Yellow jersey leader Christophe Laporte (Jumbo-Visma) managed to retain his overall lead despite crashing in the final kilometre of the stage after delivering van Aert to the line. Jumbo-Visma remain 1-2-3 in the general classification with Laporte one second ahead of van Aert and nine seconds ahead of Primož Roglič.
The hilly 191 kilometre stage from Vierzon to Dun-Le-Palestel looked set to test the sprinters, and it did exactly that on the Category 3 Côte de Le Peyroux as stage 2 winner Fabio Jakobsen (QuickStep-AlphaVinyl) couldn't stay with the front group which left many tipping van Aert to take victory on a course that favoured his talents.
Super domestique Laporte led the bunch into the 2.5 kilometre, 3.5 percent finish with van Aert in tow, whilst Jasper Stuyven (Trek-Segafredo) did the same with a long lead-out for Pedersen, and the Dane capitalised as he produced a devastating turn of speed to soundly beat the Belgian in his first career win at 'The Sun's Race'.
"Of course, I knew the finish, we did it one lap earlier," Pedersen laughed about the Dun-Le-Palestel finishing circuit.
"No, we looked into it yesterday. We missed out on yesterday's stage with a bit of bad luck, with [Alex] Kirsch having a puncture and me losing the chain.
We wanted to make up for it today and the boys did a fantastic job the whole day to make it as easy as possible for me. A perfect lead-out from Alex and Jasper and then a good sprint in the end. So it was a pretty good day."
While disappointed, van Aert admitted he just didn't have the legs to rival Pedersen in the sprint, tipping his cap to the 2019 world champion who he thought had gone too early.
"He started really early and he was apparently strong enough to keep it to the line. It’s a really impressive sprint from him and I was not strong enough to give him competition," Van Aert said after the stage.
"He’s a strong rider and a specialist in hard finishes like this. He started the sprint, in my opinion, really, really early and at that point I thought it would be in my favour, but he could hold it to the line… Strong."
Watch the full replay of Paris-Nice stage 3 below:
The 2022 Paris-Nice continues tonight with a 13.4 kilometre individual time trial that will see the race favourites kick their campaigns up a notch. Catch all the action from 12:15am (AEDT) LIVE on SBS and SBS On Demand.
