Stage 4

The road

At the start

Paolini in pink, and the longest day

Luca Paolini took the stage and the maglia rosa off a descent nobody had marked as dangerous, and this morning he has seventeen seconds on Wiggins and Urán and thirty-one on Nibali. Ahead is the longest stage of the race: two hundred and forty-seven kilometres through Calabria to a gradual twelve-kilometre drag up to Serra San Bruno.

How it was won

1. 167 km to go

   Nibali loses the wheel in the murk

   The weather closes down over Calabria and takes the visibility with it. Somewhere on a descent Vincenzo Nibali either punctures or goes down — nobody is quite sure which — and has to ride his way back to a group of favourites that has stopped waiting for anyone.

2. 26 km to go

   Sky grind, Di Luca goes

   Sky take the front with fifteen kilometres left and shed riders in handfuls up the long drag to Serra San Bruno. Near the top Danilo Di Luca jumps and Sky simply let him go; Robinson Chalapud chases across, and the two disappear into the rain and fog.

3. 3At the line

   Caught at three hundred metres

   Di Luca will not stop looking over his shoulder and will not stop pedalling. He still has a gap under the flamme rouge and still has one at eight hundred metres — and loses it at three hundred, swallowed whole. Enrico Battaglin wins the sprint by several lengths.

The result