Stage 3

The road

At the start

Five climbs in the last sixteen kilometres

Cavendish took the first bunch sprint of the Tour in Tournai and nothing moved: Fabian Cancellara still leads Bradley Wiggins and Sylvain Chavanel by seven seconds. Today starts at Orchies, a name that belongs to Paris-Roubaix, but there is no pavé — there are five categorised climbs in the last sixteen kilometres and a seven-hundred-metre ramp to the line at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

How it was won

1. 187 km to go

   The crashes begin

   The road narrows and starts to climb and the Tour starts falling over. Ryder Hesjedal goes down early; minutes later a heavier crash takes out Kanstantsin Siutsou, the first rider of the 2012 Tour to abandon and a rider Sky needed in the mountains.

2. 237 km to go

   The field splits

   The break lifts the pace with thirty-seven kilometres left and behind them another crash puts Simon Gerrans and Philippe Gilbert on the floor. José Joaquín Rojas abandons with a suspected broken collarbone, and half the peloton has a very long way to ride to get back on.

3. 36 km to go

   Chavanel goes on home roads

   Five and a half kilometres out Sylvain Chavanel attacks over the last rise before the descent into Boulogne. He knows every metre of it and he keeps pulling away — until a roundabout with two kilometres left forces him to grab the brakes.

4. 4At the line

   Sagan dances

   The finishing climb is short, steep and awkward, and the field explodes up it. Albasini leads; Peter Sagan comes off his wheel in the last hundred metres with the kind of acceleration nobody else in the race owns, and Boasson Hagen and Velits are left grinding for the places. Two stages in three days for a twenty-two-year-old at his first Tour.

The result