Yellow on the Clock: Alex Baudin's EF Squad Faces the TTT at Perreux

Two stages of this race have gone to the breakaway. Today belongs to the stopwatch.

Stage 3 of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes 2026 is a 28.4-kilometre team time trial on a circuit through the rolling countryside east of Charlieu, in the Loire department. The course leaves and returns to Perreux — a village on the lower foothills of the eastern Loire basin — completing one loop that includes a categorised opening climb, a technical descent, and a sharp final ramp before the finish. The teams have known the profile for months. The first car goes at 15:05 CEST. EF Education-EasyPost, defending the yellow jersey, rolls last at 16:29.

For the teams who have been managing their leaders through two breakaway stages — watching the gaps, saving the engines for the mountains — this afternoon is the first calculation that matters.

How Alex Baudin Got Here

Stage 1 of this race did not go according to any plan that UAE, Visma, or Decathlon had assembled. Alex Baudin, a young French rider from EF Education-EasyPost, attacked from the early breakaway on the Côte de Rousset with the race's major favourites still organising themselves in the peloton below. He crested the climb alone. He stayed alone. With two kilometres left in Saint-Ismier, he held fifty seconds over the chasing group and over a minute over Paul Seixas and the GC peloton. He took the win and the yellow jersey.

The detail that made the story better: Baudin had arrived at the race with food poisoning. He reportedly spent the night before Stage 1 in no condition to race. He raced anyway.

Stage 2 was 234 kilometres and belonged to another breakaway — Anthon Charmig winning in Le Puy-en-Velay from a long move that the peloton let go. The GC contenders managed their effort correctly, nobody attacked, and Baudin kept yellow without complication. The standings did not change.

What changes today is the nature of the race. A TTT is not a day you can manage. Each team rides its own race against the clock, from a staggered start, and the result reshuffles the GC before the first mountain stage arrives.

The Tactical Stakes

The start order is the map. Teams roll in reverse GC order, with the race leader going last. The first of the GC squads to leave is UAE Team Emirates-XRG at 15:49 — they have Isaac del Toro and Kevin Vermaerke in their line-up, with del Toro sitting at +0:44 overall and Vermaerke in the chase group at +0:32. A strong UAE time sets the target.

Decathlon CMA CGM rolls at 16:05. Paul Seixas — 19-year-old French prodigy, confirmed Tour de France debutant in July, winner of Flèche Wallonne and Itzulia Basque Country this spring — starts his first TTT that could actually change his GC position. Decathlon's team strength in time trials is an open question; today provides the first real data point.

Netcompany INEOS Cycling Team starts at 16:17. Kévin Vauquelin and Oscar Onley sit at +0:32 — inside the chasing group and positioned to gain if INEOS delivers. The team has already shown tactical intelligence in this race: on Stage 1, Vauquelin and Onley made a calculated move to separate from the Seixas group in the finale and take those twelve seconds.

Visma | Lease a Bike rolls at 16:21. Matteo Jorgenson carries the team's GC hopes from +0:44. Wout van Aert — returning from injury, visibly below his best on Stage 1 where he struggled on the first climbs — is a question mark in a TTT that rewards precisely his engine type. Even a diminished Van Aert in a TTT is not a factor to ignore.

EF Education-EasyPost closes the order at 16:29. Their TTT pedigree is good but not exceptional by the standards of the squads chasing them. Baudin is the leader, not a TTT specialist. The team's target is not to win the stage; it is to lose as little time as possible.

The Perreux circuit is technically honest. The opening 4.9-kilometre climb at 3.5% average is long enough to sort out which teams are riding at their ceiling and which are pacing. There is a first split at the summit. The descent that follows is technical — narrow roads, some camber changes, the kind of terrain where a team riding with cohesion gains a few seconds and a team slightly fragmented loses them.

The course flattens and then climbs again gently through the circuit's middle section before the final 800-metre ramp, steep by TTT standards, that precedes the finish line. Teams that have saved something for that ramp will close the gap between their first-split time and their final time. Teams that went out too hard in the opening climb will suffer.

The new scoring format applied this year — each rider is credited with their own individual GC time when they personally cross the line, not when the team's fourth rider finishes — changes the TTT's math slightly for squads with a clear leader. It rewards GC riders whose teams can deliver them to the finish line with legs intact for the final ramp.

What This Means for the Tour de France

The Tour de France's 2026 Grand Départ opens in Barcelona with a team time trial. The same format. Similar stakes for exactly the same teams and leaders. Every second registered at Perreux today is information that race directors, sports directors, and riders will carry into the July start list.

For Paul Seixas — making his Tour debut at nineteen, the youngest starter in 89 years — this afternoon is part of a preparation that has included 43,000 metres of altitude training in two weeks and a spring that produced two classics victories. The race from here has four more stages. The mountains begin tomorrow. But the TTT is the first answer to the question that surrounds every pre-Tour race: which of the GC squads has actually built the form they advertised?

For the destination guide to cycling the Perreux circuit and the surrounding Loire Roannais roads, see our Loire Roannais cycling guide. For yesterday's Stage 2 coverage from Le Puy-en-Velay, see our Stage 2 field report.