Stage 5

The road

At the start

Cap Fréhel, and the Channel wind

Cadel Evans won on the Mûr by the width of a tyre and took the mountains jersey with it, but Hushovd hung on to yellow by a single second and still has it. Jurgen Van de Walle has gone home. Seventy of today's kilometres run along the coast into Cap Fréhel: if the wind gets up off the Channel there will be echelons, and if it does not there will be a bunch sprint. Mark Cavendish has not won a stage yet.

How it was won

1. 190 km to go

   The day the circus starts

   Two innocuous-looking accidents in three kilometres and the race changes shape: Janez Brajkovič is out of the Tour, Alberto Contador is on a new bike, and Robert Gesink is picking his way back through the cars. The intermediate sprint at Goudelin passes almost unnoticed.

2. 258 km to go

   Boonen goes down

   Tom Boonen hits the deck with Dries Devenyns and Gert Steegmans and limps to the line with Addy Engels for company. The Tour will not see much more of him.

3. 332 km to go

   Voeckler and Roy go anyway

   With the finish still a long way off, Thomas Voeckler and Jérémy Roy attack a peloton full of sprinters' teams and have forty-one seconds inside four kilometres. BMC, Leopard Trek and Liquigas patrol the front, and the cross-tailwind does the rest.

4. 4At the line

   Cavendish, the hard way

   After twenty-nine kilometres together Voeckler drops Roy and rides one more alone before the dream ends two kilometres out. Then HTC do what HTC do: Cavendish comes off Renshaw's wheel at a hundred and fifty metres and rounds the lot of them for a sixteenth Tour stage.

The result