How Giro's top GC riders compared to Ireland's Roche & Martin in stage 1 TT

*Dan Martin and Nicolas Roche in today's Giro TT; Martin losing time to his GC rivals and Roche riding solidly, even though he is not riding for his own GC result on this race*

Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) may have won the opening TT stage at Giro d'Italia in Turin today but the first battle of the general classification war was also fought. Some riders put in performances that suggest they are in great shape while others suffered time losses.

João Almeida (Deceuninck-QuickStep) held the leader's jersey at last year's Giro for 15 days before slipping to a final 4th overall. He was best of the general classification men today. He took 4th in the 8.6km TT and put time into all of his GC rivals.

In the TT Almeida lost 17 seconds to stage winner Ganna. Almeida is on top of the list below, which takes all of the possible general classification riders out of the TT stage result and lists them for an easy comparison showing how the riders performed against each other in today's TT.

Simon Yates is probably the clearest favourite on form for the overall title though of Egan Bernal and Remco Evenepoel are fully fit that may change. Nicolas Roche was within one and two seconds of Yates and Bernal today. Dan Martin lost 38 seconds to Evenepoel, 19 to Yates and 18 to Bernal (Photo: Massimo Paolone)

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While Almedia's team mate Remco Evenepoel is coming back from a broken pelvis, suffered last August, and this is his first race of the year, he was next best of the GC men today, losing just two seconds to Almeida. He is followed by Aleksandr Vlasov (Astana-Premier Tech), who was just seven seconds down on Almeida.

All of the riders below are capable of a top 10 finish based on previous career results. However, some are coming back from injury and a number of them will also get pulled into team duties if their team mates are riding well and are better placed.

Nicolas Roche is not riding for GC as his Team DSM team mate, Jai Hindley, was 2nd overall in the race last year and is probably the team's best bet for the final podium again this year. However, we've included Roche's name in the list below simply to show how his TT ride compares today.

Dan Martin (Israel Start-Up Nation) is his team's GC leader and having placed 4th at La Vuelta last year he will be hoping to make a big impression over the next three weeks. Of the really big overall contenders, Martin lost most time today, though his time losses to many of these riders was relatively small.