The Tour visited Cap d'Agde for only the second time ever, as the early Tour flat stages continued. Perpignan, on the other hand, is a traditional city for the Tour to visit, thought to symbolically indicate the Tour's entrance to (or exit from, in "counter-clockwise" years) the Pyrenees. A six rider breakaway, consisting of Anthony Geslin, Yauheni Hutarovich, Mikhail Ignatiev, Marcin Sapa, Albert Timmer and Thomas Voeckler, formed within the fir...
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The Tour visited Cap d'Agde for only the second time ever, as the early Tour flat stages continued. Perpignan, on the other hand, is a traditional city for the Tour to visit, thought to symbolically indicate the Tour's entrance to (or exit from, in "counter-clockwise" years) the Pyrenees. A six rider breakaway, consisting of Anthony Geslin, Yauheni Hutarovich, Mikhail Ignatiev, Marcin Sapa, Albert Timmer and Thomas Voeckler, formed within the first kilometre, and achieved a maximum lead of more than nine and a half minutes. Attacks by Ignatiev in the last 10km had reduced the escape group to four, until with 5 km Voeckler made what proved to be the decisive break. Ignatiev finished second just in front of Cavendish and the rest of the pack.
During the race, the peloton had split into several groups as a result of the wind, as had happened two days before. Among the absentees in the first group of the peloton were Denis Menchov and Tom Boonen, but they and their group managed to return to the main group after several kilometres of chasing. Robert Gesink, who had crashed just before the windy passage along the coastline started, eventually had to let the peloton go and finished more than nine minutes behind with what in the end proved to be a broken wrist. [6]
