Back at it, the peloton tackles the longest stage of the race with some tricky climbs in the finish. The sun should be back.
Le Printemps de Bourges: the crosswind stage came two days later than planned. A three-quarters tailwind out of Bourges encouraged the peloton to race hard from the start and the script for the racing was gone with the wind. Out went the idea of a close race where the team time trial would shape the GC, where riders would contest the stage in an uphill sprint.
Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley and were out of the GC race, Vauquelin missing the split right at the start while a Onley crashed and lost contact with the front group.
Alas out went Juan Ayuso in a different several riders fell on a bend and if Ayuso was soon back on the bike he could hardly pedal and when he came to a stop he seemed unable to stand up and collapsed to the ground. Brandon McNulty was also out.
This crash split the field and suddenly there were five Red Bull riders on the front with Mathias Vacek and Jonas Vingegaard on their wheels. Vacek would crack and it was down to the Van Dijke brothers to tow Dani Martinez with Vingegaard along for the ride.
Vingegaard did not expect this kind of stage and one clue was his clothing, he was dressed in many layers and could not stop to take them off and so had to race the heated finale with bib longs over giving him the appearance of a runner who had decided to practice for a triathlon. As unfashionable as it seemed, he was looking good as Red Bull towed him away and the time gap on the rest was widening. Nobody behind had any team mates left and the race began to look like some endurance event with everyone out for themselves. Vauquelin was trying to make up for lost time but in the fog of sport Georg Steinhauser had got ahead and so the German is a surprise in the top-10 on GC.
Vingegaard rode away for the win and almost uncontested, Martinez presumably tetanised by the cold. For all Vingegaard’s wardrobe choices he’s the one in the yellow jersey now.
Taken away by paramedics Juan Ayuso looked in a very bad way but the news overnight is more encouraging, no fractures. Things might be more difficult on the Ineos team bus with Vauquelin accusing a Soudal-QS rider of flicking into the ditch at the start. The unsaid part is that he ended up chasing a lone for a long time while the team were trying to help Onley only for Vauquelin to ride past and be their first finisher but in the moment this outcome was hard to predict earlier and to go back and “rescue” Vauquelin would have been perilous.
The Route: 205km and 3,000m of vertical gain. It’s south down the Saone valley and into Paul Seixas country as he’s from the north of Lyon where the first climb of the day is a small bump in the road; the next one out of Trèves is a long drag.
Things get tricky with 40km to go. The climb to Sécheras has a tricky start with several corners in the village beside the Rhone river where positioning counts. It’s 4km at a solid 7% and all on a small back road. There’s a bigger road but only just to go back to the valley floor.
The climb out of St. Jean-de-Muzols is 2km at 12% and if the graphic above signals a 16% section, there are good parts at 15% on the way too, and all on a road that quickly gets narrow. It should be the decisive point of the stage.
The next climb is a bigger road with steady gradient and then a right turn for a smaller road to the finish that drags up before levelling out just by the finish line.
The Contenders: a lot depends on who has recovered yesterday. The breakaway has a good chance because if Vingegaard leads the race, he’s in a relatively secure place for now and there are only three others within five minutes on the GC although Visma are bound to filter the breakaway to ensure nobody is allowed back into contention.
Ivan Romeo (Movistar) has seen is GC bid collapse so now switches to stage hunting and he climbs surprisingly well. Ewen Costiou (Groupama-FDJ) is a punchy rider for the finish. Lennard Kämna (Lidl-Trek) has to race for himself now. Nicolas Prodhomme (Decathlon-CMA CGM) is no GC threat.
Kévin Vauquelin (Ineos) might feel he has a point to prove today, maybe Oscar Onley too. Lenny Martinez (Bahrain) will want a result this week and today’s stage suits.
Sandy Dujardin (TotalEnergies) is the local rider.
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L Martinez, Romeo, Soler |
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Costiou, Kämna, Vauquelin, Onley, Arrieta |
Weather: the Mistral wind can howl down the Rhone valley but usually it’s further south and the forecast says it won’t blow much anyway, just a 10km/h tailwind. Otherwise 11°C but sunny.
TV: the finish is at 5.00pm. Tune in from 4.00pm to get the final steep climbs.
Postcard from Tournon-sur-Rhône
Paris-Nice goes down the Rhone valley today and this overlaps with plenty of past editions, including the 1959 version. Its long-time organiser Jean Leulliot had a history of innovation (the Tour de France féminin, the prologue, the kilometre rule, the air transfer were some Leulliot’s ideas and he had plenty more). But one change he was against was radio course, “race radio”. The short wave system allowed those in the race convoy to communicate. It had been introduced in the 1956 Tour de France which Leulliot covered as a journalist and here is part of his write-up:
“Just push a button and everyone: team managers, journalists, photographers can get the innermost details of the race. For example one day you can hear “Ride X alerts his manager that has found some ham in his musette!” It was evocative but really useless. The reach of Radio Tour must be limited”
– Jean Leulliot (translated) in Sport Mondial, 1956
Leulliot didn’t just want the radio’s signal power kept low, he was against it for several reasons. First because it didn’t work on some days and so nobody knew what was going on because with radio they’d got rid of the blackboards used to communicate time gaps. But when it did work Leuillot wrote that it took the thinking out of a race, that directeur sportifs would be reduced to robots.
Leuillot’s next objection was that any local en route could pick up the signal and feel informed; but this could wrong as as race radio was run by the organisers and not news mediated by journalists.
All of Leuillot’s complaints were about race radio in the convoys but you can see obvious parallels to team radios used today which riders carry with them: the claims of robot riders guided by operators from the team cars; or the audio clips of this played in the Tour de France which are supplied by the organisers rather than journalists.
However if Leuillot was against this as a journalist, he was an organiser as well and radio course became a component of the sport. In 1959 he relented and Paris-Nice went on the airwaves too.
Felt a bit sorry for Onley yesterday. Yes he’d had crashed, but was back in the lead group. He then suffered a mechanical had to change bikes and couldn’t get back on despite Tarling’s efforts (Red Bull also put the hammer down harder at that point and Onley got barraged – I think there are plenty of other occasions where that wouldn’t have happened).
The van Dijk brothers were super strong yesterday.
The Van Dijke brothers jointly shared the combativity prize yesterday for their efforts.
I was very pleased with this decision, and I don’t think I had ever seen a shared combativity prize. Has this happened before? Can anybody remember a case?
Yes, it’s happened a few times. Tony Martin and Julian Alaphilippe got it jointly when they were team mates for a joint breakaway in the Tour de France.
That was an epic breakaway and certainly deserving of it.
More infamously, a double award was made in the 2011 Tour de France when Juan Antonia Flecha and Jeffrey Hoogerland finished the stage after having been mowed down and thrown into a barbed wire fence by a France Televisions car.
There was one in the Men’s Tour de France last year for more commercial reasons. After stage 3 where the jury opted to make no award, on stage 8 they made a double award for Mattéo Vercher and Mathieu Burgaudeau to appease the prize sponsor.
The Tour Down Under made a double award for the first time in the first stage of last year’s men’s race, for Fergus Browning and Zac Marriage from the Australian national team. They took their two man break so far that the sprint teams had to keep working to catch them inside the last 1500m and had minimal time to work out positioning for the finishing sprint.
Twins. Commissaires couldn’t tell them apart to judge between them
@DaveRides. I think you mean Johnny H and Juan Antonio.
Oops, I did mean Johnny.
But if it was Jeffrey involved there, he would still have deserved the prize – not only for fighting on after the crash but also for making it through a TdF stage despite being a Kilo specialist.
Skinny climber Vingegaard making the front on a rainy crosswinds stage speaks well for his all around race skills. It’s a pity he mostly avoids single day races.
Small correction, the Red Bull brothers are named Van Dijke, with an e at the end, a less common variation on a common Dutch surname.
It’s tougher than the rest (quote) and has great racing skills. He tried hard in some Classics, too, but back then it didn’t work for him although he was already strong enough. There’s more in Classics than racing skills, or more racing skills perhaps than in a Classic-like stage. But maybe in seasons to come he’ll give one-day race a second option if some opportunity of victory should surface somehow. Classics often can work for older athletes after all.
It all looked a bit liike Napoleon and his troops returning from Russia!
That will stay with me. So true!
Well, what a stage! Very impressed with the Van Dijke brothers, and absolutely blown away by Vauquelin’s ride. He must have been so angry, wasting his superb form on unsupported damage limitation all day. I hope he will be rewarded with a GC podium place at the end. I am not sure if any criticism of his team would be justified though. It was him who missed the split at the beginning after all. Is anything known about the circumstances behind that? As many have said, Bora’s tactic seemed less impressive, to say the least. I can only imagine that Martinez didn’t quite realise how little he had left until it was too late. Also, Vingegaard seemed so strong that they probably wouldn’t have been able to stop him anyway, and going for second place on GC was therefore an acceptable move. Oh, and many thanks for the postcard once again. I didn’t read the blog in 2014, and I had therefore never heard of Leulliot and how his innovations have shaped pro cycling.
If they used the Classics strong men to attack in turns in the rolling or flattish sections, feel assured that Vingo wouldn’t have been able to follow every move for long. If he did, he’d be out for GC today… Once one of them is out on the front, attack with the 2nd with Dani just following. Etc. It would have for an interesting day in Vingo’s career.
And although I don’t know them much, I’m nearly sure the bros didn’t need to be told how to, just leave them free to work it out their way.
Regarding Ineos. If you’re coming to a high profile race with two captains, isn’t it then logical (and even common) practice to dedicate an adjunct to each of them so that none of the captains should normally ever be stranded alone in a group somewhere, as happened to Vauquelin yesterday? I can see why they placed their chips on Onley at some point during the race but abandoning Vauquelin entirely was not a smart move and could’ve been prevented.
I wasn’t able to watch for most of the time but the live-ticker frequently indicated that Visma was chasing in the second group, with Vingegaard & Affini in the first group. Was this a tactic to put pressure on Ineos and Bora so that they would commit 110% to towing Vingegaard to the final hill (which they did) or am I reading to much into this?
They had Godon I think but it was too little and faded to soon, they should have had the cold mind to look at the whole situation from a different angle (see below).
Dunno what Visma had in mind but they actually kept the door open for Ineos to think better and send support back, which as such wasn’t a great idea. With an athlete like Vingo, a gregario on his side, and no Pogi around, whom would they really need from the second group? And, even more important, if their idea was burning out Ineos and Bora, well, it didn’t work much – both tactically imploded rather than being athletically wasted, which is just logical and predictable as you won’t wear out two strong teams in number chasing with half of yours.
Leaving Vauquelin alone was a serious mistake, and not only with hindsight – which simply made much manifest what was implicit in the strategy.
Since start, Ineos’ specific differential strength for this GC was having two plausible captains. Depending on how you select favs, beginning the stage they had 2 out of 4 to 6-7 candidates for GC. Betting on the split meant you lost your differential advantage of two captains in exchange for… supposedly eliminating Lenny and Vlasov? Ayuso, Vingo, McNulty, Gaudu even, and of course Dani, were all on the front.
So you swap one valuable card to force some of your weaker opponents to lose their *less valuable* ones, and doing so you sacrifice your exclusive bonus of enjoying a «double card» combo.
It’s a bad strategy as such, no matter what it’s eventually turned into by luck or chance.
And they had a huge lot of time to think about it.
I’d have left Onley with Tarling or Watson on the front, Kwiatko and another guy back working for Vauquelin very early on. Betting soon against the split or at least for whittling it down seriously.
The fact that losing the cut was Kevin’s fault, true or not (he blames a QS rider), is utterly irrelevant, that’s what you have a team for. And the interest of the team is having the best winning strategy, not worrying about what their captains «deserved» or not.
By the way, this is a stage race, so Vauquelin working madly on the front back there alone will negatively impact his further chances and performances.
On a more ‘normal’ echelon stage, maybe. On that stage it was ‘men overboard’ and ‘man the lifeboats’ and a case of everybody riding like the hounds of hell were on their tail from the very beginning to the very end of the race. The chances of anybody seeing the front of the race again after dropping from group 1 were not to be gambled on. In the circumstances the rides of both Vauquelin and Tarling were astonishing.
Wow, what a great stage again at Ti-Ad… now on with Pa-Ni! 😀 😀 😀
Who wants a more linear calendar with such a Thursday afternoon ahead? 😛
Pogačarian, “but” I liked it. Applauses to Jonas for making his point!
Even though I was happier with the winner, it was still a very predictable affair. With
Ayuso and McNulty completely out and the Ineos boys out for all intents and purposes, Pa-Ni became one of those races where you start looking for podium battles and whether there are any interesting battles for the various jerseys. EF currently hold third place, the white jersey and the green jersey. Will they have any of those at the end of the race?
Though we’ll never know, of course, I have a hard time imagining McNulty, at least, having kept up. Ayuso, maybe? I wish that del Toro were here…but he’s having fun in Italy.
Yes, but the margin by which a race is or isn’t predictable is just one among the many elements which might make it enjoyable.
Wednesday was entertaining also because of the tactical mistakes and the «what ifs», with many a psychological factor at play.
I was curious about attitudes yesterday, and how people would react both physically and mentally to the previous stage.
Plus, watching the best doing his thing is also interesting as such (to me).
Anyway, I agree about the podium battle, indeed, and I believe that, still respecting the leading athlete’s sponsor with a decent coverage, yet TV should gradually adapt (already happening, only not enough) and show us much more of the action behind.
At least JV had a good training ride, and without harassment by locals.
As Seixas wasn’t racing, we had no local enthusiast even able to try and put pressure on Vingo, indeed 😉