Sport

Fedrigo's stage win marred by pile-up

Cycling/Tour de France Stage 14: There is an innocuous look to the twisting, sunbaked roads that lead to this little Alpine …

William Fotheringham in Gap
Mon Jul 17 2006 - 01:00

Cycling/Tour de France Stage 14: There is an innocuous look to the twisting, sunbaked roads that lead to this little Alpine crossroads on the Route Napoleon and the old Roman route through the Alps, but the Tour's cyclists know better. Yesterday history repeated itself and, as in the last visit here in 2003, the outcome of the stage, won by France's Pierrick Fedrigo, was affected by a major pile-up.

It came 23 miles from the finish, on a sharp right-hand bend, suddenly and rather messily halving the six-man escape that eventually contested the finish. Travelling at about 35mph the Belgian Mario Aerts's back wheel skittered on melted Tarmac, causing the Spaniard David Canada to shy like a frightened pony, lose control and fall heavily on his back.

Aerts sailed on downwards unscathed with Fedrigo and the eventual runnner-up Salvatore Commesso, but another Belgian, Rik Verbrugghe, and Germany's third-stage winner at Valkenburg, Matthias Kessler, fell over and around Canada. Their bikes smashed into the metal barrier on the outside of the bend, sending them into the air, over the barrier and down the slope on the other side.

Incredibly Kessler continued to the finish, but Verbrugghe and Canada were taken to hospital, the Belgian with a broken leg, the Spaniard with a fractured collarbone.

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You did not need to be a particularly attentive student of cycling history to call the images to mind from 2003: Joseba Beloki splattering into the Tarmac after blowing a tyre, and Lance Armstrong missing the Spaniard by inches, diving off the road, across a field of sweetcorn, and back on to the Tarmac 50 feet lower down the hill.

It would be unfair to Fedrigo, however, to suggest that the crash made the task of winning the stage more straightforward. This was the third French stage victory on this Tour and he played Commesso and Aerts as coolly as an angler with a docile salmon.

Aerts was disposed of on the final climb, the Col de la Sentinelle, just before the final plunge to the finish, but Commesso was harder to crack. The piratical Neapolitan is wily, a stage winner at Albi in 1999 and Fribourg in 2000, but with the peloton snapping at the pair's heels he allowed Fedrigo to manoeuvre him to the front in the final 500 metres, making the sprint a formality.

It was a first Tour stage win in seven starts for the team run since 2000 under various banners - of which Bouygues Telecom is the latest - by Bernard Hinault's old domestique Jean-Rene Bernaudeau, which is impressively strict on the anti-doping front and has a policy of developing its own talent through an amateur feeder team.

The crashes underlined the fact that stages such as yesterday's can have an impact that belies their innocuous profile. There were only two second-category climbs and a smattering of ascents rated third-category but the roads were never straight, rarely wide and always rose and fell through lavender fields and apricot orchards, amid fortified villages baking in the afternoon sun.

In yesterday's intense heat none of the field, except perhaps Fedrigo, would have agreed with the writer Jean Giono that this area is "heaven on earth".

Each day the medical bulletin issued by the Tour doctors grows longer, with riders complaining of insect bites, digestive troubles and dizziness, all down to the heat.

Four more abandoned yesterday, including the Welsh-domiciled Swedish giant Magnus Backstedt, who has influenza, and there were little groups scattered all over the hills up to half an hour behind Fedrigo, with the triple Tour of Italy winner Gilberto Simoni 20 minutes back.

David Millar had targeted this stage but was suffering from what may be the start of a throat infection; the Olympic track champion Bradley Wiggins finished alongside him, eight minutes behind the winner, but looked positively lively as he performed domestique duty on the final climb, helping the team leader Sylvain Chavanel limit his losses after another crash.

Today the peloton will put its feet up and try not to think about what lies ahead: three days of heavy climbing in the Alps and a brisk sprint to the lowlands on Friday for the time-trial.

There is more food for thought in the events of Saturday, when Floyd Landis relinquished the lead to Oscar Pereiro of Spain. The American looked positively pleased to have lost the yellow jersey; if he had worn it yesterday his Phonak team would have had to ride tempo over yesterday's tough roads. They had virtually to ride with their brakes on in the final kilometres on Saturday to permit Pereiro to gain the half-hour he needed to take the lead, but now they have saved their strength and gained a valuable ally in the Spaniard's Caisse d'Epargne team.

LEADING FINAL POSITIONS (Montelimar - Gap, 180.5km): 1 Pierrick Fedrigo (Fra) Bouygues Telecom 4hrs 14mins 23secs, 2 Salvatore Commesso (Ita) Lampre-Fondital at same time, 3 Christian Vandevelde (USA) Team CSC at 0.03secs, 4 Christophe Moreau (Fra) AG2R-Prevoyance at 0.07, 5 Georg Totschnig (Aut) Gerolsteiner, 6 Stefano Garzelli (Ita) Liquigas, 7 Michael Boogerd (Ned) Rabobank, 8 Cristian Moreni (Ita) Cofidis, 9 George Hincapie (USA) Discovery Channel, 10 Cadel Evans (Aus) Davitamon-Lotto, 11 Alexandre Botcharov (Rus) Credit Agricole, 12 Christophe Rinero (Fra) Saunier Duval, 13 Damiano Cunego (Ita) Lampre-Fondital, 14 Cyril Dessel (Fra) AG2R-Prevoyance, 15 Denis Menchov (Rus) Rabobank.

OVERALL CLASSIFICATION (after Stage 14): 1 Oscar Pereiro (Spa) Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears 64hrs 05mins 04secs, 2 Floyd Landis (USA) Phonak at 1min 29secs, 3 Cyril Dessel (Fra) AG2R-Prevoyance at 1.37, 4 Denis Menchov (Rus) Rabobank at 2.30, 5 Cadel Evans (Aus) Davitamon-Lotto at 2.46, 6 Carlos Sastre (Spa) Team CSC at 3.21, 7 Andreas Klöden (Ger) T-Mobile at 3.58, 8 Michael Rogers (Aus) T-Mobile at 4.51, 9 Juan Miguel Mercado (Spa) Agritubel at 5.02, 10 Christophe Moreau (Fra) AG2R-Prevoyance at 5.13, 11 Yaroslav Popovych (Ukr) Discovery Channel at 5.44, 12 Marcus Fothen (Ger) Gerolsteiner at 5.46, 13 Haimar Zubeldia (Spa) Euskaltel-Euskadi at 5.55, 14 Patrik Sinkewitz (Ger) T-Mobile at 7.07, 15 Levi Leipheimer (USA) Gerolsteiner at 7.08, 16 Michael Boogerd (Ned) Rabobank at 7.23, 17 Georg Totschnig (Aut) Gerolsteiner at 8.16, 18 Vladimir Karpets (Rus) Caisse d'Epargne-Illes Balears at 8.36, 19 Jose Azevedo (Por) Discovery Channel at 9.11, 20 Frank Schleck (Lux) Team CSC at 10.06 Selected Others: 75 David Millar (Brit) Saunier Duval at 53mins 23secs, 130 Bradley Wiggins (Brit) Cofidis at 1hr 24mins 34secs.