Defending champion Roglic narrowly misses out on Romandie prologue win

Jumbo Visma's Primoz Roglic had to settle for second place after the Tour de Romandie prologue time trial on Tuesday, losing out to Bahrain-Merida's Jan Tratnik by less than half a second. UAE Team Emirates' Tom Bohli (UAE Team Emirates) took third.

Roglic – the defending Romandie champion – is officially recorded as having finished a whole second behind winner Tratnik, with results always rounded up to the nearest second, but in reality the gap was just 0.39 seconds – just under four tenths of a second, which the team have more generously called three tenths of a second.

"Of course, I'm disappointed with those three tenths," Roglic said on his team's website. "You always want to win, but with Tratnik as the winner, I'm not too disappointed. He's a good friend of mine."

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The time difference is likely to become irrelevant once the race hits the mountains on stage 3, with Roglic at the race to fine-tune his form for May's Giro d'Italia, where he will lead the team for the first time at a Grand Tour, having taken fourth place overall at last year's Tour de France.

"I have just returned from an altitude camp, so you always have to see and find out how things look to be going. My shape and the prospects, however, are good," continued Roglic, who won the overall classification at Tirreno-Adriatico in March – by three tenths of a second.

"Three tenths of a second is a very small difference," agreed Roglic's Jumbo-Visma sports director Jan Boven. "Sometimes you win races by a small margin and sometimes you lose with a small margin. That's all part of the sport, but Primoz rode an excellent time trial; technically he rode it very well.

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