Greig Leach

After months of discussion and kilometers of racing the peloton hit the wet muddy cobblestones hard. The sections of pave lived up to their billing and the stage was in for some deviations from the script all of the pundits had provided. Normally these roads are raced in one day Classics and the men that line up on race day are specialists in riding the challenging road surfaces, but in the Tour de France there are a wide variety of specialties vying for victory and Yellow. The peloton broke into quite a few pieces as crashes, slippery roundabouts, strong winds and fatigue took there tools on the hard men of the Tour. With a break away up the road the vastly reduced peloton hit the secondsection of pave under the leadership of Lars Bak (Lotto-Belisol) and Sep van Marcke (Belkin Pro Cycling), they were accompanied by Sebastien Langeveld, Andrew Talansky (Garmin Sharp) and surprisingly the little Italian in Yellow, Vincenzo Niblai, and his Astana teammates, Lieuwe Westra and Jakob Fuglsang.