Little Tommy Voeckler, the french breakaway artist on Team BBox, got his first stage victory in a Tour de France, by, of course, breaking away from the six man break that had led the race from kilometer zero. Voeckler chose wisely to attack the other five men when they were within 5 km to the finish. Voeckler is famous in France for holding the yellow jersey for ten days in his first ever Tour five years ago, valiantly holding off Lance Armstrong on the eleventh day before cracking on one of the climbs. Typical french cycling during the last ten years: grand gestures which ultimately end in failure.
What was odd about the breakaway failing today, although the first two finishers were members of the original break (Voeckler and Ignatiev), was that the break satisfied the flat stage breakaway rule of thumb: if your lead is more than a minute at the ten km mark, you will beat the peloton by about a second. In fact, the break kept the minute mark up until the 5 km mark, when they all starting attacking each other. That may have happened since Voeckler and Ignatiev noticed the other guys had nothing left after almost 200 km of blustery crosswinds. Those same crosswinds fractured the peloton several times before the other sprinter teams gave up on letting Columbia set the pace and decided to do some work, getting the main group to the line only 7 seconds behind Voeckler. Their efforts were in vain, since Cavendish, the green jersey holder, got third place and 26 points to keep a commanding lead over the other sprinters.
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