Cycling/Tour de France: The current king of the Tour sprinters, Alessandro Petacchi, says he is "always" scared when the elbows come out in the build-up to a mass finish. It might be a relief to ordinary mortals to hear that sprinters are not as nerveless as they look, but it will come as no comfort to their nearest and dearest who have to watch them dice with disaster.
Yesterday there was nothing to compare to the vast pile-up in the sprint on last year's opening day into Meaux - but the elbowing and barging as the peloton sped up the finish straight here at 40 m.p.h., led by the apple-cheeked Estonian Jaan Kirsipuu, suggested a repetition of that disaster is just a miscalculation away.
At 12 days off his 35th birthday, Kirsipuu is old for a sprinter, but his chances were improved by the 126-mile length of the Belgian stage plus a downpour and a welter of little climbs to deaden younger legs early on when the race looped into the Ardennes. Even so his fourth Tour stage win came in a spectacularly tight finish, with the Norwegian Thor Hushovd and the Australian Robbie McEwen within a wheel.
Hushovd, in with a shout of taking the yellow jersey after his fifth place in Saturday's time-trial, led the sprint out but he had Kirsipuu in his slipstream. He glimpsed the win that would have put him in the maillot jaune, only for Kirsipuu to edge past, with McEwen finishing at a speed that would have meant victory had he not had to bounce Petacchi out of his way twice.
There was a whiff of Ireland in the autumnal chill and heavy rain that hung over the Ardennes, and there was a fair bit of Ireland in Kirsipuu's win because Sligo's Mark Scanlon, the first Irishman to start the Tour since the heady years of Roche and Kelly, is one of the Estonian's right-hand men in the finish sprint.
The 1998 junior world champion put in a mighty surge on behalf of his leader shortly after the peloton had swept up the final two escapees of the day, the Belgian Marc Wauters and Denmark's Jakob Piil, both former stage winners, who had sped away going into the flat farmland north of the Moselle. Scanlon finished in the main bunch, given the same time as the winner, and lies 63rd overall, just 36 seconds down on the race leader and prologue winner, the 23-year-old Swiss Fabian Cancellara.
The much-hyped showdown between the former king of the Tour sprints Mario Cipollini and his heir-apparent Petacchi never caught fire. Left behind on the day's only real hill, Cipollini looks well off form as he sets out on what will be his last Tour.
Petacchi, on the other hand, was stymied by tactics. His Fassa Bortolo team-mates had to help Cancellara defend the maillot jaune and had no strength left to support Petacchi in the finale.
