Lotto Intermarché have been the breakaway team of the Tour de France so far this year, with Baptiste Veistroffer's efforts up the road earning him a new fan club, but Liam Slock came heartbreakingly close to taking it even further on stage 8.
Giving Veistroffer a day off, Slock was one of the very first riders to attack on the road out of Périgueux, soon joined by Jakub Otruba (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) and Thibault Guernalec (TotalEnergies) in what would be the three-man break of the day.
They stayed ahead for most of the day, but on the final categorised climb, some 40km from the finish, Slock attacked in search of mountains points, and then kept going, seeming stronger on his own than he had been with his breakaway companions. He held a gap of 1:20 all the way into the final 20km and sparked hope that he might stay away.
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But once the sprint teams finally woke up and ramped into action, it looked like the Belgian's days were numbered, and indeed his solid gap very quickly dwindled, and he was swept up by the speeding peloton of sprinters just 1,300m from the finish line.
"Now I am for sure disappointed," he told Eurosport at the finish after Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) won the stage.
"That's the feeling that I feel now. If you are so close, you want to win, of course. It still was a long way but it was quite close I think."
It was a rollercoaster day for Lotto Intermarché, going from initially lamenting that only three riders went away, then seeing the gap hold and spending a good 20km believing that Slock might be able to do it.
"It's always a pity when you start the breakaway with three riders; you know it's going to be difficult. But then the advantage stayed 1:50, 1:45 and I thought 'OK, if they make it with three over the top [of the final climb] they're going to have a hard time in the bunch, or they're going to have to really ride fast," DS Mario Aerts explained to Cyclingnews at the finish.
"But then when Otruba started to attack on the climb I thought 'OK, now it's going to be difficult because they'll lose a lot of energy there'. But then Liam did an incredibly fast ride from 30 to 10km, and the bunch almost gained nothing. Then we started to believe in it; still, you know that the bunch is going really fast in the end, but I think a lot of people had to work to get it back in the bunch. It's always a pity that it's so close."
Slock was caught very close to the line, just outside the flamme rouge, slowing up once he realised his day was over rather than pushing to the very last, but he said he knew he wasn't going to make it some time before that.
"[I stopped believing] on the big road between 10 to six kilometres I think," he said.
"From there I felt like they were coming closer a lot, it was a little bit uphill, and I knew that there the pace would be really high in the peloton so I was feeling there that they were coming closer and I was losing time. And the power in the legs was going a bit away."
Despite a fine effort, Slock was mainly downbeat immediately after the finish, struggling to see the positives in what had been an undeniably strong day out on the bike.
"For the moment, not really proud, but that will come tonight I think," he said.
Slock made headlines earlier this year when he took his first pro win in dramatic fashion, crashing across the line in the GP Gippingen. And although he managed to stay upright this time and show his strength and form once more, a second professional victory wasn't quite to be in Bergerac.
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