The fourth pick isn’t a moment or a day but a whole week. Paris-Nice had a lively final stage which has been a regular pick in years past by itself. This time it’s the way all the stages threaded together that is highlighted.
Paris-Nice and the Tour de France have plenty in common, the same organiser means identical visual cues from the podium to the course signage and most obviously a yellow jersey. But the backdrop is so different. The warmth of July, whether the sunshine or the festivities, is absent. Paris-Nice shows a different kind of France.
That cute village store in the photo above? A trompe-l’œil painted to cover up an abandoned building in Châtel-Montagne, a town that had 2,000 people but now has just above 300 and the race makes a part of visiting France’s empty quarters, the true feel of the race is not Paris or Nice but what sits in between. All this in wintry conditions. Few races publish a history handbook, Paris-Nice does and it must be the only one with a chapter about bad weather over the years.
The opening stage saw Julian Alaphilippe on the attack and TotalEnergies’ Alexandre Delettre take the mountains jersey, both skirmishing for a Tour wildcard while Matteo Jorgenson got involved to take a time bonus and get virtual leadership at Visma-LAB. Tim Merlier won the stage and repeated the following day after Delettre got more mountains points and Jonas Abrahamsen rode solo for much of the stage with his Uno-X team the third squad looking for one of the two invites.
The team time trial saw Jorgenson take the yellow jersey thanks to Visma-LAB’s stage win while UAE struggled and finished eighth, derailing João Almeida’s GC ambitions.
Almeida won at the Loge des Gardes after a hectic day that saw Ineos on the attack after they too had struggled in the TTT. But everyone was halted by an icy downpour that had a police moto and a team car sliding off the course and the interruption was long enough to freeze many riders to the bone. The race restarted with Mads Pedersen on the attack then Jonas Vingegaard surged on the final climb but he looked sluggish and got overhauled in the final metres.
Lenny Martinez won the “wall” stage above La Côte-Saint André, surging past Jorgenson atop a tortuous climb. Several GC contenders were caught out, Vingegaard sore from a crash while Ben O’Connor and Mattias Skjelmose just struggled.
Stage 6 saw plenty caught out in the bad weather as Visma-LAB attacked on a descent and split the field. Mads Pedersen outsprinted Josh Tarling while Almeida was among the GC contenders who lost out, as did Lenny Martinez who saw his chances of a podium finish in Nice gone with the wind.
The weather front that brought rain meant snow at altitude and Stage 7 saw the climb of the Col St. Martin to La Colmiane zapped. Going to ski resorts and tackling climbs above 1,000m is risky in March and Paris-Nice doesn’t need it but it’s a win-win for the host ski resorts, a day’s sport if the weather is good, a “look at all the snow we’ve got” advert if not. Michael Storer got in a break and team mate Julian Alaphilippe did a lot to propel the break before Storer won.
The final day saw Mads Pedersen on the rampage but it was just too mountainous for him, he seems ready for the Cipressa, let alone the Poggio. Magnus Sheffield jumped away after the climb to Peille and caught Pedersen, Felix Gall and Aleksandr Vlasov and rode away for the stage win. Behind Jorgenson attacked, dropping his rivals. He didn’t need to do this but could and almost caught Sheffield. Sheffield’s win marked a solid week for Ineos and a reward for aggressive racing.
Why the highlight?
A week of action. Victory in Paris-Nice often requires involvement every day, a time bonus here, a split there. A power-to-weight ratio is necessary but not sufficient, Paris-Nice rewards racecraft too and we have the GC race alongside the daily stage contests rather than as a separate event and this means more to watch.
The Tour de Suisse was good too in a similar way with GC action thanks to Kévin Vauquelin making the opening stage breakaway and trying to hold on but if the course this year was selective it lacked the majestic mountain passes that make it shine; similarly the Itzulia Basque Country provided a clear winner but with fewer of the infernal backcountry ramps that define the race too. Almeida won both.
With hindsight
A GC rider racing the cobbled classics? Matteo Jorgenson’s been doing it for as long as Tadej Pogačar. But pro cycling is always asking what you can do next. Win the Tour de France four times and it feels as if the champagne cork is still airborne as someone leans in to ask “sure, but can you win five like Merckx?” For Jorgenson two consecutive wins in Paris-Nice meant the next step wasn’t Dwars Door Vlaanderen but grand tour leadership with the 2026 Giro mooted. Only that all seems more hushed now to the point that he’s starting to look like a Paris-Nice specialist who can win this race and thrive in the Flemish classics before becoming a support rider in summer. This chapter’s not closed, but it’s just less of a story now.
A bad week for Jonas Vingegaard. His crash and subsequent exit was a random event but put that aside and note two points. First he just didn’t look himself on the Loge des Gardes climb, his attack saw him solo but he looked laboured rather than ethereal and he was overhauled by Almeida; but it was an usual day with the long halt so hard to extrapolate too much from. Second he’d been talking about a lack of respect earlier and how he doesn’t fight for position as he used to. Long before the Dauphiné and Tour, and before his crash here, he sounded a little out of sorts. The Vuelta win will have done him plenty of good and early success in 2026 feels as important.
Almeida got a stage win but this was the World Tour stage race that eluded him. UAE came unstuck in the team time trial, finishing just 8th with Pavel Sivakov ill. Tadej Pogačar has won the race for UAE in 2023 but can the team show the tactical finesse and focus to win without him?
Florian Lipowitz had impressed in the 2024 Tour de Romandie and went into 2025 on the long list of riders to watch. He thrived in Paris-Nice and finished second and was almost too good, attacking in obvious moments where he had a lot of power but it needed a little more direction, even his team mates were saying this out loud and he is a relative newcomer as an ex-skier. He learned quickly, finishing fourth in the Tour of the Basque Country, third in the Dauphiné and then the podium in the Tour de France but can he win a stage race ahead of the Tour next year?
During the TV coverage Thomas Voeckler was on a moto for France TV and warned viewers interested in buying a used bike from the team to check carefully as Mads Pedersen may have bent the cranks. He was all over the race and it felt like too much too soon, especially as he was on the rampage in the mountains. Contrast it to Van der Poel’s discreet Tirreno-Adriatico week before winning in Sanremo. But he had a great spring, winning Gent-Wevelgem and on the podium in Flanders and Roubaix and hardly had a break before taking four stages in the Giro. All the better for Paris-Nice and while Pogačar and Van der Poel took the spoils in the classics, he was more than the best of the rest.
Ineos had a lively race with Magnus Sheffield winning the last stage and Thymen Arensman on the podium in Nice too. Tobias Foss was on the attack several times. Was this is Ineos 2.0, a team on the attack and making moves? We’ve heard this before and Paris-Nice looked more of an outlier.
The wildcard subplot helped spice up the race. Tudor looked nailed on for an invite – and Michael Storer had a huge season – which meant Uno-X and TotalEnergies were duelling for the last invite and both did well, Thomas Gachignard taking the mountains competition. But in the end the rules were bent to allow all three teams to ride the Tour. 2026 looks very different with Tudor, Pinarello-Q36.5, Cofidis, TotalEnergies and Unibet Rose Rockets set for invites and no tension to go with it.
Highlights of 2025 – Part I
Highlights of 2025 – Part II
Highlights of 2025 – Part III
«Whole Pa-Ni» looks like a default pick due to lack of alternatives – which is a bit of a pity given that, as pointed out by other readers, too – the season actually had several highlights barring the two most obvious ones. This choice was surely useful to point out some general points which also applied this year, indeed, still it was frankly far from a memorable edition. Modified stages, lack of an actual fight for GC win, lots of ill athletes… The sensation of «really not much to highlight» is reinforced by the doubling up of the paragraph on Voeckler’s joke about Pedersen 😉 (me joking too)
This time I will move away from my usual «Ti-Ad and Itzulia were better» (they weren’t, not at all) to instead say that… Catalunya and Suisse were much better!
^___^
Hard-fought, exciting stages etc. Suisse isn’t always this good, nor are normally Almeida’s victories: for once they were, so they really deserve to be «rewarded» aknowledging that…!
Have to agree with you about Suisse. Maybe it’s because I am Swiss and a closet Almeida superfan, but I thought the 2025 TDS was one of the best races of the year. UAE messing up the first stage by not protecting Almeida well and losing all that time to quality riders just forced him to chip away at the deficit, which he did brilliantly, especially on the Montespluga stage. Class stuff. I keep saying, if UAE would just take more trouble to protect Almeida in those tricky stages where he seems to be just too nice or careful a guy to fight for position, he would win a lot more (including Valenciana and Algarve in 2025).
I think Almeida rode away with the race and in the end there wasn’t enough suspense, plus the course looked lite for a change. But with hindsight a lament as it was the last “proper” Suisse as we know it with eight stages because next year it shrinks to a five day race.
A bonus hindsight on Suisse is that Vauquelin got some help from Ineos. He’d already signed for them by then of course but it wasn’t Dries De Bondt style as obvious. And Oscar Onley too.
The problem with picking five is all the others to leave out. The next post to conclude the series is the hardest one.
The new Marvel seems rather niche : “Inrng vs gabriele on Paris-Nice : Infinity War”.The second I saw the picture of the article, I knew we would have gabriele grumbling about it 🙂
For once maybe I rather agree with him : I really like Paris-Nice but this edition didn’t strike me (but I wasn’t able to see most of the stage, I was working ; the Pedersen one seem to have been very good). Then again, I don’t think nor Catalunya or Switzerland were much much better. Maybe Dwars, for the joke ? This is the problem with a lot of one-way races due to exceptional riders : after a while it becomes redondant. Fireworks can’t happen every year. But it seems that with the new way of eating in races, differences can be done more easily and tactics and suspense are not winning.
Maybe Alaphilippe at Québec ? This one was pure tactics…
Yeah this is comedy central of sort, inrng always picking Pa-Ni no matter what (obviously doing as they please on their blog, plus of course fully entitled to pretty much any opinion as long as it’s legit!) – and I… I… well just not being able to face it ^___^
Anyway, just checking the comments in this case makes it quite clear that this time it looked peculiar, blind love sort of thing.
Believe it or not, I also like Pa-Ni a lot (Dauphiné is the real enemy 😛 …ah, and Romandie… poor Romandie, I don’t even know why I dislike it, maybe it’s the ToA-Trentino comparison).
Only, there happen to be better races of that kind, too. And sometimes it’s just the best one of course. That said, Pa-Ni faced tough times some seasons ago, but then went on improving in recent years, quite the other way around for Ti-Ad. Actually, I think it’s better to judge on a year to year basis, currently. If one can, worth watching because most of then can give you a great edition – if you can’t or struggle to, well, knowing that so often they don’t add up much …is a consolation of sort.
Let me add that I found stage racing generally mediocre or poor this season, among the top race I believe that only those three I’m insisting on (Giro, Catalunya, Suisse) had some extra interest, but nothing destined to cycling history, either. So, it’s not like I’d necessarily put them in top 5 highlights (as I already wrote, if anything maybe Suisse, including the women race and those two stages on the same day).
I just say that if one felt in need to choose a short stage races, Pa-Ni wasn’t the most brilliant one, IMHO (yet clearly above Ti-Ad or Itzulia, and on par or slightly better if compared to Dauphiné or Romandie).
I think I named Alaph’s Quebec victory under another post, too. And I liked the role Alaph played in how Amstel went, not great for him but surely very significant – and yet people now tend to forget it.
Alaphilippe did a lot for team mates in the year… as we saw in Paris-Nice for Storer.
Romandie is a strange race, the organiser resisting all the trends of recent years. Six stages with two time trials and a giant summit finish you could almost drive two team buses up in parallel, that would have been impressive a long time ago but now it’s just a very long uphill drag, especially as we’ve had racing there before the climb is mapped for efforts. But this is why teams seems to like it and especially to send promising riders as it doesn’t have traps and danger points, so we often see revelations like Lipowitz last year and this year Nordhagen and Rondel did well.
Agree with others that it’s not easy to choose highlights for 2025 as many races lacked uncertainty and were essentially a journey towards a forgone conclusion. There were plenty of moments, but not many longer narratives to follow. Watching WvA struggle for a result in the spring, especially in Dwars, was good drama but not an example of great racing. Roglic riding away with Catalunya was impressive, but the race had already fizzled out to a certain extent before the final stage. Roubaix was headed towards a dramatic finale, or so it seemed, and then an errant turn changed everything. For me, the Finestre stage stands out starkly because it seemed to offer opportunity for drama going into it, the action started in break formation, and then multiple unpredictable moments occurred before Yates and Wout finished it off. Not many races had all of these elements on the way to an unexpected result, and most of the “clashes of the titans” were decided long before the finish.
Curious to know in what sense the racing in Catalunya “had fizzled out” before the final stage, given that stages 3, 4 and 5 (out of 7) had already offered plenty of action each, being especially worth highlighting the raging racing since the very start in the flattish stage 5, which, indeed, ended with that potentially/normally small but decisive bonus second of advantage to Ayuso, hence taking back the jersey which Rogla had taken from him the day before. Plus, despite the 2nd half of the stage (some 80+ kms) being flat, the intensity of racing and the chaos had most of the top-10 in GC shifted.
I must suppose that you were utterly disappointed (and so was I) by the shortening of stage 6 due to extreme winds (or supposedly such), which had it turned into a mere transition day, so to say, but frankly after three stages so hotly contested, and – in a sense – surprisingly so, it’s not like I felt all the emotion had evaporated. Even less so with the Barcelona stage ahead, which, in fact…
In a 7-stages races, I consider that having stages 3-4-5-7 with GC action and the leader jersey changing wearer in each of them doesn’t correspond much to a sensation of “fizzling out”, but I guess it must be included among the collateral damages of EWP.
May I add that the race also shined thanks to the supernova effect generated by Brennan, whom we could appreciate as a brute force at WT level after the sparks of winning talent in small French races earlier that month.
I think that inrng produced for the Giro a definition of what should be considered great GC fighting which included the jersey swapping shoulders forth and back several times, apart the final turn of the screw. Well, I think that Catalunya corresponded the most among all the one-week top stage races. And besides being enthralling, it’s not something which is usually so common, either.
It set up the Giro with two lead contenders but they both struggled. But it felt like two riders only for the GC.
Brennan impressed, said it before here but it felt like he was going to win from a long way out, he was floating when others were struggling.
The reference to the Giro was only meant to recall that description of an “ideal” GC fight: I actually had no intention to relate the 2025 editions each other, although in fact it shows how Catalunya was contested by two main figures who at the time could be considered as absolute GT candidates.
Pa-Ni, for a comparison, barely had a GC competiton as after the two bunch sprints (by the way, no serious competitor for Merlier in a mass sprint), we had the TTT which, even if I liked it as such, ejected from any serious hope of winning, well, essentially everybody barring the two Visma teammates – soon to be confirmed just one of them. Lack of motivation, and/or form/health, plus the cold, set up the final GC which really says it all and mirrors a race with some entertaining stages and a couple of lively finales, but no interest about the final general victory.
Again, saying there wasn’t enough suspense at Suisse, where at least Almeida entered the last 10 kms / half an hour of racing with 33 secs to claw back from Vauquelin, then preferring Pa-Ni borders paradoxical. Of course *with hindsight* the above was enough for the Portuguese to destroy the field, only he hadn’t taken a single second on 4/10 of the very same climb the day before… (of course he had already shown his potential on the Spluga or Castaneda, so I’d have bet on him, frankly, but perhaps with less of a difference, as Vauquelin payed for his huge efforts the day before…)
However, let’s put it like this: if any main short stage race had any bit of suspense, this year, I’d say we can count in only Catalunya and Suisse. Unless you call suspense Lenny entering a flattish ITT with 3 seconds over Almeida.
Same for the number of contenders. Only Catalunya and Suisse were anything else from a one man / one team show *in GC terms*. Again, unless you want to count in Romandie, where, sadly, the other two in the mix were Fortunato and Lenny, whose hopes with such a final ITT were about zero.
P.S. re: Brennan, yeah yeah, come stage 5 it was no surprise, but if you tell me you saw that coming on stage 1 when he was facing the final stretch against Alpecin teammates Del Grosso and Groves, the former well ahead, the second sitting on Brennan’s wheel… well, I must say you must be the only live spectator who wasn’t simply shocked by that winning action, as far as I know.
I was referring to the shortened stage and lack of gc interest for a while, which left the gc battle down to whether someone could outkick Roglic, which seemed pretty unlikely. Overall it was a pretty decent stage race, but it was also flawed.
Still impressed but not shocked.
Although the winners of Flanders and Roubaix this year were fairly (very) predictable I wouldn’t say either race was a foregone conclusion and Flanders in particular was pretty dramatic. Neither was Lombardy, where we knew who would win the next one as soon as the last one finished. As is also now regrettably the case with Strade Bianche. You could argue any year a ‘GC’ man nearly wins Roubaix, or even momentarily looks like winning, that automatically qualifies it as a highlight. You could even go further and say edition of either Flanders or Roubaix is automatically superior than any edition of Paris-Nice by dint of the fact that it actually matters who wins!