He waited for his eleventh year of professionalism to participate in Paris-Nice. For a long time, Thibaut Pinot preferred to end the winter on Italian roads. But this season, he tackles the so badly nicknamed "race of the sun", so cold and rain have recovered a bib, thinking of the Tour du France. It was not the prospect of rubbing Julian Alaphilippe or Egan Bernal - finally forfeited after the death of Nicolas Portal, the sports director of Ineos - that prompted him to line up. But there are already benchmarks to take for the Great Loop.
“There are lines of work for Thibaut in view of the Tour, confirms Philippe Mauduit, the sports director of Groupama-FDJ. There are three stages where border risks are expected. And there are benchmarks to take. Because on the 2019 Tour, Pinot has a bitter memory of the Albi stage where a stroke of the edge, in a windy day, had cost him 1'40 "and a lot of stress.
Forge certainties
"It would be nice if there were borders," notes Mauduit. I don't care if Thibaut and the others are, in this race, in front or behind. The important thing is to see a group united and capable of organizing. " It was served during the first stage, won this Sunday by the German Maximilian Schachmann, where a border took a long time Pinot and his teammates 20 seconds from the first. "It's a reassuring day because we have perfectly managed this problem," nonetheless savored Thierry Bricaud, one of the team's two sports directors.
The other important meeting of Pinot in view of the Tour will be the time of 15.1 km on Wednesday in Saint-Amand-Montrond (Cher). With that of the Tour de Catalogne, it will be his only timed exercise before the July meeting. "I can't wait to be there, coward Pinot. I can't wait to test the new stopwatch we will be using this season. It will be an interesting day for removing important information. "
More than the pure result, Pinot and his teammates will seek sensations. “Our new bike is adapted to the morphology of each rider, notes Mauduit. Thibaut did a few sessions with him but he is still looking for flexibility. For him like the others, a successful Paris-Nice will be the one where we will have found ourselves in difficulty and where we will have been able to get out of it by forging certainties for the Tour. "