Stage 3

The road

At the start

Into the Pyrenees, and the first summit

Pogačar keeps red with nine seconds on Wout van Aert and ten on Matthew Brennan, who won in Manosque and wears white; Koen Bouwman leads the mountains, and Sergio Chumil is the first man out of the race. The last French stage runs flat past Perpignan and up the Têt valley before the first category one climb, the long Col de Mont-Louis, and a summit finish at Font Romeu.

How it was won

1. 1145 km to go

   Hayter goes again, five with him

   Attacks fly out of Gruissan and take an age to settle. Hayter is up the road for a second day running, with Magnus Cort, Timo Roosen, Olivier Le Gac, Mats Wenzel and Asbjørn Hellemose alongside him; UAE mass on the front for Pogačar and hold the six at 2:30.

2. 265 km to go

   Crosswinds tear at the bunch

   On the flat run toward the Pyrenees the wind comes in across the road and UAE lean on it, splitting the peloton clean in two. It goes back together a few kilometres later, but nobody is comfortable now, and the sky ahead is black.

3. 336 km to go

   Twenty points that vanish

   Hayter leads the break through Villefranche-de-Conflent and banks the twenty points at the intermediate sprint, enough on the road to take green off Pogačar. By evening the sprint will have been struck from the record with everything else that happened here.

4. 419 km to go

   Fortunato jumps into the storm

   The break has already come apart on the long drag of the Mont-Louis — Hellemose shed, Cort dropped back through the rain — when Fortunato launches out of the peloton and rides across to Wenzel. The two of them press on into hail so heavy the television pictures begin to fail.

5. 57 km to go

   Pogačar waves the race to a halt

   Fortunato leads over the summit into a wall of hail, and when the pictures come back they show dropped riders pulling off the road to shelter wherever they can. Pogačar comes to the front of the peloton and waves his arms until the racing stops. The whole convoy piles into a hotel near the top of the Mont-Louis, soaked and frozen, and word filters through: the stage is cancelled, Font Romeu will not be climbed, and nothing that happened today counts.