"This is road cycling, right? Not giant slalom" - Oliver Naesen expresses concerns over the fate of Saturday's stage with expected heavy snowing
Cycling
The debates about the Paris-Nice stage 4 will surely outlive the immediate legacy of this edition. One thing would be the hellish conditions with snow, hailstorms and extreme cold, but the race organization didn't make things any better by lack of communication on the future of the stage.
"Unavoidable," was how Oliver Naesen described the 45-minute neutralization 45 kilometers from the finish at Sporza. "But after that it was less clean." He refers to some teams turning up the heat already before restart of the stage as well as organizers ignoring requests of the peloton.
The Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale rider, with Matteo Trentin as the rider representative in this peloton, gave an extensive account: "They stopped and I went forward as a representative. The jury told me that the leading group and the peloton would stop and then we would see what we would do. I went for a raincoat," says Naesen, ostentatiously showing off the layers he was wearing at the finish. "1, 2, 3, ... You can't race like that, can you."
"I asked the teams for their position and made a sample. 7 teams said we would stop, 2 teams wanted to join the majority." After which Naesen started his catch-up race. He rode close for a few minutes to get back to the jury car, because the fragmented peloton had already started riding, albeit still neutralized.
"I got to the front and then they told me we would start in 2 minutes. There you are, just like half the peloton, with all your clothes on. Movistar immediately turned on the tap. Some guys were still hanging between the cars. There was 0.0 solidarity. This is race falsification!"
"I personally have nothing to gain from this, but I think of men like Ben O'Connor and Aleksander Vlasov. They assume that the race will be stopped and the first thing they see is that the group is in 3 pieces. This cannot happen."
Naesen tells it serenely, but is clearly indignant. "It was very cold and all the riders got hypothermia. It was also dangerous on the descent. Last year, 120 of us fell in the Dauphiné. That could have happened again, but fortunately they avoided it."
But Naesen doesn't like what happened after that. "We have a big group chat here and that will be talked about a lot. Definitely! Another 30 centimetres of snow is expected on Saturday. I don't know how we'll get through there, but apparently they're not listening. This is road cycling, right? Not giant slalom."
Ondrej ZhasilCycling Journalist
Ondřej Zhasil is a cycling journalist at CyclingUpToDate and has been part of the team since 2023. He is based in Ostrava, the third-largest city in the Czech Republic, and covers professional cycling across the main UCI competitions, including the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and La Vuelta a España. A key focus of his work is startlist analysis and pre-race coverage, where he examines team selections, rider line-ups, and tactical scenarios ahead of major events.
Alongside WorldTour coverage, Ondřej has developed specific expertise in junior cycling and in racing across East Asia, including competitions in China and Japan. He also maintains a broad working knowledge of other disciplines and levels, including cyclocross, while continuing to expand his understanding of mountain bike racing.
Ondřej holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics, which supports his analytical, data-driven approach to performance and race analysis. In his reporting, he regularly uses ProCyclingStats for results, statistics, and historical context. He places strong emphasis on careful sourcing, editorial accuracy, and updating articles promptly when new, verified information becomes available.
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