"If it was just Bakelants, we could have gone to the finish but with Bardet high in the classification I knew the peloton would chase us."

Those were the words of Paolo Tiralongo after stage three at Paris-Nice. Tiralongo attacked in the final 10km of the stage and was quickly joined by two riders from the same team: Jan Bakelants of Belgium and Romain Bardet of France.

The trio gained as much as 30 seconds on the group in the final circuit into the finish, but as Bardet is a threat to General Classification hopes for Jakob Fuglsang and Fabio Aru and many others in the mountains, the peloton closed down the breakaway at less than 2km to the finish.

Tiralongo, Fuglsang and Aru all finished in the same time as stagewinner Michael Matthews of Australia, who also took over as race leader.