Paris-Nice: Matthews remains in control after snow forces stage 3 cancellation

Michael Matthews (Orica-GreenEdge) retained his small lead at Paris-Nice after snow resulted in the cancellation of stage 3 to Mont Brouilly. When the peloton hit the snowy conditions in the feedzone, the organisers chose to neutralise racing and eventually cancel it altogether. While the sprint and mountains points will count, the times will not be taken into account.

With the summit finish on Mont Brouilly, it was supposed to be a day for the general classification but they will have to wait for another couple of days before they can try to put time into their rivals.

One rider that wasn’t on the start line was Philippe Gilbert (BMC), who abandoned overnight due to a respiratory illness. The racing started under wet conditions but with seven climbs to come there was plenty of action from the off. A big group of 14 riders broke away inside the opening five kilometres. They were soon joined by Paul Martens (LottoNL-Jumbo) and Roy Curvers (Giant-Alpecin) to increase that number to 16. The fast pace at the start took its toll and several riders were dropped, including an ill Arthur Vichot (FDJ) who eventually climbed off.

The large escape group was able to build up an advantage of over three minutes but the peloton didn’t appear happy with the amount and strength of riders up front and drastically cut that down to under two minutes. Unperturbed by the reports of snow up the road, AG2R-La Mondiale’s Alexis Gougeard decided that he’d had enough with just under 100km still to run and he went on the attack. Along with him went Laurent Didier (Trek-Segafredo) and Alexey Lutsenko (Astana).

Now just three riders, they forged ahead, dropping the larger group behind with relative ease. The big chasing group would eventually get caught, but not before Jesus Herrada broke free and joined the trio out front. Gougeard’s teammate Alexis Vuillermoz was one of the unlucky ones, crashing on the descent and abandoning after a short chase.

After getting dropped earlier in the race Thomas De Gendt made advantage of the proximity of the escape group and jumped across to them. Turning onto the third climb of the day, where the feedzone was situated at the top, the five-man escape group saw their gap grow to over three minutes. It wouldn’t matter, however, with the conditions at the top too much for the race to continue.

There were initial reports that the riders would be taken by car to kilometre 125, where they would make an assessment of the conditions and resume if it was ok. However, that didn’t happen and news that the stage had been cancelled quickly came out. It was initially thought that the extreme weather protocol had been implemented but Luis Angel Mate (Cofidis) stated on Twitter that it was not the case and the riders had taken it upon themselves to stop riding.

Paris-Nice will resume on Thursday with a 195km stage from Juliénas to Romans-sur-Isere.

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