Giropaul +1
Sky has been doing brilliantly. So far they've won four stages, which is more than France has so far this Tour. They've had people in yellow and polka dot, and are still in yellow with a very good chance of winning the GC. The team was winning the team classification for the first seven days. No one can complain about all that.
At the end of the day, their main interest is keeping Wiggins in yellow, if they can get Cav to a sprint finish, without risking yellow, they will, but don't hold your breath, because yellow is going to be their main interest. Cav will probably have to work harder than he usually does, to make sure he's in the correct place, and possibly with a less than optimal lead out team (if at all). Cav is capable of doing that on the right course, but sometimes things won't work out perfectly, especially on stages like yesterday, when that gert big hill was always likely to scupper Cav's chances, he's not a climber.
Anyway, back to today. The small group of leaders, including Peter Sagan were always going to win the stage, they got so far out in front, there was no chance that the Peleton was going to catch them up, so it was a good win for Sanchez.
The tacks on the road was a bit of a disaster. It would have been interesting to see how the leaders of the peloton managed to get down from that horrendous climb up the Mur de Péguère, which looked fairly horrible, the speed that many of the cyclists appeared to be doing.
They're reporting something like 30 visitations occurring around the top of the climb, which makes you think that someone should have seen who did it, because the number of people around the climb, as ever, was huge.
Someone also crashed with a broken collar bone, which may have been caused by the tacks, so if the French police find anyone, they're a bit stuffed. On the flip side, at least that's all that happened. A puncture at the 60-70mph that you can apparently achieve on that downhill could have been fatal, so in many respects it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
It appears that Wiggins decided to neutralise the race, especially when Cadel Evans had had to stop three times with two flats, as did many other riders. That seems to be the right thing to have done, so it's reasonable, but spoilt the final race, since there could have been some interesting racing up to the line, although it would probably have been a finish where things wouldn't have changed much.
