Reduced to qualifying as one of the best two runners-up, Tigers will go to Toulon or Clermont – it will be the latter if the Massif Central club beat Racing Métro with a bonus point today.
This all-French affair in the Massif Central looks preordained as a home win, but the interest will be in how Clermont assimilate their Test players back into the team.
Immense crowds watched in the Massif Central, a chain of hills and mountains not to be compared to the Pyrenees, which will be transited Friday and Saturday, or the Alps, which arrive next Wednesday.
Clermont will be a different proposition in round four but in this form Exeter will travel to the Massif Central with anything but subdued hopes.
There will be plenty of mountains, too, with 28 climbs, three more than this year, scattered over four chains – the Massif Central, Pyrenees, Alps and Jura – with four mountain stages concluding with uphill finishes.
"The view here will be like a magnet," he said on a recent afternoon, standing on the fourth level and pointing to Columbus Circle and the Fifth Avenue massif across a snow-covered Central Park.
He could well hang on to the lead until Wednesday's mountain stage through the Massif Central but, as he pointed out, when it does leave his shoulders he will probably pull on green and, failing that, he will be back in the rainbow stripes.
The aquifer in the Lepini massif may be classified as "unconfined with an undefined bottom surface".
The observed differences in the rbcL and trnL sequences between the populations on the Gelbison massif and those on the Sila and Aspromonte massifs can be thus interpreted not only in a phylogenetic, but also in a taxonomic context.
A week pass for the Grand Massif system is €40.
