack - I thought why not? I can either wait until I get dropped in the final or at least try something and make the best out of it," Danny Van Poppel said.  But the team called me back saying it was nonsense. It was a hard stage today, not one for me.”

After the early escape of two riders was snagged back with still over 80 kilometers to go, Laurent Didier slipped out of the peloton with three others off the descent of the day’s second categorized climb. The quartet lost one, then gained two, but despite fresh legs the gap never increased more than a minute. Omega Pharma-QuickStep was motivated to keep Tony Martin in yellow, and too many teams were hungry for the stage victory.

“The strategy was to be in the breakaway, but at first it was only two guys, so we needed to be ready when the next breakaway went," Didier said. "It was a GreenEdge that attacked, and I went after him. It was a good group with BMC and Thurau [Europcar] who came for the mountain points. But the most we had was 1’10”. When the two guys [Van Der Sande and Agnoli] joined they were stronger than us, and that broke up the rhythm.”

On the final category two climb with just over 20 kilometers to go Didier lost contact to the breakaway and was swept up. In the last 10 kilometers the relentless pace over narrow, serpentine and undulant roads caused splits in the peloton; the last stubborn relic, Tosh Van der Sande (Lotto-Belisol), was captured with seven kilometers remaining and immediately FDJ moved to the front and continued the torture - by the harrowing uphill finish no more than 40 riders remained.

It was the perfect tricky ending for Peter Sagan (Cannondale) who sprinted to the win and moved into third overall. OPQS successfully defended the yellow jersey of Tony Martin with most of the top overall classification staying intact.

It was not a day that suited the six riders of Trek Factory Racing as Matthew Busche and Andy Schleck rolled in over a minute later, and the rest slightly further back. It was a good move by Laurent Didier, who played in the instrumental breakaway of the stage, but in the end too many motivated teams, coupled with a tough parcours, led to a small, selective bunch sprint.

“Today was a long day, and it took a while since we did not go so fast in the beginning - it was more than five hours on the bike," Schleck said. "In the end I did not feel good; I did not have good legs anymore to try something in the last 10 kilometers. It was going hard with 50kms to go and then in the last 3-5 kilometers FDJ was going full gas and everything exploded with two kilometers to go.”