Stage 12

The road

At the start

Bastille Day, and the Tourmalet

Mark Cavendish took the green jersey at Lavaur, and Thomas Voeckler is still in yellow: 1:49 on Luis León Sánchez, 2:26 on Cadel Evans, 2:37 on Andy Schleck, with the climbers yet to show anything at all. That ends today, and it ends on Bastille Day — the Hourquette d'Ancizan, then the Col du Tourmalet, then the first summit finish of this Tour, thirteen kilometres up Luz-Ardiden.

How it was won

1. 190 km to go

   HTC take the whole road

   Movistar the middle, HTC the left, Omega Pharma the right — and HTC have it easily in hand, delivering Cavendish seventh, Renshaw eighth and Goss tenth. Nine more points, and green is eighteen clear of Rojas with the high mountains still to come.

2. 269 km to go

   Hoogerland attacks again

   Movistar set a hard pace on the first climb and the first man to answer it is Hoogerland, barbed wire and stitches and all. Chavanel and Kreuziger go across to him.

3. 364 km to go

   The corner on the Hourquette

   Geraint Thomas loses the front wheel on damp tarmac, finds a gap between parked vehicles and slides to a stop inches from the cliff side. He remounts, shoots onto the grass again on the next bend with mud still on his tyres, and gets back to the leaders anyway. Minutes later the peloton reaches the same corner and a handful go down; Voeckler brakes into a parked car.

4. 435 km to go

   Roy first through the fog

   The Tourmalet is wrapped in cloud and the break has finally come apart on it. Jérémy Roy moves back up to Thomas and crosses the summit first for the Souvenir Jacques Goddet, with Jens Voigt dragging an ever-smaller yellow-jersey group up behind.

5. 58 km to go

   Vanendert and Sánchez arrive

   Eight kilometres up Luz-Ardiden, Jelle Vanendert and Samuel Sánchez come up to Thomas and Roy and ride straight past them. The two who have been away all day have nothing left; between them they take the Goddet and the combativity prize and no more than that.

6. 63 km to go

   Fränk Schleck's third try

   The brothers have been feinting at Contador all the way up the mountain, jabs rather than knockout blows — Andy going, the Spaniard following, Fränk shooting up the other side. With two and a half kilometres left Fränk finally gets a clean gap and goes after the leaders alone, up a narrow road walled with people.

7. 7At the line

   Sánchez, ten years on

   Samuel Sánchez takes the first Tour de France stage win of a long career at the top of Luz-Ardiden, ten years after his old teammate Roberto Laiseka was the last man to win here. Vanendert is second, and Fränk Schleck runs out of mountain just short of them both.

The result