TRAGEDY: RIP’ Emilien Jeannière is dead and his girlfriend has been arrested as suspect and cause of his death…

“I’ve been waiting for this win for a long time,” Jeanniere, who turned pro in 2023, said afterwards, “and I hoped it was going to come this year.”

“It was exactly my kind of finish, I knew it already, it’s kind of difficult, technical and with a bit of downhill just before and a couple of corners. I was a bit far back with 600 metres to go, and I got blocked. But I didn’t hesitate, and we came past the break at the last moment and I got up to Penhoet and then overtook him.”

 A four-man breakaway featuring Petr Kelemen (Tudor Pro Cycling), David Martin (Polti-Kometa), Jeremy Leveau (Van Rysel-Roubaix) and Antoine Hue (CIC U Nantes Atlantique) made it off the front in the opening kilometres. Martin was fastest in the opening sprint at  La Bourgneuf-la-Foret, while Leveau, 30 seconds down on Cosnefroy in the prologue, quickly became virtual leader on the road.  But the quartet’s main aim was to build as big a lead as possible, which finally peaked out at 3:35 before the sprinters’ teams began to react.

TotalEnergies and then Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, working for the race leader, kept a solid but not excessively harsh control on the front. But as Cosnefroy explained later, having a break ahead with a small gap was ideal as it soaked up all the sprint bonuses and helped maintain his lead on a very tight GC ranking, and so it was only when EF-Education EasyPost added their weight that the gap began to descend a little more sharply.

Martin continued to pick up more sprint points and bonus seconds at Fougerolles du Plessis (km.113), along with the maximum mountain points on offer on the three classified climbs of the day. But beyond those brief skirmishes for the secondary classifications,  the four collaborated well and with 50 kilometres remaining, they still had a 2:30 advantage.

More and more sprinters’ teams lent themselves to a very sustained pursuit, notably a very committed Lotto-Dstny and a little later, Groupama-FDJ. A stage running largely along constantly rolling, twisting country backroads, did not make the chase any easier, though and when the break approached the finish town of Ernee for the first time, they still had the bones of two minutes in their favour.

Hard work from Thomas de Gendt for Lotto-Dstny kept the pace high, while Martin snatched up the final sprint points on offer when the four ahead passed through the finish line and onto the first of two laps of a 10-kilometre local circuit.  Martin finally cracked on a false flat, but the trio who remained proved a much more difficult task for the pack to reel in, with Kelemen in particular a real powerhouse. Groupama-FDJ even sacrificed their third rider on GC, Sam Watson, in an all-out bid to bring them in.

The three breakaways continued to grit their teeth, making the most of the constant twists and turns in the road to stay out of sight of the bunch, and it was clearly going to be touch and go if the move stayed away. “Five more seconds,” Cosnefroy later observed, “and they’d have made it.”

On the very last rise into Ernee and with less than 500 metres to go, the three were caught on the right-hand side of the road. But a ripple effect across to the left of the bunch as they were reeled in seemingly caused several riders to go down. Clement Venturini (Arkea-B&B Hotels) was later visible after the finish line with the back of his jersey shredded to bits by the crash and a cut in one arm, while one Decathlon-AG2R rider was forced to walk across the line with his bike.

Meanwhile around 20 riders, unaffected by the crash, still could dispute a drawn-out, messy sprint.  Jeanniere went from long, powering past Penhoet’s left in the last metres with a sustained acceleration to win by a clear bike length, making the most of a very tricky finale to clinch a breakthrough victory.