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Arnaud De Lie (Lotto-Dstny) scored his second victory of the 12 months within the opening stage of Etoile de Bessèges, shutting down an assault from final 12 months’s stage winner Mads Pedersen (Trek-Segafredo) earlier than powering into the headwind to take the primary chief’s jersey.
Benoit Cosnefroy (AG2R Citroën) rounded out the rostrum of an elite group after an aggressive day of racing by crosswinds round Bellegarde.
The victory offers the 20-year-old a four-second benefit on Pedersen and 6 on Cosnefroy, with the rest of the peloton led by Dylan Teuns (Israel-Premier Tech) at 13 seconds.
De Lie, who garnered nearly all of Lotto-Dstny’s factors final season, is off to a different sturdy begin after taking out the 1.1-ranked Clàssica Comunitat Valenciana 1969.
The way it unfolded
Ayco Bastiaens (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Jean-Louis Le Ny (Good Métropole Côte D’Azur), and Simon Pellaud (Tudor Professional Biking Staff) attacked from the gun and got a big hole by the peloton who have been saving their power for the anticipated crosswinds within the latter a part of the stage.
The trio had over 5 minutes when the essential second got here the place Ineos Grenadiers conspired with Trek-Segafredo to separate the peloton.
The lead group left EF Schooling-EasyPost on the again foot, with staff leaders Magnus Cort and Neilson Powless lacking the entrance group. They’d Stefan Bissegger and Andrea Piccolo to behave as anchors to crush the entrance peloton, nevertheless.
Regardless of the perfect efforts of Trek-Segafredo and Uno-X to maintain the group rolling, the presence of Lotto-Dstny sprinter De Lie maybe hampered the motivation and cooperation.
The main group contained Dries de Bondt (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Benoît Cosnefroy and Greg Van Avermaet (AG2R Citroën Staff), Aaron van Poucke (Staff Flanders-Baloise), Arnaud de Lie, Sébastien Grignard, and Brent van Moer (Lotto-Dstny), Pavel Sivakov, Ben Tulett, Luke Rowe, Michal Kwiatkowski, and Ben Turner (Ineos Grenadiers), Markus Hoelgaard, Toms Skujins, Mattias Skjelmose Jensen and Mads Pedersen (Trek-Segafredo), Stefan Bissegger, Andrea Piccolo (EF Schooling-EasyPost), Guillaume Boivin, Krists Neilands, Sep Vanmarcke (Israel-Premier Tech), Kristoffer Halvorsen, Erik Nordsaeter Resell and Martin Bugge Urianstad (Uno-X Professional Biking Staff), Pierre Latour (TotalEnergies), Luca Mozzato and Louis Barré (Arkéa-Samsic), Tom Bohli and Petr Kelemen (Tudor Professional Biking Staff) and Rudy Barbier (St-Michel-Mavic-Auber 93).
They swept previous the three leaders with 36km to go and had nearly a minute on the Cort group however the chasers poured on the trouble earlier than the final crosswind part and rejoined lastly, with simply over 10km to the end.
De Lie remained in prime place and his Lotto-Dstny staff sat again whereas different groups pushed to the end, solely coming to the fore inside 3km to go and hugging the aspect of the highway to gutter the peloton within the crosswind.
The Classics riders have been sat entrance and centre on the tough chip-and-seal tarmac that lead into the uphill kick to the road – Teuns, Pedersen, Van Avermaet and Cosnefroy – with Jasper De Buyst doing the heavy lifting for De LIe.
Pedersen launched first and opened a niche, forcing the younger Belgian to struggle to scramble throughout however he had power to spare and added one more win to his ever-growing palmares.
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