The peril of celebrating early: Tobias Halland Johannessen loses Classic Var to Lenny Martinez on line

The Uno-X rider sat up before the French one-day race was truly won, and paid the price

Tobias Halland Johannessen
(Image credit: Getty Images)

With 25 metres to go of the Classic Var on Friday, Tobias Halland Johannessen thought he had won the race. With an attack on the final climb to Mont Faron, the Uno-X Mobility rider clearly felt he had done enough for victory, and so stopped sprinting, punched the air, and sat up in the process.

What he hadn't accounted for was that the race was still very much live behind him. Lenny Martinez (Groupama-FDJ), sprinting to the finish, nipped around him in the dying centimetres of the race to take the win. Halland Johannessen, surprised, through his arm up in the air in a different way, but the direction of triumph had already been decided.

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Adam Becket
News editor

Adam is Cycling Weekly’s news editor – his greatest love is road racing but as long as he is cycling, he's happy. Before joining CW he spent two years writing for Procycling. He's usually out and about on the roads of Bristol and its surrounds.

Before cycling took over his professional life, he covered ecclesiastical matters at the world’s largest Anglican newspaper and politics at Business Insider. Don't ask how that is related to cycling.