Heading into Tuesday's team time trial, Visma-Lease a Bike, Lidl-Trek, Soudal-Quickstep and Ineos Grenadiers seemed to have the highest chances of leading Paris-Nice at the end of stage 3. Instead, UAE Team Emirates powered to a somewhat unexpected stage win, with American Brandon McNulty taking the yellow jersey of race leader.
UAE Team Emirates won the stage by 15 seconds over second-placed Jayco-AlUla, with EF Education-EasyPost slotting in third. Remco Evenepoel's Soudal-Quickstep team were fourth at 22 seconds, much to the Belgian's dismay, while Ineos and Visma were just behind.
McNulty and teammates Finn Fisher-Black, João Almeida and Jay Vine are now tied on time at the top of the general classification.
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"We're super happy to win the stage and then I wasn't expecting to be in the jersey at all so it's special," McNulty said before describing why the course was so unpredictable.
"It was a really a really heavy start. The roads were not super fast feeling with a lot of up and down and then [it was] super fast in the second half. You never really got a recovery because you had to either be climbing or keep the speed up. So it was really tough, but I think we rode perfectly."
Paris-Nice organisers were granted flexibility last year to change up the timing formula, so rather than take the team's time by the fourth rider to finish, the time was taken by the first rider. That led teams like Quickstep to finish with just two riders together.
UAE Team Emirates and Ineos were the only teams to finish with more than three riders, and both had a fifth rider until just before the finish.
"I think we would have liked to have maybe one or two more on the fast section back, but in the end, you've got to use your guys where you can. I think five was still enough on the fast section back. We won so we planned it right."
McNulty heads into the increasingly hilly second half of the race in the leader's jersey but hedged his bets on holding it til the finish in Nice.
"Obviously we have João here as our main leader and then we have quite a few good climbers," he said. "I don't know really how I'm going at the moment because I was a bit sick after the UAE [Tour] last week. So it's really a bit unknown, but we will see tomorrow."
Paris-Nice has its first summit finish on stage 4 at the end of a 183km stage from Chalon-sur-Saône to Mont Brouilly, a stage that has seven classified climbs. For more details on the route, see the 2024 Paris-Nice route page.
