Stage 1 - On Expectations

The Tour de France continued in predictable fashion over night, with a classics style stage of 198km from Liege to Seraing in Belgium unsurprisingly dominated by classics style riders. Pre-race favourite Peter Sagan took the win, outsprinting Fabian Cancelllara, resplendent in his yellow jersey, and Edvald Boasson Hagen. Belgian Phillipe Gilbert was 4^th. A small group of 40 made it to the finish but none of the main overall contenders lost any time (apart from that no-name German I highlighted yesterday who has now fallen out of the top 10).

Peter Sagan has won virtually every race on earth so far this season, so it was no surprise to see him win out on the day. He was given a dream path to the finish after hoping on Cancellara’s whell in the last 1500m, as the Swiss blew away from the peleton in trademark style. In taking the win Sagan struck a blow in the green jersey competition (he now trails Cancellara by just 6 points) with fellow rivals such as Mark Cavendish and Matt Goss absent from the finale. The market has moved heavily in his favour in this competition but we’ll get a better idea by the end of this week as to how the battle will go between the pure sprinters and the allrounders.

Overall the stage was pretty damn predictable (and if you didn’t have the top 4 finishes in your fantasy line up you should probably give the game away). Break of random French dudes goes out, gets caught, peleton winds it up in the last 10k, sprinters get blown off the back, strong man power away up the hill and classics specialists finish 1 2 3 4 5 – stock standard Tour de France in the modern era. Still, I think these style of stages give the first week a bit more flavour than the old school dead pan stages where it would be dead flat for the first 6 days and the sprinters would take turns at the glory.

We did get enough bobbles on the parcours to have a first leader in the mountains classification and Michael Morkov, a member of the days break will take the first polka dot jersey. He seemed pretty excited about it too after wrapping it up on the day’s second climb. Tejay Van Garderen finished in the main bunch so kept is slender lead over Boasson Hagen in the youth classification. The other highlight was an intrepid fan thinking the optimal place to grab a photo opportunity would be smack bang in the middle of the road as the peleton bore down on him. Needless to say the riders who crashed will not be happy with that performance.

Yellow Jersey – Fabian Cancellara

Green Jersey – Fabian Cancellara

Polka Dot Jersey – Michael Morkov

White Jersey – Tejay Van Garderen

Brock McLean Tweet of the day:

@Thollenshead – Sagan won #tdf stage 2 but @f_cancellara was the strongest. I’m calling a win like that #weaksauce for not taking a pull in the last 2k.