Paris-Nice: Ineos Grenadiers win stage 3 team time trial while Juan Ayuso takes GC lead with second-placed Lidl-Trek finish

An impressive team performance brought Ineos Grenadiers victory on the stage 3 team time trial at Paris-Nice, beating Lidl-Trek by 2.5 seconds in Pouilly-sur-Loire on Tuesday. It was their first victory in the discipline they once dominated for five years.

British TT star Josh Tarling did the lion's share of the work, benefitting their new GC signings for 2026, Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley, with the Frenchman stopping the clock as their first rider across the line.

With each rider's individual time counting for their general classification standing, Vauquelin fell just short of taking the race leader's yellow jersey, which went to Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) thanks to the four bonus seconds he gained at an intermediate sprint on stage 2.

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In what was a key dress rehearsal for the opening stage of this year's Tour de France, which will kick off with a 19km TTT in Barcelona, the quickest time at the finish changed several times throughout the stage, with Visma-Lease a Bike, Decathlon CMA CGM and Lidl-Trek all setting benchmarks which looked tough to follow.

Visma would've been delighted at the line having well beaten UAE Team Emirates-XRG and put Jonas Vingegaard into a strong position, but deciding to go all in for their strongest TT rider brought Daan Hoole and Decathlon into the lead of the stage.

Ayuso helped power a brutally strong Lidl-Trek outfit around the 23.5km course, and he surged to the line solo to beat Decathlon by nine seconds, but more importantly, he was 13 seconds quicker than Vingegaard and beat his former team by 34 seconds.

"A nice test with the team to see where we are and try to make it work to our advantage. I think it shows that we did a lot of work in the winter," said Vauquelin after the victory.

"I think we can be very proud of what we have done, and the team can be proud too. It was good to have really strong riders around who are really good in the individual time trial.

"Yes, I would have loved to take the yellow jersey, of course, he got those four seconds yesterday, but we've got to be proud of ourselves, and there are going to be a lot of hard days coming up, with very bad weather as well."

How it unfolded

Picnic PostNL got racing started on stage 3 of Paris-Nice with the 22 squads battling out a 23.5km team time trial from Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire to Pouilly-sur-Loire on Tuesday afternoon.

In what is a key testing ground for the Tour de France, which will start this year with a TTT in Barcelona, there was an early look at some of the top GC outfits, UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma-Lease a Bike as the fifth and seventh starters.

Raced with the rules that will feature in July, each rider would get their own individual time for when they crossed the finish line, away from the old style where a team's clock would only be stopped when their fourth rider crossed the line.

After being relatively quiet for the GC favourites on the two opening sprint stages, the action on Tuesday was guaranteed to shake up the overall standings, with Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) starting as the best-placed climber, four seconds ahead of all his rivals.

The course started with a more technical section heading east out of Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, with corners and narrow roads forcing riders to be fully focused before emptying the tank fully en route to the finish.

Picnic stopped the clock with a time of 28:19, but they were quickly well beaten by Jayco AlUla, who extended what was a 28-second lead at the intermediate check in Saint-Laurent-l'Abbaye out to 41 seconds at the line.

They didn't hold the lead for long, however, with a solid Groupama-FDJ United team setting a time 20 seconds faster at the finish. But the real action was heating up behind both these teams, with UAE beating the Australian team's intermediate time by nine seconds, only for Visma to go three seconds faster.

UAE, as expected, arrived at the line with the clock still in the green, and they did take the lead from Groupama, but they only had two riders remaining for the final few kilometres: Brandon McNulty and Marc Soler.

The well-oiled machine that is Visma-Lease a Bike showed off their TTT prowess with a rapid performance, and Vingegaard was well-guided throughout the 23.5km to arrive alongside Davide Piganzola and Bruno Armirail, setting a time 21 seconds quicker than their rivals at the top of the leaderboard.

It certainly looked like a time that would take something special to challenge, and that came from Decathlon CMA CGM, who employed alternate tactics to use up six of their seven riders before the final run, at which point they let Dutch national ITT champion Daan Hoole move away on his own. Without a GC leader to protect, they were all in for the stage win, and Hoole stayed strong in the finale to beat the time set by Vingegaard by four seconds.

The challengers kept coming as racing entered its final phases on Tuesday, with Lidl-Trek beating their rapid intermediate time – which was seven seconds quicker than Visma's – by just less than two seconds.

After stellar work by Jakob Söderqvist and Mathias Vacek, Lidl-Trek's leader, Juan Ayuso, stormed to the line in the final kilometre to better the time set by Hoole and Decathlon by a further nine seconds.

The twists weren't over on the stage, however, as Ineos Grenadiers took over top spot at the intermediate time check by a huge 12 seconds, with Tarling putting on a ferocious effort for the British squad to try and beat Lidl-Trek.

As their orange jerseys entered the final kilometre, Tarling was almost dropping the British team's GC riders, Vauquelin and Onley, but the Frenchman got back to his teammate and put in a final effort to just beat Lidl-Trek's time by two seconds, though Ayuso had done enough to take over the race leader.

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