Rain fell throughout the day for stage 4 at the 69th Tour de Romandie on Wednesday, lending support to a successful breakaway rider as the stage winner. For much of the day, Team Katusha’s Pavel Kochetkov was part of the remains of an initial break that included teammate Anton Vorobyev, but in the last few kilometers he lost contact with the others, and was eventually reabsorbed by the main field while Stefan Küng soloed to victory.

"I don’t feel so good after this long day in the rain. I feel mentally drained from the effort today.  I would have liked to get a result today but that didn’t happen. If I had been able to stay with Küng I could have been in the yellow jersey. In the break everyone looked to me to do the most work because I was best-placed in the classification so I had to work so much there, more than the others and perhaps too much. But I will take lessons from this for upcoming races," said team rider Pavel Kochetkov.

Teammate Anton Vorobyev also contributed big efforts to the original break when the gap was being established but his efforts proved to be too much, too early and later he dropped back to the chasing peloton.

The stage honors went to Swiss rider Stefan Küng, 21, in his first WorldTour victory. Crossing the finish line behind him at 38- and 39-seconds were Jan Bakelants (AG2R La Mondiale) and Bert-Jan Lindeman of Lotto NL-Jumbo. Team Katusha’s Egor Silin was 22nd.

The general classification stayed with Michael Albasini of Orica-GreenEdge. Second and third places at 20-seconds belong to Ivan Santaromita (Orica-GreenEdge) and Christopher Froome of Sky. Team Katusha riders Ilnur Zakarin, Egor Silin, Iurii Trofimov and Simon Špilak continue to hold the fifth through 8th places on the GC at 25-seconds. Team rider Maxim Belkov holds the mountains jersey.

The stage began in La Neuveville and ended in Fribourg after 169,8 km and three rated climbs.  The break of six that included Kochetkov and Vorobyev went clear after only 10 km of racing and built a gap of more than six minutes. But the wet weather and the climbs on course worked on the riders and efforts fell apart with Küng attacking on the final climb. Despite a chase to reach him, the young rider held his advantage all the way to the finish line to claim the biggest win of his career.

Only one road stage remains for this year’s race and that is Saturday’s stage 5 at 166,1 km. The stage begins in Fribourg and includes three category-1 climbs before the final summit finish at on the cat.1 Champex-Lac.