The second stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné was a day of contrasts for Arnaud Démare (FDJ). The Frenchman made the uphill drag in the final 200 metres look easy – Alexander Kristoff and Nacer Bouhanni were convincingly put to the sword – but his dominance gave little indication of how he'd suffered just a couple of hours earlier.
The 171km stage from Saint-Chamond to Arlanc was always likely to culminate in a bunch sprint, but the trio of back-to-back climbs in the middle of the route – a category two, then three, then four – saw the Frenchman dropped from the peloton, while many of his rivals remained in the mix.
Démare had teammates with him to help steady the ship and he made amends in impressive fashion, taking a victory whose significance was only enhanced by the hardship.
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"I'm so happy to have won a race on a day like that. This morning I was hoping for a sprint but I knew it was going to be tough. We had nearly 2,500 metres of altitude gain, and for the sprinters that takes its toll. It's very wearing. You saw that in the sprint, which wasn't super fast," Démare said in his winner's press conference in Arlanc.
"I had a bad moment on the 30 kilometres of climbing in the middle of the stage. Mentally it was difficult, and to be able to raise the arms at the end makes you forget about those moments. It's a bit like what I'm going to find at the Tour in a month's time. It's by overcoming these difficulties that you grow. Today, even after finding myself in trouble I was able to win. It's a scenario that I can replay in my head when I encounter similar moments."
No matter how much it sweetened the victory, Démare's early difficulty nevertheless served as a wake-up call. As he noted, the likes of Bouhanni and Kristoff, two of his companions from the opening day's gruppetto, dealt with the climbing comparatively comfortably.
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