Kévin Vauquelin was given a towel to put around his neck to keep warm at the finish line of a sodden stage 4 of Paris-Nice, but as soon as the Frenchman reached the Ineos Grenadiers team vehicle, he threw it to the ground in disgust.
Vauquelin, somehow, managed to soar to sixth place, rescuing a situation that looked to have left his race in tatters from the earliest phases of the stage. But his dogged comeback and his remarkable solo surge on the final climb perhaps only served to underline what might have been.
Vauquelin was on the back foot less than 20km into the stage, when crosswinds blew the peloton into echelons and he found himself in the third group on the road for most of the day.
Vauquelin did not speak to the media after the stage but did take to social media to shine a somewhat cryptic light on what happened in the crosswinds, suggesting a Soudal-QuickStep rider edged him off the road at a crucial moment.
"Imagine you're in the front line [of the peloton] and a rider pushes you into the field, and you end up at the back of the peloton because it's a direct crosswind," Vauquelin wrote in an Instagram story.
"No, I'm kidding, but just imagine (Soudal guy)," he added.
Vauquelin's group did come back to the second group on the road, but still lagged more than a minute behind the main bunch for well over 100 kilometres.
Vauquelin looked increasingly desperate as he attacked repeatedly out of the chase group, which was still 50 seconds in arrears with 50km to race, which is when the race turned on its head again. A crash that took out race leader Juan Ayuso saw a seven-man group clip off containing Jonas Vingegaard, who’d go on to win the stage.
Ineos’ other main GC card, Oscar Onley, who had crashed earlier, was suddenly chasing too, and Ineos were giving him their resources, while Vauqeulin was still fighting to get back from behind. Onley was even powered away from his group by TT specialist Josh Tarling but even so, with around 15km to go, the Vauquelin group managed to come back to them, though they were still minutes down on the Vingegaard group.
When they hit the final climb to Uchon, it was Vauquelin who kicked on and went solo from the group. He stormed up the ascent, limiting the damage to Vingegaard to 3:38.
Onley, meanwhile, went completely the other way. The Scottish rider appeared to implode, dropping like a stone and losing almost five minutes to his teammate on the final climb alone.
No Ineos Grenadiers riders stopped to talk to the media at the finish and the team have not yet sent in any reaction from the camp.
At the end of an utterly tumultuous day for the general classification, Vauquelin was somehow still in the podium hunt, fourth overall at 3:39 behind Vingegaard, 2:47 behind Dani Martinez, and 19 seconds behind Georg Steinhauser. He was ahead of fifth-placed David Gaudu and sixth-placed Lenny Martinez by just over 1:20.
Onley, meanwhile, is now 14th at 8:47, his hopes of a podium all but burned. Carlos Rodriguez, the team’s other pre-race GC card, was already a few minutes down after the team time trial and his stage 1 crash, and finished over half an hour down on the day.
It brings Ineos Grenadiers crashing back to earth after the highs of their TTT victory on Tuesday. And the most painful part might just be that Vauquelin seemingly had so much more to give.
