Dauphiné Stage 3: Matteo Jorgenson Delivers TTT Victory to Visma in Tour de France Dry Run

U.S. ace Matteo Jorgenson blasted to the line fastest Tuesday to bring Visma-Lease a Bike the win and make his own GC gains in the stage 3 team time trial of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

Behind Jorgenson, Netcompany Ineos leadership tandem Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley also made moves in the first classification shake-up the race once called the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Alex Beadin dug deep at the end of EF Education-EasyPost’s effort Tuesday to narrowly defend his leader’s jersey ahead of a sprint stage on Wednesday.

Vauquelin and Onley crossed the line together at the end of the Ineos rotation to put the team second on the stage and jump to 12 seconds behind Baudin in the race for GC.

Pre-race favorite Paul Seixas may be disappointed after he and Decathlon CMA GGM went 45 seconds slower than Visma-Lease a Bike.

The 19-year-old prodigy will have to wait for the mountain-packed triple header at the end of the race to make his push on the classification.

Jorgenson delivers in first race since collarbone fracture

Jorgenson’s rocketing finish to Visma-Lease a Bike’s imperfect TTT vaulted him to forth in the classification at 15 seconds.

“This is seven times better than winning on your own because the team gets the moment afterward together, which you don’t often get,” he said at the finish.

“It didn’t go well for us today. We lost Wout [van Aert] super early and Ben [Tulett] flatted on the main descent. But we adapted well and could rearrange things and adjust,” Jorgenson said. “In the final downhill, we couldn’t have gone any faster.”

The performance marks a huge comeback for the 26-year-old as he builds toward the Tour de France.

Jorgenson is racing for the first time since he was sidelined for weeks when he broke his collarbone in a crash at Amstel Gold Race.

“It feels good to win a race, and really nice after the spring I’ve had,” he said.

Jorgenson – a two-time winner of Paris-Nice – was coy when asked about his GC aspirations for the week to come. He certainly didn’t do any harm Tuesday to whatever hopes he may be hiding.

The Tour de France dress rehearsal

As well as marking the first serious GC showdown of this race, Tuesday’s 28.4km test across the rolling hills of the Loire served as a key dry-run for stage 1 of the Tour de France.

A 19km TTT around Barcelona on July 4 will decide who wears the first maillot jaune.

As per the Tour de France, GC times Tuesday were based on individual finishes, rather than being awarded to an entire team based on their fourth or fifth rider.

The peloton’s biggest teams saw Tuesday as invauable to their final preparation for the Tour de France.

Despite rosters changing between the two races – Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard are not racing this week, for example – it’s better to find kinks in equipment, strategy, or even warm-up protocol this week rather than at the grand départ.

Vingegaard will have been grinning ear-to-ear as he tuned in to Tuesday’s stage from his final Tour de France altitude camp.

Critérium du Dauphiné Stage 3 results

Top-3 on the stage:

1. Visma-Lease a Bike: 32:52
2. Netcompany Ineos: +00:09
3. EF Education-EasyPost: +00:29

 GC standings can be found in the second tab below