Key Takeaways: Paris-Nice & Tirreno–Adriatico Final Weekend
Breaking down what a major upset at Paris-Nice & the reemergence of Visma stage racing dominance means for the rest of the season
The 2024 cycling season continued its march towards bigger and more significant races, like the upcoming bonanza this coming Saturday at Milan-Sanremo, this past weekend, with the Visma-Lease a Bike duo of Jonas Vingegaard and Matteo Jorgenson reminding everyone that their reign as sport’s premier stage racing team is still going strong by winning overall titles at Tirreno-Adriatico and Paris-Nice. While Vingegaard’s overall victory at Tirreno, even against talented rivals like Juan Ayuso and Jai Hindley, may have been easy to foresee due to his current status as the sport’s undisrupted GC rider, Jorgenson’s win at Paris-Nice over major stars like Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič was incredibly surprising and potentially portends the emergence of the ever-elusive new American superstar.
Catch up on the action from earlier in the races:
Paris-Nice Stages 1-3
Paris-Nice (Stages 4-6)
Tirreno-Adriatico (Stages 1-5)
Paris Nice
Stage 7
7km: At a rare and interesting mid-final climb bonus seconds sprint point, Soudal-QuickStep highlights the current kinks present in their stage-racing machine when Remco Evenepoel’s teammate Ilan van Wilder sprints ahead of his leader, presumably in an attempt to block Egan Bernal from taking the six-second bonus for first place. However, he doesn’t make it there and ends up just taking the four-second bonus from his teammate.
4.3km: Evenepoel attacks, needing to take over a minute back in the GC. Visma’s Matteo Jorgenson and race leader Brandon McNulty respond immediately, while the rest are slightly slower to move. Evenepoel eventually sits up as things come back together, which Bora’s Aleksandr Vlasov exploits by launching a well-time attack to get off the front and eventually use it to win the stage.
3.6km: Jorgenson’s advantage due to his Visma team quickly comes into focus when we see that after things re-group following Evenepoel’s attack, he is the only one with a teammate able to come to the front to set a high pace to deter further attacks, while everyone else is isolated.
1.8km: Evenepoel goes to the front and increases the pace again, but a group including Jorgenson, Roglič, and Skjelmose is able to stay with him, while McNulty finally shows signs of cracking after dropping a few seconds off the back.
Finish: After Jorgenson comes to the front to take a few pulls with Evenepoel, signaling he feels confident in his ability, Evenepoel sprints to the line to get the 6-second time bonus for second place on the stage, 8 seconds behind stage-winner Vlasov, and 19-seconds ahead of McNulty.
Stage Results:
1) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora-Hansgrohe) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +8
3) Primož Roglič (Lidl-Trek) +8
Stage 8
46.7km-43.7km-to-go: With McNulty leading the race by just four seconds, Evenepoel launches three straight attacks on the day’s hardest climb in an attempt to create one of his trademark long-range solo moves. However, with Lidl-Trek splitting the group on a wet descent earlier in the stage, he is isolated from his Soudal-QuickStep team, so he can’t rely on teammates to drive up the pace to increase the chances of a successful attack, and Jorgenson is quick to respond to every move.
43.6km: However, Evenepoel’s third move, while still marked by Jorgensen, is successful in shaking McNulty loose, with the race leader dangling helplessly just a few seconds back. Vlasov would soon join him, but after the Bora rider jumped across the gap to the leaders, it was essentially race over for McNulty, who, once stuck in the chase group with rivals for the overall podiums, was quickly losing time to the leaders.
22.5km: With the three-rider leader group having a 1’20 gap back to the McNulty group, the race is now just between Jorgenson and Evenepoel for the overall win, but when Jorgenson wins the bonus sprint without contest from Evenepoel, it is already clear that Evenepoel has all-but waived the white flag and is riding for the stage win.
12.6km-10.5km: Evenepoel pulls the group up the final climb, which is his last place to potentially launch an overall-winning move. His high, steady pace drops Vlasov, but with Jorgenson on such a high level, he can’t open a gap.
9km: When Evenepoel crests the final climb with Jorgenson on his wheel, the only thing standing between Jorgenson and the overall win is a crash on the final descent.
Finish: After showcasing incredible bike-handling skills, Jorgenson gets down the descent with no issues and rolls in, almost declining to contest the stage win, as Evenepoel celebrates the stage win (which is slightly strange since he failed to win the overall despite being the pre-race favorite).
Stage Results
1) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +0
2) Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-LAB) +0
3) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora-Hansgrohe) +50
Overall Top Ten
1) Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-LAB) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +30
3) Brandon McNulty (UAE) +1’47
4) Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) +2’22
5) Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora-Hansgrohe) +2’57
6) Luke Plapp (Jayco-Alula) 3’08
7) Egan Bernal (Ineos) 4’03
8) Wilco Kelderman (Visma-LAB) +4’04
9) Felix Gall (Decathlon-AG2R) +4’35
10) Primož Roglič (Bora-Hansgrohe) +5’33
Key Takeaways
Matteo Jorgenson: The 24-year-old American earned what is only his third, and by far the biggest, win of his career by toppling some of the sport’s biggest GC names in one of the most prestigious one-week races on the calendar, becoming the first American in nearly 20 years (Floyd Landis: 2006) to win the event. It goes without saying that this is a major accomplishment, and it shows that his off-season transfer to Visma from Movistar has already paid off, and that he has officially graduated from an interesting and almost freakishly versatile prospect to a true star-in-the-making.
The most impressive part of this victory is not only his ability to stand tall against repeated attacks from Remco Evenepoel, who can function as a one-rider wrecking ball whenever he decides to make a move but that he won this race despite losing time in the team time trial, which you would expect to have driven a Visma-LAB rider to overall victory.
For example, if we look at the evolution of Jorgenson’s time gap to Evenepoel as the race went along, his biggest loss (16 seconds) came in the team time trial. This means that if we just isolate the head-to-head stages, Jorgenson put a whopping 46 seconds into Evenepoel out on the road.
Evolution of Time Gap to Remco Evenepoel:
Stage 1: +2Stage 2: +2
Stage 3: -14
Stage 4: -22
Stage 5: -22
Stage 6: +40 [Race-winning move]
Stage 7: +32
Stage 8: +30
The cornerstone of his victory came during his bold attack late on Stage 6, when he surged clear of the peloton when Roglič and Evenepoel were looking at one another and finished 52 seconds ahead of Evenepoel.
Additionally, his aggressive front-foot racing, which saw him contesting multiple mid-stage time bonuses, saw him rack up nearly as many bonus seconds throughout the week (28) as Evenepoel (32), who is considered one of the sport’s elite time bonus poachers.
The big questions going forward will be what Jorgenson is capable of and what events he will choose to target. After all, his combination of Classics and Stage Racing talent is extremely unique and signals that he could become one of the rare Americans to challenge in the one-day Monuments.
After all, considering Jorgenson told me after winning Paris-Nice that he is on much better form since joining Visma due to the team’s science (and logic)-based training processes and that finished 4th at E3 and 9th at the Tour of Flanders in 2023, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that he could challenge for the win at a major Cobbled Classic in 2024.
Concerning his potential as a three-week GC prospect, it is also important to keep in mind that in the same conversation, Jorgenson said he wouldn’t have done as well at Paris-Nice had his team put pre-race pressure on him, which suggests he may not have designated Grand Tour leadership in his future.
While US media will certainly want to push this Grand Tour GC narrative, the lifestyle of a one-week and one-day racer can be far easier than that of a tall, three-week prospect due to the immense toll of keeping their bodies at an unsustainable weight. For evidence, look how short and personally miserable the time frame of Grand Tour dominance was for riders like Tom Dumoulin and Bradley Wiggins.
Remco Evenepoel: A 24-year-old finishing second at Paris-Nice and winning the final stage is certainly nothing to scoff at, but when the dust settled at the end of the race on Sunday, it was immediately apparent that both Evenepoel and Soudal-QuickStep have a long way to go before they can be considered a true Tour de France force.
Despite his obvious talent in hilly one-day racing, Evenepoel’s stage-racing resume, with a single win in the sport’s three Grand Tours and seven biggest one-week races, tells us that his ‘wind it up and launch a solo attack to the finish line’ approach in one-day races isn’t fully translating to stage races.
In fact, at times during Paris-Nice, Evenepoel, and Soudal-QuickStep almost appeared to forget that they were in the midst of a stage race and that they needed to take responsibility for strong riders, like Jorgenson, riding up the road to avoid paying the price of lost time at the end of the week.
After all, Evenepoel’s GC loss here can be pinpointed to his Soudal-QuickStep team leaving him isolated toward the end of Stage 6 and his failure to recognize that Skjelmose, McNulty, and Jorgenson riding clear didn’t merit an immediate bridge attempt.
This lack of a truly cohesive team-wide strategy has been an issue at Soudal-QuickStep in stage races in the past, suggesting they still haven’t fully made the transition from one-day to multi-day teams.
But, perhaps the biggest concern Evenepoel should have after the week is that he could not definitively distance Jorgenson, who not only won’t be leading Visma at the Tour, but won’t even be their final mountain domestique.
Brandon McNulty & UAE: The 25-year-old American may have lost the overall lead on the final stage, but considering he held on for a massive third place overall, which marked his first time finishing on the podium of a WorldTour-level stage race, through a difficult final two stages where he was clearly just hanging on, this was still a successful outing for McNulty.
For American cycling, McNulty’s third place overall was significant since it marked the first time two American riders finished on the Paris-Nice podium. It shows that despite the lack of raw numbers, the quality and depth of US talent at the sport's top level are higher than ever.
Also, finishing first amongst his UAE team, which, at least in theory, boasted a strong start list at the start of the race, is massive for his future prospects of leading the team at stage races.
However, for UAE, this isn’t quite as possible since this is the second time in just a few weeks that they have seen a stacked team, with riders like João Almeida, Jay Vine, and Finn Fisher-Black, completely collapse over the course of a week after posting strong time trial results that bunched them at the top of the GC standings.
Primož Roglič & Bora-Hansgrohe: While everyone was excited to see how the 2022 Paris-Nice winner would perform with his new Red Bull-aligned team, Roglič laid a massive egg at a race that suited him perfectly on paper. This means that even though his team salvaged the week with Aleksandr Vlasov scoring a key stage win, pressure will begin to rachet up on the Roglič/Bora pairing, especially since the race was won by his former team with a rider they acquired partly to replace the veteran Slovenian.
Much will be speculated about Roglič’s underperformance at this race, especially since it is his worst performance in a one-week race where he didn’t crash since the early years of his career, but it is important to remember that in 2024, everything appears to be about the Tour de France Roglič, and that he intends to sacrifice form at some of these early races he has dominated in the past to ensure he is at his best in July.
This is a major departure for Roglič compared to years past, but at 34, his years as a top-tier GC contender are quickly running out, and it's now or never for him to complete his set of Grand Tour wins.
Tirreno–Adriatico
Stage 6
6.6km: Sitting in second place 1’20 behind Jonas Vingegaard, Bora’s Jai Hindley makes an admirable attempt to take the race to the leader by attacking off a high pace created by his Bora team.
6.2km: However, after not being dropped, Vingegaard unleashes a vicious counter, almost as though he is aggrieved by the attack attempt.
6.1km: Juan Ayuso and Hindley stay close for a moment, but Vingegaard gradually floats clear en route to a second-consecutive stage win.
Chase Group Finish: Ayuso and Hindley put in good performances to ride in for second and third place 26 seconds behind Vingegaard. Impressively, Ayuso’s young teammate, Isaac del Toro, finishes just 10 seconds later, after sitting on the Tom Pidcock-led third group with Thymen Arensman, Ben O’Connor, and Cian Uijtdebroeks.
Stage Results
1) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-LAB) +0
2) Juan Ayuso (UAE) +26
3) Jai Hindley (Bora) +26
Stage 7
Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan won the somewhat oddly-placed final day sprint stage ahead of Alexander Kristoff and Davide Cimolai with an impressive display of pure power. Considering it was the massive Italian’s second stage win of the race, it will spark plenty of speculation regarding his prospects of winning Saturday’s Milan-Sanremo and racking up multiple Giro d’Italia stage wins, especially now that he is a team capable of delivering him to the final few hundred meters with a clear run to the finish line.
Results
1) Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) +0
2) Alexander Kristoff (Uno-X) +0
3) Davide Cimolai (Movistar) +0
Overall Top Five:
1) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-LAB) +0
2) Juan Ayuso (UAE) +1’24
3) Jai Hindley (Bora) +1’52
4) Isaac del Toro +2’20
5) Ben O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R) +2’24
Key Takeaways
Jonas Vingegaard & Visma: At this point, with Vingegaard winning his second stage race of 2024 by over a minute, despite only having two stages to build up a time buffer, there isn’t much left to say about the stage-racing dominance of Vingegaard and his Visma team.
Considering that he is already on better form than at this point in 2023, when he went on to handily win his second straight Tour de France, anyone with ambitions of challenging him and Visma will have to be prepared to best a historically great talent.
Perhaps the most impressive part of Vingegaard’s recent wins is his willingness and ability to pile on his competition when he already has the race locked up. This speaks to his mettle as a competitor and that he is one of the rare GC riders who possess an almost myopic obsession with the mechanics of gaining time on their rivals.
Unfortunately, for those who may hold out hope that Vingegaard has come into 2024 too hot, in our post-Paris-Nice chat, Visma rarely miscalculates the training and fitness plans for its top GC talents. This is likely due to their training regimes coming from a highly scientific team of trainers who closely monitor their riders' fatigue and recovery.
The Rest: Vingegaard may have handily dusted them, but Juan Ayuso, Jai Hindley, Isaac del Toro, and Ben O’Connor all looked impressive throughout the week.
In particular, the 21-year-old Juan Ayuso, who won the flat time trial and was the best of the rest on the climbs, has appeared to progress from his first two pro seasons and appears poised to be UAE’s second GC option behind Tadej Pogačar.
Additionally, the 20-year-old Del Toro, who rode to 4th place in the GC in his first pro season despite clearly suffering from positioning and tactical errors, was somewhat stunning, further demonstrating his massive potential.
In contrast, Visma-LAB’s 21-year-old wunderkind, Cian Uijtdebroeks, who came over from Bora in a high-profile divorce in the off-season, appeared outclassed by Del Toro and Ayuso.
While I wouldn’t normally comment on the perceived underperformance of a 21-year-old, the fact that he forced his way off Bora due to the fact that he felt he wasn’t given leadership and felt he couldn’t progress in the way he wanted to at his former team, means his performances will be under a microscope, especially when it isn’t clear he will be on the level to command GC leadership for Visma.
Nice write up. It did seem that McNulty was left on his own on the last few climbs in the last few stages. He performed well given that he should of had more mountain domestique help.
Not sure Vine, Fisher-Black and Almeida earned an honest paycheck the last two stages?