Gray seagulls like the gray sky announce a near and gray sea next to Marseille. Provence in March. Cold. Silent crickets, flooded their shelters. Rain and the squad of the Paris-Nice, unfortunate without Jonas Vingegaard, who has gone home with his family. “Two falls without gravity,” read the medical part of the eve. One of the two falls was that of the leader, which rises 100 kilometers from the finish line with the lip, dizziness and pain in the fans, unable. The doctors attend to him from his cabriolet but despite his symptoms they do not order him to stop as the anti -collection protocol points out. Cabazota continues. Nor can he stop well, his doll hurts, without force his fingers.
Vingegaard, at home, hopes that the body will recover from the fall, that everything returns to its place, that the wrist deflate and stop hurting again. In its program is the Volta to Catalunya (March 24 to 30) as the next race. From the office of his visma, a message: “Hopefully it is in Catalonia, but to see how it recovers the next few days.” The road to the Tour is again tortuous for the only cyclist who has tried from you to Tadej Pogacar and has defeated him.
Vingegaard’s visma on the road, the sunny price of tourist posters turned into a province of the Netherlands, allied with the Northeast wind pull That all year will be discussed for glory and joy of the yellow and ineos team, which also placed six runners in the group of 16 that danced with the wind, and in which they were also, well placed for the general, Mattias Skjelmose and Florian Lipowitz; and for pain and escarnio of Pablo Castrillo, Raúl García leg or Joao Almeida, who lost 2m, or Iván Romeo and Lenny Martínez (9m).
The stage, which many would not hesitate to qualify as Dantesque, as said before, won Mads Pedersen, the man who loves the rain and flies on the puddles, very powerful to the sprint in Berre l’étang as when he won in 2019, in Harrogate, the most aquatic rainbow that is remembered. Matteo Jorgenson arrives leader –40s to Skjelmose, 59s to Lipowitz and 3m 44s to Castrillo, first Spanish – to a cut weekend. The stage of Saturday, the queen through the mountains of Nice, erases 40 kilometers and the ascent to the hardest port of the race, the Colmiane, because the snow and the cold make its descent dangerous.
The arrival at the Antonio Gramsci road in the proud pergola of the pontifical states, the golden bronzes and the 100 churches, called the revolution in the stage of the walls of the brands, which should be the most entertaining of a dital marathon tyrrhen. Deaf ears of a frozen platoon that is only excited, the tireless youth ardor of Juan Ayuso, always in the head, and how his shines his Maglia Bianca, On the last climb, the Monterolo Wall, 7.5 kilometers from the finish line. Ayuso accelerated in the last meters to launch in the descent, and his Filippo Ganna wheel, the blue giant in Red Pinarello, which every day at the end looks sideways at Mathieu van der Poel and rehearses a different end for his planned Milan-San Remo. The descent of the Monterolo was the descent of a fast Poggio and a vigilant and fearful stop at the foot, two kilometers from the goal, which allows the last of the escapees of the day, the 27 -year -old Norwegian worker Fredrik Dversnes, to reach an unexpected and happy victory. Gramsci would surely have loved a victory of the bearded Ganna or the Fantasy Van der Poel. The Italian has apology, his bicycle broke down in the absence of a few kilometers. “I have worked hard in winter to reach this level and I hope to maintain this condition at least one more week,” explained the giant that all Italy wants. “My main objective in Adriatic Tyrene was to win the counterreloj and try to do it well in stages three and four. After yesterday I called Geraint Thomas and said: ‘With this condition you have to try to endure today’ and that is what I did. In the end the mechanical problem left me out of play. With luck I managed to stay in the squad to kilometer except three before asking for mechanical assistance. ”
The Dutch simply miscalculated the times on an arrival that was drawn thinking about him. He won the Sprint for second place ahead of Roger Adrià, the Catalan of the Red Bull that has been a radiant March.
More complicated will have Ganna maintain the lead on Saturday in the queen, cold, snow and the unpublished mountain of Frontignano (eight kilometers to 7.8%), a culminating point of the career of the two seas. Ayuso (22s), Antonio Tiberi (29s) and Derek Gee (34s) are the most concrete threat. More diffuse, but also there, David de la Cruz and Pello Bilbao (54s), Ion Izagirre (57s) and Mikel Landa (1m 2s). “I knew that the final descent was treacherous, that’s why I was in the front group. It has been a very difficult stage, also for the wind, but I already have my eye on Saturday. I hope to achieve the Maglia Azzurra, That is my goal. ”
After 840 kilometers and more than 21 hours of bicycle against cold and rain and incredible roads of abruptions and marks, all the differences between the best are those recorded in the 11.5 of the counterreloj in a Tuscan sea walk.
