The Mûr-de-Bretagne again showed on Thursday that every second counts at the 2018 Tour de France.
The finish atop the Brittany climb, just as it did in 2011 and 2015, created small but significant time gaps among the overall contenders, opening cracks in riders' confidence and perhaps giving an indication of what will happen in the rest of the race.
Dan Martin (UAE Team Emirates) had the guts to attack alone into a stiff headwind and had the legs to finish off the move and win the stage. His kilometre-long surge tested all of his fellow overall contenders, exposing even the slightest hint of weakness.
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Pierre Latour (AG2R La Mondiale) was the closest to catching Martin, with Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) leading home a select 13-rider group of chasers at three seconds.
Chris Froome (Team Sky) struggled slightly, and effectively finished two seconds behind. But that was one second too many. His stage time was calculated on the gap to Valverde and so the race results confirmed he lost eight seconds. Rigoberto Uran (EF Education First-Drapac) suffered a similar fate, losing 11 seconds, and Bob Jungels (Quick-Step Floors) lost 12 seconds. Martin picked up a 10-second time bonus for his win while Valverde took four bonus seconds.
Froome dismissed his latest time loss, and he may be proved right by Paris. It was also far less than the 31 and 53 seconds Romain Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale) and Tom Dumoulin (Team Sunweb) lost, respectively, after they tangled in the final kilometres before the climb to the finish.
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