This far into Tadej Pogačar's reign as the dominant force in cycling, it probably shouldn't come as a surprise anymore that his team would give no quarter to the breakaway hopefuls on a day like stage 3 of the Tour de France. Just the same, the discourse during the race on Monday was focused on UAE Team Emirates-XRG's decision to chase down the escapees.
After all, the lumpy journey from Granollers, Spain into France had the look of a traditional breakaway stage, and after a fierce battle for the first hour and a half of the stage, there was a large and determined group up the road. Meanwhile, the finish was not hard enough to produce the sort of gaps that would be of much use to Pogačar's GC ambitions. In the days of yore, this would have been just the sort of day where Alex Baudin of EF Education-EasyPost could dream of taking his first ever Grand Tour stage win.
Unfortunately for the 25-year-old Frenchman, those days of yore have given way to a new age. Indeed, it's been some time now since UAE first started to embraced their role as breakaway killers. We should have seen this one coming – but at the same time, it's better for all of us that Baudin didn't give in to despair. For at least a little while, he made it interesting on Monday, inciting the action in the break and then holding on to be its last survivor, caught about 11 km from the finish.
Dane Cash
"At the start, when we had three minutes, I started to believe it," Baudin said. "It was really disorganized in the group, I had to push for the steep climb, we gained some gap, and I was still thinking we could do it."
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