Tour De France: Stage One, Alessandro Petacchi Takes Out a Crash-Marred Sprint

The first week of the Tour de France is traditionally given over to the sprinters with a series of flat stages and the 2010 iteration is absolutely no exception to that rule.

Stage One took the peloton from Rotterdam in Holland to Brussels in Belgium, a total of 224km.

It was watched by a massive crowd, with some unofficial estimates putting the numbers at a staggering one million!

The script for today’s stage could have been written months in advance, with gaps left to fill in the names of the combatants.

First came the obligatory breakaway involving Quick Step’s Maarten Wynants, Euskaltel-Euskadi’s Alan Perez-Lezaun and Lars Boom from Rabobank. They managed to get the lead up to seven and a half minutes at one point, before being inexorably drawn back towards the chasing pack.

Breakaways of this kind rarely succeed, however they are almost obligatory and afford the sponsor’s names some highly valuable camera time—always an important task for professional cyclists.

To keep life interesting, there were a handful of minor crashes.

The first left Australian HTC rider Adam Hansen with what appeared to be a broken collarbone. The young rider managed to not only get back on the bike, but led the peloton in the chase of the breakaway.

David Millar and Ivan Basso were caught up in another crash when one of the Tour’s perennial cycling hazards—a dog—decided to cross the road. Millar and Basso were unharmed, although Millar did require some mechanical assistance on his bike and Basso needed new shoes.

The fate of the dog is unknown, although he wasn’t hit by any of the bikes, he almost certainly received a very stern “bad dog!” from an embarrassed owner.

Once the breakaway was controlled with about 50km still to race, the peloton went into cruise mode, keeping the leaders within striking distance, but expending the minimum possible energy while the teams reorganised in preparation for the inevitable bunch sprint.

By the "20km to go" banner, the lead bunch was whittled down to two riders with Boom and Perez-Lezaun having dropped out and Wynants being joined by Alexandr Pliuscin of Katusha. The lead was under one minute and destined for failure.

There is a cruelty about the way that the peloton deals with breakaway riders, almost toying cat-like with them, before going in for the kill inside the last few kilometres. Today, Pliuschin and Wynants were reeled in with just over eight kilometres to go.

A cycling bunch sprint is one of the most exciting and terrifying sights in world sport.

The riders are physically leaning on each other as their team’s lead-out men build the pace for the lead sprinters to unleash their explosive power inside the few hundreds of metres.

One slip can lead to disaster. A moment of doubt can see the race pass you by. And that’s what happened, a sharp right-hander with two kilometres to go saw sprint favourites HTC’s Mark Cavendish and Oscar Freire caught up in a crash, but that was nothing compared to the massive pile-up at the 500m mark.

The pile-up completely blocked the road, allowing only a handful of riders to compete in the final sprint, which was taken out by Lampre’s Alessandro Pettacchi, followed by Mark Cavendish’s lead-out man Mark Renshaw and the perennial sprint front-runner, Thor Hushovd from the Cervelo Test team.

All of the big names were caught up in the various crashes, including US sprint hope Tyler Farrar of Garmin-Slipstream. Because of the crashes, all of the riders will receive the same time, leaving us with no changes to the order from the start of the day.

Stage two stays in Belgium with a 192km ride from Brussels to Spa.

Standings after Stage One
 
1.    CANCELLARA Fabian           TEAM SAXO BANK               
2.    MARTIN Tony                     TEAM HTC - COLUMBIA        + 00' 10"      
3.    MILLAR David                     GARMIN - TRANSITIONS        + 00' 20"      
4.    ARMSTRONG Lance             TEAM RADIOSHACK        + 00' 22"      
5.    THOMAS Geraint                 SKY PRO CYCLING        + 00' 23"      
6.    CONTADOR Alberto             ASTANA        + 00' 27"      
7.    FARRAR Tyler                     GARMIN - TRANSITIONS        + 00' 28"      
8.    LEIPHEIMER Levi                 TEAM RADIOSHACK        + 00' 28"      
9.    BOASSON HAGEN Edvald     SKY PRO CYCLING        + 00' 32"      
10.    GERDEMANN Linus            TEAM MILRAM        + 00' 35"