Friday was a great day for American cycling, with Brandon McNulty taking the race lead of Paris-Nice after escaping with compatriot Matteo Jorgenson on a stage won by Mattias Skjelmose of the US Lidl-Trek team.
Jorgenson (Visma-Lease A Bike) started the attack on the seemingly innocuous Côte de la Colle-sur-Loup, leaping away from the group with race leader Luke Plapp Jayco-AIUIa) and favourites Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and Primož Roglič (Bora-Hansgrohe). McNulty (UAE Team Emirates) then bridged across with Skjelmose to Jorgenson and the trio gained nearly a minute by the line.
The Dane mostly sat on as he was further down in the overall standings, but McNulty found a willing ally in Jorgenson - a rider just one year younger and a former rival in the junior ranks.
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"Besides my teammates, one guy I work really well with in a break like this was Matteo - it was fun," McNulty said. "Just like in the juniors, we were doing the same stuff."
That 'stuff' was ripping the WorldTour race to shreds, bombing a descent to gain most of their gap as the rain began to fall. It was a tactic McNulty didn't expect to work.
"I knew there would be attacks on the circuit, but I didn't really expect to take yellow back. But it's far from over with two more days to go."
On paper, the stage looked like it should be one for the sprinters, with the five classified climbs ending inside 30km to go. But the peloton split on the category 3 Cote de la Blachette, leaving the fast men behind. It split even further before the Côte de la Colle-sur-Loup when Roglič attacked.
McNulty said the team knew the stage would be deceptively hard before it started.
"When I came to this race, I was thinking you have a few hard days and then two sprint days before the mountains - then we looked closer into it ... the finishing circuit is quite hard. So this morning, we expected teams to do something."
"Then the way the race played out for the break to go, it was pretty obvious that it would be an aggressive fight. In the end that's exactly what it was."
Already the Paris-Nice leader earlier this week for one day after the TTT, 25-year-old will head into a shortened stage 7 with 23 seconds on Jorgenson, 34 on Plapp, 54 on Skjelmose and 1:03 on Evenepoel - and confidence high after his win last month at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana. A raft of contenders are within two minutes - Egan Bernal at 1:14, McNulty's teammate at 1:30, and Roglič at 1:44.
"We're in a good position now but you can never get ahead of yourselves," McNulty said. "We have two hard days coming probably with bad weather and everything. So we'll take day by day but yeah, we'll go tomorrow as hard as we can.
"I expect chaos - shorter days are always like this. Probably a big fight for the break and then the climb is going to be full gas. I think we'll just have to ride well as a team and defend the jersey."
