I watched the last hour (got woken up) and my impression was that Sagan had a vibe of "I've already done the hard work and won one, what about you guys?" He was working pretty hard over the last half hour compared to the rest of that bunch but was also doing so very strategically. It looked like he felt he could beat anyone in that group in the sprint if he didn't burn himself out.find_bruce wrote:Yep Sagan, Valverde and Alaphilippe looked at each other waiting for 1 to respond, but none did
So he let Valgren et al. go and chose fourth over chasing and ending up tenth.
YMMV.