Professional cycling can be intriguing mix of power, tactics and opportunities. All too often, though, it comes down to who is the strongest, either as an individual or as a team. Occasionally, however, even the biggest of favourites don’t quite get things right, and the race slips out of their fingers. There can be a number of reasons for that and the 82nd edition of Paris-Nice has shown quite a selection of them from riders we might have suspected to be above that kind of thing.
Before the start, everyone expected Primož Roglič to play his part and he did, just not in the category we were led to believe from previous years. Despite it being the first race of his 2024 campaign, everyone was convinced he would be ready to lead his new team Bora-Hansgrohe to a victory or, at the very least, a podium place. Winner two years ago and dominant in 2021 until a crash on the final stage saw him drop to 15th, Roglič knows how to ride the race.
March has always been one of his best months, because if he’s not bossing it in France, then he’s over at Tirreno-Adriatico winning there instead. On top of that, he needed a confidence-building result, not just for his own sake after leaving Jumbo-Visma, but also for a team that has invested in him as their Tour de France leader. Everything pointed to the Slovenian arriving in Paris ready for action.
The first stage saw him attentive enough, but lacking a bit of his usual power when he couldn’t immediately respond to accelerations from the likes of Egan Bernal and Remco Evenepoel. He was able to close down any gaps before they got really serious, so it looked like he was going to ride himself into that last bit of form as the week progressed and he might well have done if it had stayed reasonably dry. It didn’t, though, and disastrous choices in the pacing strategy during the team time trial on stage 3 put paid to any idea that he still might be the man to beat.
Roglič knows it’s a discipline where the strongest rider has to be careful to manage his teammates on the hardest sections, and the directors in the car know it’s their job to control the situation, so how did Bora find themselves with just two riders left with the team leader with more than half the course remaining? Was it Roglič’s reluctance to slow down because he was so used to the Visma speed or was it a lack of insight into the second half of the route?
I’m sure the pre-race briefing didn’t include the fiasco of losing their big…
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