A team time trial and so a practice run for the Tour de France. However this course is not as hilly as recent editions and so the tactics will be more subtle as teams try to retain their rouleurs for as long as possible.
le Maître Kanter: no crosswinds, just a pesky headwind and so only a breakaway for the mountains points with Casper Pedersen adding to his tally. Job done he and Matthis Le Berre were caught or sat up and we got a procession to a sprint.
Worth nothing the sight of Jonas Vingegaard at the back of the peloton, no incident to remark but it’s not where overall contenders sit; moments later Juan Ayuso was second in an intermediate sprint to grab a four second time bonus.
Dan Hoole made a late attack but was caught in the streets of Montargis and a surprise winner in Max Kanter of XDS-Astana but no fluke, he hit the front and just kept going. Laurence Pithie was second, the same position when the race last finished here. Luke Lamperti stays in yellow.
The Route: if you’re used to team time trials in Paris-Nice now with the “new” rules awarding a team the win based on the time of their first rider across the line then today is subtly different because the course just isn’t as hilly as we’ve seen in recent years, we’re unlikely to see teams burn up all their riders before their GC leader goes clear for the final minutes.
Teams ought to finish with multiple riders as the climb to Saint-Andelin isn’t that hard but it is a drag all the same and so a tactical point, it’s exposed too amid the pruned vine stumps. All this still makes for a tactical course as you can use up some riders who can take big turns in order to ensure others can power to the line later on but normally today’s course suits a more cohesive team that can stick together and the tactics won’t be so visible.
The Contenders: Visma-LAB, Lidl-Trek or Ineos for the win? UAE have a strong team but are more erratic in this discipline, having won the Paris-Nice TTT once but also been 5th and 8th recently. Movistar could surprise but not for the win. Decathlon-CMA CGM have big hopes and look good on paper but their riders have been losing time so far.
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Visma-LAB |
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Lidl-Trek, Ineos |
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Weather: some sunshine but mainly cloudy and 14°C, a 10km/h SW breeze.
TV: the first team is off at 3.05pm and the last team due in at 5.00pm CET. UAE and Visma start relatively early, here is the start order:
Postcard from Pouilly
This could be the wine stage with a course in the Loire vineyards. But instead a sideways look at team time trials with plenty of sour grapes. Today’s stage is a technical affair with teams training on traffic-free motor racing circuits to perfect the art of pacing and rotation. A lot of thought goes into the order of the riders, pacing and the individual efforts in order to achieve harmony.
It wasn’t always this way. For a professional cyclist what could be more obvious that riding “through and off”, and with colleagues? This assumption regularly proved ruinous as teams made a mess of things and it was more trial than team. Like a group ride approaching the run home, strong riders could show off or just inadvertently prove too powerful, causing their team to crack and sometimes shatter.
Even the ultra rational Chris Boardman ended up doing this to his team mates in the 1994 Tour de France while wearing the yellow jersey. It cost him the lead the day before race rode to Britain.
In 1989 Pedro Delgado was late to the prologue’s start ramp and finished last, losing almost three minutes; but on Stage 2, the team time trial, his Reynolds team finished last and partly because a panicky Delgado tried too hard to make up lost time causing his team mates to implode and this cost him over four and half minutes. Given he lost the race by three minutes in Paris the was TTT more ruinous than the infamous prologue.
In 1978 there was a 153km stage from Evreux to Caen, sounds normal, but it was a team time trial. It took the winners over three and half hours. Speaking to Le Parisien, Jean-René Bernaudeau, long time boss of the TotalEnergies team, said “it was horrible thanks to the distance, 153km. Madness. The next day none of us could sit down“. Still the 100km team time trial was an Olympic discipline and so not unknown. If that sounds tortuous the 1927 Tour de France saw the format change where teams set off every quarter of an hour to complete the stage, effectively making that edition and the following year a set of team time trials.
In more modern times the team time trial has been a refuge for some squads. Because it is so technical and dependent on careful cooperation some teams have focussed on it as a way to win at the Tour de France and elsewhere when they’d otherwise be shut out – think Crédit Agricole beating ONCE and Festina in 2001, or more recently HTC, Greenedge and Garmin – whether because of endemic doping or just squashed by big budget teams. Today there’s no refuge for anyone.