Stage 1

The road

At the start

Cancellara in yellow, a wall at the end

Fabian Cancellara starts the Tour's first road stage in yellow, seven seconds up on Bradley Wiggins and Sylvain Chavanel and ten on Tejay van Garderen. Liège to Seraing is a hundred and ninety-eight kilometres of Ardennes road that never flattens out, ending on a wall in the middle of a town — too steep for Cavendish and Greipel, far too short for the climbers. RadioShack find out what carrying yellow costs.

How it was won

1. 150 km to go

   RadioShack ride the whole day

   Six men went clear inside the first kilometre and RadioShack-Nissan have been chasing them ever since, one team on the front of the Tour de France for a hundred and fifty kilometres with nobody offering a hand. Fifty to go, a tailwind behind them, and they finally pull the gap under two minutes.

2. 29 km to go

   Greipel pulls, and that means something

   Maxime Bouet lasts longest of the six and is taken with nine kilometres left. Lotto Belisol lead the catch — but the man doing the pulling is André Greipel himself, which is Lotto saying out loud that they do not expect the wall at Seraing to give them a bunch sprint.

3. 32 km to go

   The yellow jersey attacks

   Chavanel jumps at the two-kilometre board and Albasini hauls him back on the steepest part of the ramp. Fabian Cancellara tows the entire race up to the pair of them and then simply keeps going. One rider gets across to the wheel: Peter Sagan, twenty-two, sitting there and declining to come through.

4. 4At the line

   Sagan comes around him

   Boasson Hagen bridges with five hundred metres left and the three of them tip into the last of the climb to Seraing. Cancellara opens at a hundred and fifty metres, which is the only card a man who cannot out-sprint them has left to play, and Sagan goes past on the outside so easily that he is sitting up and celebrating before the line. First Tour de France, first road stage, first win — and the jersey stays on the shoulders of the rider he has just beaten.

The result