Tour de Suisse

10 18 June, 2.WT, Switzerland

There's not much here for the sprinters, and the Tour favourites tend to favour the Dauphiné. But there's climbing galore at the Tour de Suisse, and it's a strong contender for the hardest stage race in cycling outside the Grand Tours. The 2017 race serves up its usual mix of incredibly di icult mountain stages and, well, incredibly di icult hilly stages plus a tough time trial. The key days are the mountain stages on days four, six and seven. The third of these sees the highest stage inish of the European season, at 2,784m on the Tiefenbachferner climb, above Sölden in Austria. Stage 6 crosses 2,000m twice, with the San Bernadino and Albulapass, and even stage 5, listed as a hilly stage, crosses the 2,005m Simplonpass en route to the inish in Cevio. In between, there are two punchy circuit races. Stage 2, in Cham, sees four laps of a 43km circuit which includes a 766m climb, while stage 8 has eight laps covering 100km in Scha hausen, which also hosts the inal day's hilly 28.6km TT.