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.
