Jonas Vingegaard follows the Red Bull train. 📸 Photo courtesy of A.S.O./Billy Ceusters.

Hi Subscribers,

Today I travelled to Paris-Nice, and I’ll be on the ground from tomorrow morning ahead of stage 5. I’m staying in Macon this evening, the place where my journalist colleague, Jean François Quénet, has reminded me that Viatcheslav Ekimov won a stage of the 1991 Tour de France.

Stage 4 of Paris-Nice was an epic affair, and to mark the occasion, we have a guest post from Editor in Chief at Domestique, Barry Ryan, who has brought today’s events together in this excellent piece.

Early tomorrow morning, we’ll run our exclusive interview with Sarah Gigante, and then it’s straight to the start of stage 5 in Cormoranche-sur-Saône for more reactions to today’s events, and plenty of behind-the-scenes and in-depth coverage.

Daniel 🫶

It’s a cruel sport, cycling. We already know it, of course, but that doesn’t make the periodic reminders any less bracing. Stage 4 of Paris-Nice to Uchon promised a tense duel between Juan Ayuso and Jonas Vingegaard. Instead, it produced a stark contrast in fates.

Their paths diverged on a bend in the road outside Saint-Léger-sous-Beuvray, where they were both in the front group of 40 or so riders that had formed when the race splintered into echelons in the opening kilometres of a stage of driving wind and rain.

Follow me on: Twitter 🟢 — Instagram 🔴 — Bluesky 🔵

The intensity never abated all day, and by Vingegaard’s teammate Edoardo Affini’s reckoning, they were barrelling along at 80km/h when the crash happened. Vingegaard was sitting behind a cadre of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe riders at the front of the group, with Ayuso tucked in just behind him.

The first seven riders all swooped safely through that bend, but just beyond the view of the television cameras, Ayuso’s wheels slipped from under him. We hear a lot of talk about fine margins in modern cycling, but some of those millimetres can’t be calibrated and they certainly can’t all be controlled. A film of water on the road here. A tap on the brakes there. Chance plays a part in this sport too, more than anyone wants to believe. This time, Vingegaard made it through the bend safely, while Ayuso ended up in the ditch, as did Brandon McNulty, Iván Roméo and Nils Politt.