Team Sunweb’s Michael Matthews launched an explosive sprint to take the victory on stage three of the Tour de Suisse today and his victory means that he now leads in the general classification by 10 seconds.
The riders faced an uphill sprint to the line and Team Sunweb helped to ensure their Australian sprinter was in a prime position. Niklas Arndt was the last of the lead-out train and after helping to position Matthews at the head of the peloton, he launched his sprint with 150 metres to go.
Nobody came close to him and he took a comfortable win. World Road Race champion Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) finished second with John Degenkolb (Trek-Segafredo) in third.
After finishing in fourth place on the opening day’s prologue and taking some binus seconds with his win today, Matthews now leads on GC by ten seconds from his teammate and Giro d’Italia winner Tom Dumoulin.
After the victory Matthews said: “I wasn’t climbing so well today but it was enough to stay with the best. In the final I knew that I had Nikias and the other guys with me which gave me some extra motivation. I knew that he could do a huge pull in the final metres to make the situation perfect for me to take the win. It’s nice to get the win that I really wanted to get last year and it will be really good to have the leader’s jersey tomorrow.”
Team Sunweb coach Marc Reef added: “The plan for today was to go for Michael, we knew that the final suited him perfectly and everybody was feeling strong to put their all in to support this goal. We joined in the chase to control the breakaway and the rest of the team were able to put Nikias and Michael together in a perfect position going into the final 1.5 kilometres. The team stayed calm and Michael was able to follow Nikias’s perfect lead-out to sprint to the win in a very difficult finale.”
