Danish all-rounder Mads Pedersen gave his Lidl-Trek teammates a public dressing-down after stage 1 of Paris-Nice, after they collectively failed to deliver Pedersen to a position where he could fight for victory.
Pedersen is clearly in good form, having just won a stage and the overall in the Tour de la Provence earlier this year and has a good track record in Paris-Nice, too, with stage wins in 2022 and 2023.
However, the former World Champion came home a disappointed twelfth in the bunch sprint at Le-Perray-en-Yvelines that decided stage 1 of the 2025 edition, after he and his teammates failed to work well enough together in the closing kilometres to put Pedersen in a position to battle against stage winner Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep).
"There's not much to analyse. It was just lousy riding, and the work being done today wasn't good enough at all. So there's not much to say," he told Danish TV station TV2.
"There's some positional struggle where I lost them [his teammates], but at the same time I knew it would open up again on the left side at some point, so I could jump back to them. But something happened to them too, and they lost each other."
Pedersen was in a marginally more conciliatory mood on Monday morning at the start in Montesson of a second, flatter stage, saying he hoped it would also conclude with another bunch sprint, but with a very different result.
"We made some mistakes coming into the sprint, we lost each other too many times and had too much work finding each other again, so we just missed out on having a chance for sprinting," Pedersen told Cyclingpro.net at the start of stage 2.
Although his overall dissatisfaction remained clear, in contrast Pedersen singled out Sunday's performance by Mattias Skjelmose for praise for his stage 1 performance, after the Dane bridged across to a dangerous late breakaway also including Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) and Matteo Trentin (Tudor Pro Cycling).
That action had saved his teammates some energy for the finale after things came back together again, Pedersen pointed out, only for their plan to go seriously awry in the build-up for the sprint itself.
At the stage 2 start, Pedersen remained upbeat for his chances of getting a third Paris-Nice stage win in four editions of the race at Bellegarde on Tuesday afternoon.
"It's a bit of a different sprint today, the last five kilometres are pretty straightforward," he pointed out, "and hopefully we'll get it right today."
