{"id":19292,"date":"2023-03-13T11:12:25","date_gmt":"2023-03-13T11:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/13\/the-moment-paris-nice-was-won\/"},"modified":"2023-03-13T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T11:12:25","slug":"the-moment-paris-nice-was-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/13\/the-moment-paris-nice-was-won\/","title":{"rendered":"the moment paris-nice was won"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The winning moment? It\u2019s tempting to say when Poga\u010dar made the belated announcement he was going to start the race. However it wasn\u2019t so simple. Jumbo-Visma brought a strong team, Jonas Vingegaard had been winning plenty and the race started with the promise of a duel, a revenge match even. Only the contest would prove one-sided and Stage 4\u2019s summit finish at the Camp des Loges saw Poga\u010dar win ahead of David Gaudu while Jonas Vingegaard was further back, a hierarchy that would only become further entrenched.<\/p>\n

Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/p>\n

Things got off to a lively start with Poga\u010dar attacking twice in the finale of the opening stage, his appetite for time bonuses meant even the six second offering close to the finish, a petit four <\/em>of a time bonus, tempted him.<\/p>\n

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Many saw Jonas Vingegaard as the likely winner because his Jumbo-Visma team would ace the team time trial, put him in yellow with a good cushion of time and then he could defend. Yet come Tuesday\u2019s TTT stage, the Dutch team duly won but only took 23 seconds on fifth-placed UAE Emirates. Symbolically Tadej Poga\u010dar finished alone while Jumbo could have finished with the regulation four riders together. Yet by this point Poga\u010dar had taken 12 seconds in time bonuses from the first two stages so Vingegaard was only 11 seconds up on the overall classification, no cushion. This was a relative win for Poga\u010dar who kept his rival in range, plus Jumbo-Visma\u2019s win came with its own opportunity cost, having selected heavier riders for this stage it meant fewer climbers to help in the mountains to come.<\/p>\n

The rule change whereby teams started together but were given their own time when they crossed the line gave us plenty to talk about on a Tuesday and probably beyond as it\u2019s likely to feature more often. Visually it lets spectators see the tactics at work far more than any long turns from strong riders, it\u2019s possibly more egalitarian as a team able to afford seven or eight millionaires who can time trial and offer mountain support isn\u2019t advantaged as much any more compared to a squad that has fewer of these valuable \u201cSwiss army knives\u201d; the team\u2019s performance is marginally more dependent on its strongest rider rather than its fourth best.<\/p>\n

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If those 11 seconds looked insufficient for Vingegaard, it proved so at the Loge des Gardes summit finish. Surprisingly Vingegaard attacked one third of the way up the climb. Poga\u010dar responded and the two seemed to be on a different level but they marked each other and the others were able to ride back. This allowed David Gaudu to counter. When Poga\u010dar had to go again to fetch Gaudu \u2013 who was riding high on GC thanks his team\u2019s solid fourth place in the team time trial \u2013 Vingegaard started to flounder once the road kicked up in the final kilometre and he\u2019d finish the day 44 seconds down on GC.<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s stage was cancelled by Storm Larisa, it wasn\u2019t just risky to race in, the roads were blocked in places. A bike race might feel terribly important but local government officials deploying crews to reopen roads probably have other priorities.<\/p>\n

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Saturday\u2019s summit finish stage to the Col de la Couillole revealed the precise hierarchy of the race with Poga\u010dar winning, Gaudu able to follow him while Vingegaard was better than the rest but having to react to what Poga\u010dar did. Tobias Foss did a huge amount of work, did this keep a lid on the attacks so that his leader wasn\u2019t destabilised or did it suit Poga\u010dar and Gaudu even more? Either way the stage prised open the time gaps further.<\/p>\n

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Sunday\u2019s final stage has often seen the race turned upside down and when this hasn\u2019t happened, it almost did. Only this time there was Hitchcock drama, it was a much more stable stage. Poga\u010dar and his entourage were saying that because he lives in Monaco he really wanted to win on his nearby training roads in Nice, presumably his backers should be thinking of buying him holiday homes in, say, Oudenaarde and Courchevel<\/a> as well. For once there no attacks on the climb to Peille because Tim Wellens, once the eternal attacker, is now a tow truck for UAE. The total lack of peripeteia was so evident that we had the four leading riders overall in the same respective positions on the Chemin Du Vinaigrier. At the finish the only position in the top-10 that changed was Jack Haig finishing tenth and while that\u2019s solid for him, it was because Pierre Latour\u2019s slipped to 14th place after losing ground mid-stage because of his persistent descending problems.<\/p>\n

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There was more than the overall classification. Jonas Gregaard did a great job to take the mountains jersey, attacking and taking points on every day he could except Satuday\u2019s Stage 7. The sprints saw a mix, Tim Merlier won the opening stage to add some kindling to the heated topic of which sprinter Quickstep will take to the Tour de France; Mads Pedersen won the next day and his form is impressive ahead of the classics. Olav Kooij landed his biggest win so far and if Jumbo-Visma lost out on GC they\u2019ll find plenty of satisfaction in his win and the team time trial, they lost to Poga\u010dar but came out well ahead of most other teams.<\/p>\n

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The Verdict<\/strong>
We got the duel between Tadej Poga\u010dar and Jonas Vingegaard. Only if you scored each stage, Poga\u010dar got the advantage on six of them, it probably would have been seven if the weather hadn\u2019t cancelled one of the stages. We should mention the weather because the wind was all wrong, it didn\u2019t blow enough to turn the sprints stages into spring classics; and when it did blow we got a see breeze, as in you could see trees being bent backwards like wooden limbo dancers. Paris-Nice is often one of the best races of the season, a regular highlight of the year and the weather is a factor behind the action, Mother Nature didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n

The other factor is the finely balanced racing and this time there was no surprise, Poga\u010dar\u2019s strong performance in the team time trial and the first summit finish set the tone and he was voracious, extending his lead before taking a solo win in the yellow jersey. If this is his relaxed start to the season where he\u2019s yet to go to altitude for training then he\u2019s winning the mind games as well as the trophies.<\/p>\n

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For Vingegaard, it\u2019s not the first time he\u2019s finished second a week-long stage race in March to Tadej Poga\u010dar given that\u2019s exactly what happened last year\u2019s Tirreno-Adriatico. The difference then is that he was Rogli\u010d\u2019s understudy and today he\u2019s the Tour champ. All the same, extrapolating his form from March to July is perilous. The challenge for Vingegaard, and everyone else, is Poga\u010dar\u2019s sprint, he can do it on the flat for time bonuses and when he goes at the top of a mountain pass he can not only win the stage, take the time bonus but also open up a gap of a few seconds. As we saw this week UAE are looking stronger and more cohesive and they didn\u2019t bring their Tour team for a dress rehearsal either.<\/p>\n

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David Gaudu provided the plot twist in the week, almost matching Poga\u010dar in the two big summit finishes and even out-sprinting him for one of the intermediate time bonuses although he never looked likely to overturn the race. He\u2019s 40-1 to 20-1 with the bookmakers for the Tour de France but that only implies the market thinks you\u2019d have to run this summer\u2019s Tour de France 20 times for him to win. He was fourth last July, but 13 minutes down. This week he showed more consistency \u2013 he\u2019s been DNF in Paris-Nice twice before \u2013 but there were only two summit finishes and when Poga\u010dar jumped on Sunday, Gaudu said he didn\u2019t have the legs to follow but he\u2019s much closer now. Arnaud D\u00e9mare is still riding the Tour de France but Gaudu\u2019s request for support will be ever-more tempting.<\/p>\n

Finally this might be one of the last editions of Paris-Nice that runs at the same time as Tirreno-Adriatico with calendar reform looming for 2026, something that would change the feel of both races. The Italian race was born in part because Italians wanted a stage race as preparation ahead of Milan-Sanremo, something the French enjoyed with Paris-Nice. So while we wonder about what happens between now and July, Sanremo is much closer, literally 50km along the coast from Nice. Many eyes are rightly on Poga\u010dar and Vingegaard but quietly the likes of Arnaud De Lie, Mads Pedersen, S\u00f8ren Kragh Andersen, Fred Wright, Nils Politt and more have been putting the finishing touch on their preparation for Sanremo and beyond, just as Wout van Aert, Julian Alaphilippe, Jasper Philpsen and others have been doing in Italy. And of course Poga\u010dar<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The winning moment? It\u2019s tempting to say when Poga\u010dar made the belated announcement he was going to start the race. However it wasn\u2019t so simple. Jumbo-Visma brought a strong team, Jonas Vingegaard had been winning plenty and the race started with the promise of a duel, a revenge match even. Only the contest would prove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6804],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sports.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}