CYCLING:THE PHRASE "the road to Paris is long" is one of the oldest cliches in the Tour de France lexicon, but it will be especially apposite for the Tour leader Bradley Wiggins from now on.

He got a taste of what is in store for him yesterday on his first day in the yellow jersey, when one of the most animated stages in recent years ended with Vincenzo Nibali of Italy, Jurgen Van Den Broeck of Belgium and the defending Tour champion, Cadel Evans, testing his legs into the finish. Then, afterwards, he received his first proddings from the media.

Van Den Broeck and his faithful sidekick Jelle Vanendert will be constant threats in the mountains now, and they accelerated at the top of the last climb of the day, the short, steep and aptly named Col de la Croix, asking questions of the lead group, which was then whittled down to just Wiggins, Chris Froome, Van Den Broeck, Nibali and Evans.

It was the Italian who attacked twice on the descent – perhaps because the general perception is that going downhill is Wiggins’ weak point – but the Englishman responded, and he had the legs in the final kilometres to answer a late attack from the Belgian, who swept away after going round a roundabout on the opposite side from the rest of the group, with Evans, briefly, joining him.

“I’m not surprised by anything at the Tour,” said Wiggins. “I expect anything, never underestimate anything, and never predict anything. It’s difficult to say when you can ever relax.”

There are other tests of a Tour leader, however. This became evident when a journalist asked Wiggins for his opinion on comparisons being made on the internet between Wiggins’ Sky team and Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team, which has been linked to a current investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency.

The journalist was given short shrift. “I say they’re just f***king w*****s. I cannot be doing with people like that,” said Wiggins.

“It justifies their own boneidleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing anything in their lives.

“It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it, ” added the rider.

For Wiggins, it was probably the most stressful moment of his Tour so far, more so than the stage through the Jura over the Col de la Croix.

The road of the cross is one of the eternal Tour metaphors, but delightfully the stage also boasted the Col de la Passage de la Douleur. The 157km over the Swiss border was one long Passage of Pain for many as its brevity, less than four hours, meant the action was constant from the off, the group around Wiggins and Sky constantly diminishing.

The largest group at the finish numbered fewer than 40, and there was a further reshuffle at the top of the classification, with the Estonian Rein Taaramae, Fabian Cancellara, and Nicolas Roche losing ground.

The search for French cyclists of quality is a constant, and often painful, theme in the Tour and another one emerged when the youngest rider in the race, Thibaut Pinot, won the stage with a perfectly timed attack over the final climb and a brave effort to hold off the eight-strong group that included the “heads” of the race.

Pinot is 22 years and five weeks old, but already has a good climbing pedigree, and is one of the many promising jeunes who have been brought into cycling through Marc Madiot, the two-times Paris-Roubaix winner who has run Francaise des Jeux, the squad backed by the French national lottery, since 1997.

Pinot bided his time during the large escape that dominated the stage, then attacked late to overtake the Swede Alexander Kessiakoff close to the top of the Col de la Croix.

It was the sixth win of his young career and is in a different dimension to what has gone before. But for most French cyclists, the big struggle is kicking on after the initial breakthrough.

The first French stage win of the Tour had the TV commentators in ecstasies – the more so when one team-mate after another came up to give him a man-hug for the cameras after the finish – but the most dramatic spectacle was Madiot’s paroxysm of delight and encouragement, smashing his fist into the car door, screaming and punching the air.

The lotteries that count for most in the Tour, unfortunately, are the crashes that have beset the race since Liege, and they continued en route to Porrentruy when Samuel Sanchez was involved in a four-rider pile-up only 35 miles into the stage.

The Spaniard landed heavily on his left shoulder and was carried off with a badly bruised collarbone and a broken right hand, all of which may end his chances of defending the Olympic title on July 28th.