If the Tour de France Femmes' race up Mont Ventoux on Friday saw Marlen Reusser slip out of the race lead, then a far shorter climb the next day may well have put paid to her chances of taking the yellow jersey altogether.
It all went down on a climb unnoticed in the race roadbook – a 450-metre wall hidden away after the last climb of the day, the 4.4% gradients of the Côte de la Ginestière.
It was on the 13% slopes of the Chemin de l'Arieta, overlooking Nice to the west and 5.8km from the finish, where Reusser was left behind. Up front, Demi Vollering launched her bid for glory, taking race leader Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney and fourth-placed Elisa Longo Borghini with her, before punching out alone to become the race's third leader in as many days.
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Reusser crossed the line among a group 38 seconds off Vollering, and while she may still have been harbouring dreams of overall victory after Ventoux, those are now surely gone.
"I think it's a two-and-a-half-minute effort or something, which at these gradients is pretty crazy," Reusser's Movistar directeur sportif Kelvin Dekker told Cyclingnews after the finish.
"FDJ did really well before – they were so explosive – so positioning at the bottom of the whole climb wasn't great. Marlen had to do quite an effort to get in position, take the downhill, and then go up again.
"I think she started already pretty much on the limit, but I think she maximised it pretty much. I don't expect her to be with the front three on this kind of thing."
The Movistar strategy was to keep in touch over the top of the wall, or at least hope that Vollering and Niewiadoma-Phinney would still be together so that the Swiss racer could benefit from any cat-and-mouse games on the run-in.
Unfortunately for them, that wasn't to be.
"I think it's more and more difficult to win the Tour," Dekker said of Reusser's chances at regaining yellow.
"We were hoping to be a bit close at the top. I don't think we were too far at the top, but that they were together and there would be moments of hesitation and we would come back from the back.
"We didn't look at today as an opportunity to really gain time, but we did know an opportunity might open up. But when Demi dropped Kasia, for sure that opportunity was over, and then it was just limiting time losses for the podium.
"We were expecting this kind of racing, but we were hoping, and maybe expecting, that Demi would not be able to drop Kasia."
Sunday's final stage, taking in four ascents of the Col d'Eze, provides one last chance for a GC shakeup. Niewiadoma-Phinney, now eight seconds down on Vollering, will surely risk it all to beat the Dutchwoman to the title, as she did two years ago.
Reusser, meanwhile, lies 1:12 adrift of yellow, though her cushion to Longo Borghini remains 1:07 after losing 27 seconds to the Italian champion. Movistar, then, may be looking backwards on the defensive rather than forwards on Sunday.
"We're mainly going to try and consolidate this, and then we'll see tomorrow," Dekker said. "I think tomorrow is a nice stage. It's not crazy steep until the last lap, where it gets a bit steeper for a while.
"It's going to be super hard if you have a bad day and feel you're done. You can lose a lot of time. So, we take it very seriously; we're close [to the end], but we're still quite far away from it, so we'll see."
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