Ramunas Navardauskas continued Garmin's strong momentum when he beat his faster rivals to win the second stage of the Tour de Romandie. Having passed the finish line with 31km to go the team say that the final suited their Lithuanian rider and they allowed him to go for the win.

Garmin-Sharp is mainly in the Tour de Romandie to fight for the GC win with Andrew Talansky but today the team was successful in the final sprint in today's second stage. Ramunas Navardauskas got the chance to forget about his domestique duties for a moment and he promptly delivered by taking the win ahead of Enrico Gasparotto (Astana) and Gianni Meersman (Omega Pharma-Quick Step).

The team had started the stage with a defensive approach and only wanted to bring Talansky to the finish without any time loss.

" It was a beautiful day here in Switzerland featuring as stage that was 190 km of up-and-down," sports director Johnny Weltz said. "We decided not to be very active in the beginning of the day. The attacks started and finally three riders broke clear. We followed wheels until the last category three climb wich was much harder than that! The guys took care of Andrew to be up front’ we had Ryder (Hesjedal, ed.), Ramunas, (Peter, ed.) Stetina and Tommy D (Tom Danielson, ed.) in the first group."

With 31km the peloton passed the finish line for the first time and with a corner only 400m from the line, the sports director realized that it could be a good sprint for Navardauskas. Hence, he gave the loyal domestique carte blanche to fight for the stage victory.

"We gave Ramunas the go to try for the sprint because we saw the first time around that the finish line was 400 meters from the final turn," he said. "It would be a long sprint which suited him — it worked out with a great win!"

The win continues Garmin's strong run of success after Daniel Martin's win in the Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Tomorrow's stage is very similar to today's and Navardauskas could try to keep the momentum but contesting another sprint finish.

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