British favourite Geraint puts time into his rivals

rivals simply could not live with it. One by one, the big guns yielded valuable time, some of them potentially ruinous dollops on the stopwatch – Thibaut Pinot restricted the damage to 12 seconds, but Adam Yates and Jakob Fuglsang shipped 21 secs each while Romain Bardet and Richie Porte both lost almost a minute.

Ineos were only pipped to the stage win by Jumbo-Visma’s Dutch train, who were last out of the starting gate.

But the frustration of a near miss with the fabled Maillot Jaune was a minor irritant on the day that Thomas and his formidable sidekick Egan Bernal put clear daylight between themselves and the big guns.

The Tour de France is never won in the first week, especially with monster mountain stages awaiting the peloton in the second half of the race.

But you can lose it if you are caught napping – and Thomas was happy to steal a march on some of his likeliest challengers for the crown in only the second stage.

“Looking at GC, it’s a good performance – obviously we wanted to win, but 20 seconds [to Jumbo-Visma] is a big enough gap to know a few mistakes didn’t cost us the stage win,” said Thomas.

“It was a positive day for sure, and it was good going off first because your judgement on how the ride went wasn’t skewed by the result.” It was a less satisfying day for Yates, the other fancied Brit in the GC field.

But the Mitchelton-Scott leader put a brave face on his deficit, saying: “It’s still early in the race but, as a team, we can be happy with that. It’s a stressful day for all the teams and it was tough out there.”

Jumbo-Visma’s storming ride put Dutchman Steven Kruijswijk, a dark horse in the pre-race betting, 20 seconds up the road from Thomas and kept overnight leader Mike Teunissen in the leader’s Yellow Jersey.

Teunissen said: “We already had a lot of morale with this jersey, but when we heard we were fastest at the first checkpoint, we were flying.”

Today’s third stage is a flat, 133-mile long haul across the border into France, finishing in Champagne country at Epernay. Last one in the Mercier tent picks up the tab.