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| Matteo Trentin edges out Peter Sagan in Tour de France stage seven | Matteo Trentin edges out Peter Sagan in Tour de France stage seven |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Listen closely to Matteo Trentin speak English and there are unmistakable hints of Manx in his accent – a bequeathment from his Omega Pharma-Quick Step team-mate Mark Cavendish, with whom he shares a room. Trentin has learnt plenty else from Cavendish too, judging by the way he held off Peter Sagan in a nose-to-nose sprint to win stage seven. | |
| As both men plunged for the line, heads aerodynamically down and pulses raging, it looked too close to call. But the freeze-frame photographs showed that Trentin had triumphed by the width of a ball bearing. “This win is for Cav and for the team,” said Trentin. “It’s beautiful because it came after six days of bad luck. | |
| “We fought for Cav on the first day and since his crash we have kept fighting,” he added. “On the hills and the flat and even on the cobbles we kept saying ‘let’s try for every stage, let’s try for every possibility’ and it paid off. I will celebrate with champagne.” | |
| A year ago the 24-year-old Trentin became the first Italian to win a stage of the Tour de France in three years. Now he has decisively ended Omega Pharma-Quick Step’s frustrating week. No wonder he was smiling. | |
| But for Sagan the agony lingers. He has finished in the top five on all seven stages, and leads the green jersey standings by a street, yet a stage win eludes him. That the finish sharply contrasted with the early gentility on the road from Epernay to Nancy came as little surprise. At 234.5km the stage was the second-longest of this year’s Tour. Riders needed to ease their way in after the strain and pain of the previous days. | |
| It helped that the rain that has dogged this year’s race had finally stopped. Minds were becalmed and legs needed to be pacified with the Vosges mountains on the horizon. As a result, a six-man breakaway led for over 150km without much undue chasing. Along the way the riders passed the first world war battlefield at Verdun, where heads were nodded to the fallen. | |
| There was just one abandonment on the day – the 20-year-old Danny van Poppel. His withdrawal left Britain’s Simon Yates as the youngest rider left in the Tour. Yates, a 22-year-old from Bury, has quietly chugged away on his first grand tour and currently sits in 85th out of 186 riders. As the road steepened and came out of the forests with 17km remaining, he was the first man over the fourth-category Côte de Maron, scoring one point in the king of the mountain’s jersey. | |
| Almost immediately afterwards the American Teejay van Garderen, who at 2m 11 sec down on general classification was in striking distance of the yellow jersey, was involved in a big crash. Despite pushing desperately hard to make up the time, he lost 1m 03 sec on the stage. | |
| Most of the peloton was still together up the final climb of the day, the Côte de Boufflers, but Sagan and Greg van Avermaet were able to attack and get a lead of around seven seconds on the 5.5km descent to Nancy. Both men worked together, but the bunch closed and had caught them by the 1km flag. | |
| Briefly Team Sky’s Richie Porte, looking to stay out of trouble, led on the final straight. That appeared a wise decision as Simon Gerrans, hoping to get in contention for the finish, took out Andrew Talansky, who flipped off his bike as if thrown from a bucking bronco. | |
| Afterwards Porte sounded relieved at making it through safely. He remains in seventh position, 1m 54 sec behind Vincenzo Nibali. “It was a long stressful day, it might look easy on the television but I’m glad I got through and that the cross winds didn’t materialise,” he said. ‚“Thank God for my team and for Bernie Eisel, he had me in his back pocket all day.” | |
| Nibali knows that his rivals are ready to pounce, starting with today’s eighth stage from Tomblaine to Gérardmer La Mauselaine. Its narrow roads and steep climbs will provide a short, sharp shock to the peloton, although we will probably have to wait until Monday’s 10th stage, up La Planche des Belles Filles, for the general classification places to get a proper rattling. “I don’t know the Vosges climbs,” admitted Nibali, “but I know Alberto Contador and the others will attack. It will be a very nervous stage but we’ll try and keep things under control to the end, then we’ll see what happens. | |
| The first three-quarters of 161km stage is flat, but with 30km remaining the road to Gérardmer gets choppy. First comes the second-category 896m Col de la Croix des Moinats, a 7km-long slow burner, then the Col de la Grosse Pierre, which climbs at 11.3% at one point and has narrow hairpins. To finish off, the 1.8km climb to the La Mauselaine ski station has an average gradient of 10.3%. | |
| And if the peloton haven’t been tortured enough by the crashes and rain and cobbles, there is another pain that will linger long in their minds: the next flat stage is not until Stage 15 on Sunday week | |