Encore by André Greipel. Only fifth Cavendish. Waiting for the mountains, the Tour de France, as expected, thrives on the thrills of sprints, stunts and the power of the sprinters released in a handful of hundreds of meters traveled at 60 kilometers per hour, a few seconds that seem infinite elbowing the 'with each other, in a hysterical crescendo of adrenaline, a sort of Palio di Siena, with bikes instead of horses, in which falls are the ever-present unknown factor: even the Saint-Quentin stage, soporific for hours on end, respected this script embellishing it with the final scene of a group launched at full speed in pursuit of four fugitives who saw their advantage and the dream of a victory canceled in the last meters of the stage. What's more, the finish was on a slight incline, a simple little incline which for the tired muscles of Ghyselink and Urtasun, the last to give way, must have looked like the Galibier. Greipel, the German Lotto sprinter born in Rostock, the city of Jan Ullrich, the only German to have won a Tour in 1997, won with incredible strength. Mark Cavendish, also conditioned by the crash in Rouen, was surprised by such power to such an extent that he gave up and was preceded not only by the Australian Mattew Goss and the Argentine Juan-José Haedo but also by the Frenchman Dumoulin. Petacchi, once again in contention for a win, finished eighth. Seventh the old but always formidable Oscar Freire. Peter Sagan is not in the top ten today and he was unable to collect any other valid points for the green jersey he wears. Guilt, as the script of the Great Boucle, of another disastrous fall in the last 3 thousand meters (with the delays therefore all neutralized for the purposes of the classification). Tightrope walker on his bike, the Slovak this time was unable to avoid going to the ground, slamming his backside on the curb, in the carom triggered by an induced swerve by Tyler Farrar, unlucky as never before in this Tour, who got up so much furious with whoever bumped into him, how battered and bloody. Ranking obviously unchanged with Fabian Cancellara bringing the yellow jersey worn in his career to 27 days.
Tomorrow the Tour restarts towards Metz. A 207,5 km stage still reserved for sprinters, the last one because the first mountains arrive on Saturday with the climb to the Planche des Belles Filles, which will be the starter for the alpine stages scheduled for next week. Obviously no news on the standings front and the candidates for the final victory (with Bradley Wiggins and Cadel Evans always the most popular). But other news has nonetheless shaken the Tour in the last 24 hours: the first, sad, concerns a sudden death, that of the thirty-year-old Belgian rider Rob Goris, who arrived at the Grande Boucle as a commentator on Flemish television. The other, disturbing, adds another bad piece to the sensational Armstrong case: according to the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, four American riders, who are running this Tour, (Hincapie, Leipheimer, Vande Velde and Zabriskie), allegedly entered into an agreement with Usada , the anti-doping agency US, a mild and timed sentence (six months after the Vuelta) for their testimony against Lance Armstrong. The ghosts of doping, which disturbed the eve of the great French stage race, thus promptly reappear with effects that, even without waiting for the end of an investigation as burning as it is untimely and out of time, appear nefarious and corrosive for the Tour and cycling everything.
