7 crashes, 30 riders down on slick roads
TOUR DE FRANCE: Leaders avoid disaster
AMIENS, France — With crashes taking down riders on rain-drenched roads, keeping team leaders safe was the order of the day on Wednesday’s fifth stage of the Tour de France.
By the time Andre Greipel attacked in the last 100 metres to win his second stage of the Tour, and a third in five days for German riders, the last of the day’s seven crashes had taken down 30 riders.
There had been a big spill in stage three, too, involving some 20 riders. But once again, Chris Froome and the other Tour contenders avoided them.
“There was absolutely everything out there today. It rained, which made the roads slippery, and it was also windy,” said Ian Stannard, Froome’s Team Sky teammate. “That made for a stressful day.”
Peter Sagan, a Slovak rider seeking to win the green jersey as the Tour’s best sprinter for a fourth straight year, had even more reason to feel tired. He spent most of the day protecting his Tinkoff-Saxo teammate Alberto Contador, and then contested the stage sprint, zooming ahead of British rider Mark Cavendish to take second place behind Greipel.
“It was also very crazy today with rain, wind and a lot of crashes and I’m happy with how we finished,” Sagan said.
Three of his teammates were involved in crashes, but not Contador.
“Everybody wants to be at the front on a day like this to protect the team leaders and that creates tension,” Sagan said. “I want to help and protect Alberto.”
The yellow jersey group rolled over the line with no change to the leading positions.
German rider Tony Martin, the winner on stage 4, still leads Froome by 12 seconds and Tejay Van Garderen, a promising American rider with strong climbing skills, by 25.
The stage took the weary peloton over 189.5 kilometres from Arras to Amiens in northern France, passing some of the battlefields of the First World War.
The rain, which largely stayed away the day before, thundered down and turned the roads into something of an ice rink.