CYCLING/TOUR DE FRANCE: DARK, THREATENING clouds have been hanging over this Tour since it left Brest on Saturday afternoon. They have been meteorological rather than metaphorical, born of a depression in the Irish Sea rather than an impending doping scandal, so it should have surprised no one when the rider who likes to call himself the Thunder God, Thor Hushovd, won yesterday's bunch sprint.

Hushovd rightly pointed out that the weather over this Breton weekend has been pretty much like that in his native Norway: foul, cold, with strong winds and rain. Conditions were similar for his stage win not far away from here at Quimper in the 2004 race, and he probably said the same thing back then.

Both stages over the weekend offered pulsating finales on uphill finishes; yesterday, the route climbed steeply from a yachting marina up into the town centre in the final three miles. The day's escape was brought to heel on the climb, a test of strength which threw the domestiques out of kilter, meaning that none of the sprinters had a full team to support them in the final kilometre and a half.

Initially, a burst from world time-trial champion Fabian Cancellara looked promising, but unlike in his victory last year at Compiegne, the big Swiss had mistimed his effort; Hushovd's Australian team-mate Mark Renshaw had him in his sights, and the Norwegian duly surged forth as the road dipped downwards with 300 metres to go. Not quite the speed of a lightning bolt as his personal website claims, but pretty rapid nonetheless.

In past years, a stage win on day two of the Tour would have guaranteed a bunch sprinter the yellow jersey, provided he had managed to perform respectably in the previous day's prologue time-trial. But there was no prologue in this Tour, and there are no time bonus seconds deducted for placings in the stage finishes or the intermediate hotspots, so Hushovd had to content himself with the stage win.

Instead, this morning the maillot jaune will stay on the shoulders of the Spaniard Alejandro Valverde, Saturday's stage winner at Plumelec. The only current doubt about Valverde concerns the codeword valv.piti, allegedly scribbled on one of the bags of blood in the Operation Puerto affair two years ago. He denies any involvement, and the investigation seems to have run into a dead end.

In a Tour without an obvious favourite and with no dominant figure, he has a handy psychological edge, due both to the win and the fact that yesterday his Caisse d'Epargne team controlled matters with ease.

Yesterday, the omens should have been auspicious for Mark Cavendish as he began his challenge to be the first Briton to take a bunch sprint finish in the Tour since Barry Hoban's stage win at Bordeaux in 1975.

Two hairpins from the bottom of the tough climb from the little yachting port of Plerin back up into the town centre is the spot where British cyclist Chris Boardman fell and broke his ankle during the prologue time-trial that opened the 1995 race as he sped downwards in the opposite direction to that taken by Cavendish and company yesterday.

While two cyclists in the sky-blue jerseys of the Columbia clothing company finished close behind Hushovd, they were Cavendish's team-mates Gerard Ciolek and Kim Kirchen, the Luxembourg rider who had also finished second on Saturday to Valverde and thus takes over the points winner's green jersey. Cavendish had lost a little ground on the steep climb that preceded the finish on Rue Pierre de Coubertin, and was unable to figure in the sprint.

While the Manxman is understandably a little frustrated, David Millar is exactly where he wanted to be. In Saturday's stage finish on top of the Cadoudal hill at Plumelec the Scot was one of 12 riders who finished one second behind Valverde, and he gained six seconds on Cancellara, the big favourite for tomorrow's time-trial in Cholet.

There are always victims on these early stages of the Tour, and the most significant casualty looks set to be last year's King of the Mountains, the Colombian Mauricio Soler, who lost ground as he nursed a possible broken wrist from a crash on Saturday.

Today's flat stage crosses Brittany in the opposite direction to yesterday's rather hillier effort. The finish in the streets of Nantes has no hill but is spattered with roundabouts and traffic islands. "Acrobatic" is the verdict of Saturday's third finisher, Jerome Pineau.