With 25 metres to go of the Classic Var on Friday, Tobias Halland Johannessen thought he had won the race. With an attack on the final climb to Mont Faron, the Uno-X Mobility rider clearly felt he had done enough for victory, and so stopped sprinting, punched the air, and sat up in the process.
What he hadn't accounted for was that the race was still very much live behind him. Lenny Martinez (Groupama-FDJ), sprinting to the finish, nipped around him in the dying centimetres of the race to take the win. Halland Johannessen, surprised, through his arm up in the air in a different way, but the direction of triumph had already been decided.
