Five storylines to follow at the 2025 Tour de Suisse

The Big Three of Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel draw the eye, of course, but there’s a strong argument that João Almeida is the fourth power when it comes to stage racing these days. The Portuguese rider placed fourth behind that trio at last year’s Tour de France, after all, and he has been among the outstanding performers of 2025. 

Only Vingegaard could deny Almeida on home roads at the Volta ao Algarve in February, but the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider hit full speed later in the Spring, claiming overall victory at both Itzulia Basque Country and the Tour de Romandie. His spell of altitude training in May looks to have gone well, too. Almeida recently knocked more than a minute off the quickest time up El Purche, a Strava KoM that, hardly coincidentally, belonged to his teammate Juan Ayuso.

In July, Almeida will work diligently for Pogacar at the Tour de France, but he has the freedom to chase overall victory at the Tour de Suisse, where he placed second behind teammate Adam Yates a year ago. After Ayuso’s travails and Isaac del Toro’s emergence at the Giro d’Italia, Almeida will be keen to stake out his terrain as a Grand Tour leader next season. Adding the Tour de Suisse to his palmarès won’t harm his claim.

His results may have been nondescript so far in this, his final season as a pro rider, but Geraint Thomas has mastered the art of peaking at precisely the right time. His last three seasons have all followed a similar pattern, with a quiet start followed by a podium finish in a Grand Tour. Replicating that at the 2025 Tour de France is surely beyond with him, but Thomas will still aim to make a mark in his final appearance, and it would be ill-advised to write him off.

The Tour de Suisse should reveal a little more about Thomas’ capabilities in July. Back in the COVID-19-ravaged edition of 2022, he emerged as a surprising overall winner, but he backed that up with arguably the greatest athletic display of his career en route to third place at the following month’s Tour de France.

Before each of his Giro podium places, meanwhile, Thomas showed his first signs of life with solid but unspectacular displays at the Tour of the Alps. This Tour de Suisse might follow a similar template, with Thomas operating in the service of teammate Laurens De Plus while riding in the front group for as long as he can.

Ben O’Connor was one of the outstanding performers of 2024, but he has yet to shine since swapping Decathlon-AG2R for Jayco-Alula during the off-season. Then again, the two campaigns are very different. Last year, O’Connor focused on the Giro d’Italia, where he might have been on the podium but for a bout of illness, and the Vuelta a España, where he led for two weeks en route to second overall. 

This time out, O’Connor’s campaign has been built squarely around a return to the Tour de France, and everything he has done so far in 2025 has been a function of his desire to perform at his best in July. O’Connor enjoyed a sparkling 2021 Tour, winning in Tignes and placing fourth overall, but his next two outings were rather more ill-starred. He will hope for considerably better next month.

The Tour de Suisse is where O’Connor will hope to show signs of progress, even if podium finishes at the Dauphiné in 2022 and 2023 didn’t translate to success at the Tour. Indeed, O’Connor’s decision to make his Tour de Suisse debut is intriguing in itself. Like many, he will sense the opportunity to claim a big result in the absence of Pogacar, Vingegaard and Evenepoel. But perhaps above all, he liked the idea of having his final pre-Tour warm-up a week closer to the main event.

Tudor Pro Cycling have a wildcard for the Tour de France and Michael Storer has picked up some very useful results at Paris-Nice, the Tour of the Alps and the Giro d’Italia, but the ambitious team’s star signings have not yet lived up to their billing.

The arrival of Julian Alaphilippe and Marc Hirschi last winter was supposed to mark a new chapter for the Swiss squad, but each man had a subdued Spring campaign. Hirschi got off to a flyer with a win at the Clàssica Comunitat Valenciana in January, but he receded from view as the weeks progressed. Alaphilippe sparked the winning move at Amstel Gold Race, but he faded almost immediately afterwards.

Both riders will hope for better when they lead the line at the Tour de France, but the Tour de Suisse is already a key appointment for their sponsors. “I feel in better shape again and I’m ready to go for stages,” Hirschi told Blick. Expect plenty of aggression from Hirschi and Alaphilippe, especially in the early part of the week.

In the wake of the tragic deaths of Gino Mäder and Muriel Furrer in bike races on Swiss roads, the Tour de Suisse has introduced additional safety measures for 2025. Race director Olivier Senn was the public face of the organisation at each of those events. His humanity and compassion were evident in the aftermath of the tragedies, but now his race is attempting to follow up by taking practical steps to lessen the risks.

The key innovation for the Tour de Suisse is also long overdue. Every bike in the race will be equipped with a GPS tracker that will allow riders to be located more quickly in the event of a crash. The trackers are also programmed to automatically alert officials when abnormal patterns are detected. Potentially dangerous sections of the course, meanwhile, will be flagged beforehand on Veloviewer.

“Absolute safety doesn't exist,” Senn acknowledged in a news conference last week. But that doesn’t absolve race organisers of their responsibilities. The measures being applied at the Tour de Suisse should be standard across professional cycling.