Defending Champion Tom Dumoulin wins Opening Giro d'Italia Time Trial

Dumoulin showed his rivals that he is in top form ahead of three weeks of Italian Grand Tour racing

Tom Dumoulin (Team Sunweb)  won the opening time trial of the first stage at the 2018 Giro d'Italia. He took the lead by completing the time trial circuit two seconds faster than Rohan Dennis, who was in the hot seat most of the day.

The opening stage in Jerusalem was 9.7 kilometres and featured a rolling course.

Even before the time trial started officially started there with crashes during the recon with Chris Froome (Sky), Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana) crashing and Kanstantsin Siutsou (Bahrain-Merida) withdrawing with a broken vertebra.

One of the big favourites of the day was BMC's Rohan Dennis. He set a  best time with 12 minutes and 4 seconds.

Pre-race favorite Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ) completed the course 31 seconds and Simon Yates' crossed the finish line 18 seconds down.

Bahrain-Merida's Domenico Pozzovivo put in a solid 12 minutes 29 seconds, a solid start to his GC aspirations. European TT champion Victor Campenaerts (Lotto Soudal) completed the route by a fraction of 4/100th's of a second behind BMC's Dennis

The biggest loser was Chris Froome's (Team Sky) who was over 37 seconds down on Dumoulin, having crashed heavily in the course Recon.

Last year's champion Tom Dumoulin started the race on the right foot and finished the stage two seconds faster than the rider of BMC, taking the Pink Jersey on the first stage of the first grand tour of the year.

Dumoulin said: "It's been quite a cool few days in Israel and today tops it off with the win. I knew that I felt good but you have to see how things go during the race. We've worked really hard over the last few months, so I'm really happy with the win because it confirms that all of the work has paid off. The course was really good for me; it was really technical and I’m good on the corners. I could go full gas, then recover, then go full gas and recover again. It’s nice to be in the Maglia Rosa but it will be hard to keep it for three weeks. We aren’t planning on defending it every day so we will see what we do with that in the coming days.”

VIDEO: 2018 Giro d'Italia Stage 1 Highlights

2018 Giro d'Italia Stage 1 Top 10

1 Tom Dumoulin (Ned) Team Sunweb 0:12:02 
2 Rohan Dennis (Aus) BMC Racing Team 0:00:02 
3 Victor Campenaerts (Bel) Lotto Soudal   
4 José Gonçalves (Por) Katusha-Alpecin 0:00:12 
5 Alex Dowsett (GBr) Katusha-Alpecin 0:00:16 
6 Pello Bilbao (Spa) Astana Pro Team 0:00:18 
7 Simon Yates (GBr) Mitchelton-Scott 0:00:20 
8 Maximilian Schachmann (Ger) Quick-Step Floors 0:00:21 
9 Tony Martin (Ger) Katusha-Alpecin 0:00:27 
10 Domenico Pozzovivo (Ita) Bahrain-Merida 0:00:27