2011 Tour De France Stage 7 Results: Mark Cavendish Dominates—Brad Wiggins out

There’s a big omen hanging over today’s ride. In Tour history, stages finishing in Chateauroux have only ever been won by riders with the initials MC. One of those rider is the legend, Mario Cipollini, the other is riding in today’s race—the Manx Missile, Mark Cavendish.

Today’s stage did nothing to change that quirky coincidence.

Stage Seven takes the peloton from Le Mans  to Chateauroux over another very flat 218km journey. There Is no King of the Mountain points on offer today and the intermediate sprint is within 25km of the stage finish.

It should come as no surprise that there was the obligatory—and inevitably ill-fated—breakaway, today composed of four riders: Perez Urtasun (EUS), Mickael Delage (FDJ), Gianni Meersman (FDJ) and Yannick Talabardon (SAU).

Early in the stage, Tom Boonen—2007 green jersey winner, Belgian road racing champion, and 2009 world champion—abandoned his 2011 Tour de France campaign.

The after effects of a nasty crash in Stage 5 proved too much despite his courageous effort to recover from the crash and complete the stage and fight through the pain on Stage 6. The loss of Boonen and team leader Sylvain Chavanel carrying an injury from an early crash has left Quick Step’s  race in tatters.

Radioshack has another two riders go down in a crash, Yaroslav Popvuch and Haimar Zubeldia, meaning that they only have one rider, Levi Leipheimer, who hasn’t been up close and personal with the tarmac. To quote Phil Liggett, “if they didn’t have bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

To underscore that statement, there was another crash with a large number of riders including Chris Horner of Radioshack who took a long time to get back up and spent some time riding alongside the  medical car.

More dramatically, Sky Procycling’s leader and Tour GC contender Bradley Wiggins was forced to abandon after looking very much like he broke his collarbone. Sadly for Sky, Geraint Thomas, who was waiting to pace Wiggins back into the pack, also lost his white jersey.

At the intermediate sprint, after the breakaway squabbled for the high points as reward for their effort, the HTC team stamped its authority on the points for the best of the rest, which Cavendish took comfortably.

HTC repeated the dose for the final sprint of the day and delivered a textbook lesson in how to deliver a sprinter in the best position to take out a stage. The team dictated the pace and started the lead out from about five kilometers out from the finish.

A remarkable effort

Tomorrow, the race gets bumpy with the Tour going in to some medium mountains tomorrow which should start to sort out the general classification riders, with two category four climbs, a cat three and one cat two hill to climb over.

Rest assured, HTC will be at the other end of the peloton.

1. HUSHOVD Thor                     TEAM GARMIN - CERVELO      28h 29' 27"  
2. EVANS Cadel                        BMC RACING TEAM                    + 00' 01"
3. SCHLECK Frank                    TEAM LEOPARD-TREK                + 00' 04"
4. MILLAR David                        TEAM GARMIN - CERVELO          + 00' 08"
5. KLÖDEN Andréas                  TEAM RADIOSHACK                    + 00' 10"
6. FUGLSANG Jakob                 TEAM LEOPARD-TREK                + 00' 12"
7. SCHLECK Andy                     TEAM LEOPARD-TREK                + 00' 12"
8. MARTIN Tony                         HTC - HIGHROAD                         + 00' 13"
9. VELITS Peter                         HTC - HIGHROAD                        + 00' 13"
10. GESINK Robert                    RABOBANK CYCLING TEAM        + 00' 20"