Visma-Lease a Bike could have sat in the peloton on stage 6 of Paris-Nice on Friday and let the sprinters have their day, but instead, the team took a very different tactic.
Following Jonas Vingegaard's abandon, the team threw their weight behind race leader Matteo Jorgenson and jettisoned all but two of their closest rivals with a full-on echelon attack with around 60km to go.
Their effort was so strong that only 16 riders ended up in the leading group: all of Visma-Lease a Bike, all but one rider from Ineos Grenadiers, Mattias Skjelmose and stage winner Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Florian Lipowitz and Matteo Sobrero (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and Max Schachmann (Soudal-Quickstep).
Jorgenson gained 1:54 on a group with João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates XRG) and 8:57 on the main peloton with Lenny Martinez (Bahrain Victorious), who dropped out of the top 10. Additionally, the American scored a six-second time bonus to bring his lead over Lipowitz to 44 seconds. Skjelmose climbed from sixth to third overall at 59 seconds.
"I'm impressed with the guys today and our commitment and just following the plan that we made ourselves this morning," Jorgenson said.
"We looked at the course on the bus and made the plan. On a day like today, I knew we had the strongest team in the race for these kinds of conditions, and it's nice to take full advantage and make what was a very grim day, as far as weather conditions, into a positive experience, at least results-wise."
The team had been planning to try to get both Jorgenson and Vingegaard onto the final podium in Nice, but after the Dane crashed and hurt his hand on stage 5, the team could have taken a more conservative approach with leading Lipowitz by 36 seconds but chose instead to blow the race wide open.
"The plan was to take the descent of [the Côte de Baux-de-Provence] first, and then see if there was enough wind at the bottom where it was going to open up into crosswinds," Jorgenson said.
"The whole day we were kind of sheltered and we didn't really know if there was enough wind, but there was. And so I said, 'Victor [Campenaerts], let's go'. I looked back a few times and saw some big gaps, and then just from there to the finish it was about pedalling and trying to push as hard as as we all could. The boys just did an amazing job."
Jorgenson is now much closer to his home roads in Nice, where he'll face a shortened, 109-kilometre summit finish stage to Auron on Saturday before the final showdown in Nice on Sunday.
"It's a good situation," Jorgenson said, but wouldn't let on about the strategy for the rest of the race. "I'll have to warm up now. Take a warm shower, get some food in me, and then [we will] try to tackle it head-on."
