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The two-time Tour de France winner, Jonas Vingegaard, claimed his first Paris-Nice title as the Frenchman Lenny Martinez pipped him in a sprint finish to win Sunday’s final stage.
Vingegaard had already won two stages earlier in the eight-day race but left his charge for the line a fraction too late in the two-up sprint after the pair had broken away on the final climb of the hilly 145km eighth stage that started and finished in Nice on the French Riviera.
After the peloton reeled in the last of the day’s breakaway riders, the Frenchman Valentin Paret-Peintre, Vingegaard attacked 21km from the finish, with only Martinez able to hang on to his wheel.
The Dane crested the final climb, the Cote du Linguador, first to seal victory in the king of the mountains competition to go with his inevitable overall victory. However, when it came to the sprint finish, Martinez launched his bid for the line early and Vingegaard simply did not have the power to overhaul him.
Still, with three victories from his first eight days of racing this season, Vingegaard is in fine form ahead of his tilt at a Giro d’Italia-Tour de France double. Having won two of the three Grand Tours, adding the 2025 Vuelta a España to his 2022 and 2023 Tour victories, he has also now won three of the sport’s major one-week stage races – claiming the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2023 and Tirreno-Adriatico a year later.
The Colombian Harold Tejada, who won Friday’s sixth stage, took third on the day, coming home in a small group seven seconds after the winner. Fellow Colombian Daniel Martínez, who crashed more than 50km from the finish and lost touch with the leading peloton, battled through pain to limit his losses and came home 51sec back to preserve his second place overall, more than four minutes behind Vingegaard.
The German, Georg Steinhauser, took the final spot on the podium six minutes off the pace, holding off the Frenchman Kévin Vauquelin.
Isaac del Toro won the Tirreno-Adriatico on Sunday, his second stage-race victory of the season as Jonathan Milan claimed another sprint win in an exciting finale.
The UAE rider, Del Toro, had already effectively secured his overall triumph by ending Saturday’s penultimate stage 42 seconds ahead of Giulio Pellizzari. Del Toro rolled over the line in San Benedetto del Tronto with the rest of the peloton to make absolutely sure, even though he was caught up in a late crash which took out Milan’s sprint rival Jasper Philipsen.
Del Toro finished the race 40 seconds ahead of the USA’s Matteo Jorgenson, with Pellizzari dropping down a place into third after the final day. The 22-year-old also claimed the points and youth jerseys with his impressive display over a tough week in central Italy made harder by wet conditions and two punishing mountain stages on Friday and Saturday.
The final stage was a more prosaic affair although Mathieu van der Poel, who won two stages this week ahead of Milan-San Remo, led a breakaway which forced the main bunch into a rapid pace over the 142km.
Jonas Abrahamsen made a burst to try to claim a solo victory in the final of five circuits but he was swallowed up with around 400m remaining. That allowed Milan to power through the middle and win by a whisker the final stage of his home race for the third straight year.
It was Milan’s sixth win in a brilliant opening few weeks of the season in which he has already claimed the points jerseys at the UAE Tour and AlUla Tour.
