Team Sky's Bradley Wiggins finished third in the Prologue of the Criterium Dauphine which started in France today.
Wiggins, was one of three British (Wiggins, Geraint Thomas and Daniel Lloyd) and one Irish rider (Nicholas Roche) in the week long race which started in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne with a 5.4km prologue and he finished the course in a time of 6 mins, 23.96 seconds.
It was a lead which stood until Rabbobank's Lars Boom flew home in a time of 6 mins, 18.12 seconds and with Alexander Vinokourov and John Degenkolb bettering the time set by the Britishh time trial champion, Wiggins had to settle for fourth place which was changed to third.
Geraint Thomas finished 27th.
Tomorrow's stage is 144km long and from Albertville to Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse.
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HTC-Highroad's Michael Albasini has taken a home win in the one-day GP Kanton Aargau race in Switzerland on Sunday.
Riding as part the Swiss national team, 30-year-old Albasini was the fastest in a six-man bunch sprint that decided the 181.5 kilometer race. Second was Italian Giovanni Visconti and third Germany's Stefan Schumacher.
On the final climb of the race's last lap, Albasini launched a counter-attack after Italian Davide Rebellin tried a move, pulling the six-strong group clear. Sticking close to Rebellin in the break, Albasini then followed Schumacher when the German led out of the sprint.
Following his win in stage three of the Bayern Rundfahrt in Germany last week, also taken in a small group sprint, the GP Kanton Aargau was Albasini's second win of 2011.
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Alex Rasmussen took his first win of the season today at the TD Bank International Cycling Championship in Philadelphia. With a long sprint through the circuit finish of a 251 kilometer race, Rasmussen showed outstanding resilience after the Giro d'Italia by pulling ahead of the pre-race favorites for the win of this iconic one-day race.
"With only five riders to work with, we had to take control right from the start," said sport director Allan Peiper, "There were six riders out front in the beginning, and Caleb [Fairly] and Patrick [Gretsch] did a great job interchanging and controlling the pack."
"There was a maximum lead of nine and a half minutes, and Fairly and Gretsch slowly reeled them in."
In the last thirty kilometers, there was a break of about a minute that held until the last lap of the race circuit when HTC-Highroad pulled them back.
"Leigh Howard's derailleur failed at Lemon hill with three kilometers to go," says Peiper, "But we had maintained a dominant presence in the peloton and the guys were able to keep the group together."
"Rasmussen was on point, and was able to make a big sprint from a ways back to take the win."
This is Alex Rasmussen's first win for the HTC-Highroad Sprint team, and the team's second win of the day after Michael Albasini's victory in GP Kanton Aargau.