For an organization that used to ruthlessly calculate every marginal gain on the road, the modern INEOS Grenadiers setup often looks a little bit chaotic. Take Tuesday morning at Paris-Nice, for example. During their routine recon for the Stage 3 Team Time Trial, the squad managed to crash.
Oscar Onley described it in perfect corporate PR speak after the race, noting that the team “had a bit of a scare” and “found the limits this morning.”
Translation: they binned it in the corners before the clock had even started.
But whatever panic ensued in the INEOS team cars apparently worked. Over the 23.5-kilometer course to Pouilly-sur-Loire, the British squad put together a ride that actually resembled their former glory days, stopping the clock at 26 minutes and 40 seconds to take a razor-thin victory over Lidl-Trek.
The Tarling Effect
You can talk all you want about team cohesion and productive winter training camps—as Kevin Vauquelin dutifully did in his post-race interview—but the reality of this win comes down to the sheer wattage of Josh Tarling. The giant Brit delivered a monstrous pull on the run-in, effectively acting as a high-speed tractor beam to drag his remaining teammates toward the line.
INEOS blasted through the intermediate checkpoint with the fastest split of the afternoon, thanks to early grunt work from Dorian Godon, Michal Kwiatkowski, and Sam Watson. But as the kilometers ticked down, the formation started to disintegrate. They had planned to crest the final climb with four riders; they only had three. Carlos Rodriguez, still battered from a nasty crash on Sunday’s opening stage, put in a gritty defensive ride just to keep the pacing high before swinging off.
It was ultimately up to Vauquelin to empty the tank in the final meters, crossing the line alongside Onley to stop the clock. “I pushed full gas to make up every second,” Vauquelin admitted. “Which was good because it was only two seconds!”
Ayuso Sneaks into Yellow
While INEOS gets to pop the champagne and celebrate their first TTT win in a long time, the real strategic winner of the day might actually be Lidl-Trek.
Their incredibly close second-place finish—just two and a half seconds adrift—was exactly what Juan Ayuso needed. The result stripped the yellow jersey from the shoulders of EF Education-EasyPost’s Luke Lamperti and handed it directly to the young Spaniard.
Ayuso now sits in the overall lead, two seconds ahead of Vauquelin and three seconds ahead of Onley. But with the race heading into the hills, those narrow margins are basically irrelevant. As Onley noted, Paris-Nice isn’t just about pure climbing legs; the weather is inevitably going to turn horrific and the parcours is heavily back-loaded. The GC battle is only just beginning, but for an INEOS squad desperately trying to claw its way back to the top of the sport, surviving the morning recon to win a WorldTour TTT is a pretty good start.
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