ROULEUR CENTENARY TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE 1 Porto-Vecchio to Bastia
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They were only 2km from the place where they now expected to end the race, and starting to prepare for the final effort, when a new instruction came through: the bus had been moved at last and the finish would be at the original location. A solution had been found, apparently by someone from Movico, the Dutch company responsible for the Tour’s portable grandstands and other finish-line facilities. Perhaps he or she had recalled the title of a comic film of the 1960s, starring Jerry Lewis: Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River. The answer was to stop trying to lift the span clear of the bus’s roof, and instead to let some air out of the tyres on the vehicle’s ten wheels before easing it out without demolishing the whole thing. While the road captains of the leading riders were recalibrating their already recalibrated efforts in the
final kilometres, Greipel joined the list of casualties, the rear mech of his derailleur gears sheared off in a crash. While he stood holding his useless machine, waiting for a replacement amid the chaotic procession of team cars whose occupants were trying to work out how many riders they had left and exactly where they were, the remaining sprinters started to wind up for the climax. They were on the final bend, almost in sight of the line with 350m to go, when Matt Goss hit the barrier and came down: the last but one survivor of the group of top sprinters who had been expected to contest the finish, and another unhappy moment on a bad day for Orica-GreenEdge. The last man standing was Marcel Kittel, the big 25-yearold leader of the Argos-Shimano team, who did not fail to profit from his good fortune. Through his earpiece a