The Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes GC contenders face their first major challenge of the overall battle this afternoon in the stage 3 team time trial, but for leading favourite Paul Seixas, it will be an even more crucial test.
As Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad pointed out on Tuesday, this is the first time the 19-year-old has raced a full-scale team time trial as a pro. Only his participation in the World Championships in Rwanda mixed relay event, where the French sextet took silver, could be seen as a very partial precedent at this level.
With Seixas building towards his first-ever Tour de France, which opens with a team time trial in Barcelona on Saturday, July 4, the 28.4-kilometre TTT in Auvergne will act as his only in-race dress rehearsal for the Tour's equivalent stage.
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This afternoon's rolling trek across the country lanes surrounding the town of Perreux is widely seen as an excellent opportunity for Tour teams to practice their TTT 'automatisms' – although some stars like Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) have preferred to prioritise other questions, like altitude camps or recons and have skipped the Tour Auvergne this year.
For Seixas, though, the absence of previous TTT reference points in a race scenario makes this chance a very important one, Decathlon CMA CGM sports director Luke Rowe told Het Nieuwsblad. Plus, of course, this is a crunch moment for trying to win the Tour Auvergne, which Seixas has already stated is a major goal.
“It [doing a TTT] is something you can only learn in a race,” Rowe said. “You can practice, train, and scout as much as you want, even on closed circuits if necessary, but it can never be compared to a race itself. Simply because of the speed.
"In modern cycling, you have to flirt with the limit at which your legs explode right from the start. You have to constantly feel that things could go wrong at any moment. You can’t replicate that in training.
"There, you might feel like the team time trial is going quite smoothly. If you have that feeling in a race, it simply means it’s not going fast enough. It simply isn’t allowed to go smoothly."
On top of that, in a TTT, the old cliché about how you can't win a race but you can definitely lose it applies in full, either because it means losing time or crashing out altogether. That's something that can only be experienced in a race scenario, Rowe said, and "Paul needs to master that feeling, that realisation."
Even before he's turned a single pedal stroke in this afternoon's TTT, though, Seixas will already be able to appreciate how nothing can be taken for granted in such stages. His teammate Matthew Riccitello, supposed to be the seventh member of the line-up for this Tuesday, had to quit Auvergne on Saturday because of illness, something which will already have caused a reworking of Decathlon's TTT strategy.
After losing one seventh of their team's collective resources for this afternoon, it remains to be seen if any of the bad luck that can wreck a team's TTT through no fault of their own – a puncture, a mechanical at the wrong moment – also affects the French 'home' team, riding close to the squad's service course in Grenoble.
That extra tension is what makes TTTs so nerve-wracking an event, too, with all the riders expected to perform at maximum intensity no matter what their individual contribution might be.
Physically and technically the team are in no doubt that Seixas is up to the TT task he faces, given he's not only performed exceptionally well in pro time trials to date: witness his knock-out victory in the Itzulia Basque Country's rugged semi-urban TT in April, for example, or his near-miss against Filippo Ganna (Netcompany Ineos) and Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) – also present in France this week – in the Volta ao Algarve's equivalent event in February.
On top of that, Decathlon have already practised team time trials on closed circuits and will do more test runs outside races before the Tour.
But as Seixas will discover for himself when Decathlon roll down the start ramp in Perreux this afternoon at 16:05 CET, 24 minutes before the final team of EF Education-EasyPost with current GC leader Alex Baudin, it's the race action itself that will make all the difference to how he handles today's dress rehearsal for July.
Not to mention the fact that Tuesday's TTT forms a key component for trying to win the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, with all the extra pressure, expectations and motivation for a home side like Decathlon and local racer like Seixas, that extra element will surely bring, too.
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