Kévin Vauquelin was given a towel to put around his neck to keep warm at the finish line of a sodden stage 4 of Paris-Nice, but as soon as the Frenchman reached the Ineos Grenadiers team vehicle, he threw it to the ground in disgust.
Vauquelin, somehow, managed to soar to sixth place, rescuing a situation that looked to have left his race in tatters from the earliest phases of the stage. But his dogged comeback and his remarkable solo surge on the final climb perhaps only served to underline what might have been.
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Vauquelin looked increasingly desperate as he attacked repeatedly out of the chase group, which was still 50 seconds in arrears with 50km to race, which is when the race turned on its head again. A crash that took out race leader Juan Ayuso saw a seven-man group clip off containing Jonas Vingegaard, who’d go on to win the stage.
Ineos’ other main GC card, Oscar Onley, who had crashed earlier, was suddenly chasing too, and Ineos were giving him their resources, while Vauqeulin was still fighting to get back from behind. Onley was even powered away from his group by TT specialist Josh Tarling but even so, with around 15km to go, the Vauquelin group managed to come back to them, though they were still minutes down on the Vingegaard group.
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