Stage 7

The road

At the start

A mountain nobody has ridden

The crash twenty-five kilometres from Metz cost this Tour four riders outright, and cost Ryder Hesjedal, Fränk Schleck and Robert Gesink most of their races. Fabian Cancellara wakes up in yellow for the eighth day, seven seconds up on Bradley Wiggins. Today that ends somewhere: La Planche des Belles Filles has never been used by the Tour — 5.9 kilometres at 8.5 per cent, with the last hundred metres at fourteen.

How it was won

1. 188 km to go

   Nothing happens on the Grosse Pierre

   Two category-three climbs and the seven leaders roll over both without the race behind them stirring. Sánchez spends the Mont de Fourche complaining about the fans running alongside him. All of it is preamble.

2. 211 km to go

   Van den Broeck's mechanical, Valverde's puncture

   Eleven kilometres from the finish Jurgen Van den Broeck stops with a mechanical and has to chase with only Adam Hansen for company; moments later Alejandro Valverde punctures. Two of the ten best climbers in the race lose the front group before the mountain even starts.

3. 36 km to go

   Boasson Hagen splits the race

   Sky put Edvald Boasson Hagen on the front and the speed tears the peloton in half. The break is swallowed at the foot of the climb, and Gesink, Gilbert and Tony Martin are all shelled out the back within a kilometre of the first ramp.

4. 45 km to go

   Cancellara loses the yellow jersey

   Five kilometres of climbing left and the man who has worn yellow since Liège comes off the group. Fränk Schleck and Andreas Klöden are gone too. What is left of the 2012 Tour de France is about a dozen riders.

5. 51 km to go

   Five men under the flamme rouge

   Froome, Wiggins, Evans, Nibali and Taaramäe. Nobody else. With four hundred metres left Cadel Evans, the defending champion, goes to the front and opens the sprint.

6. 6At the line

   Froome on the fourteen per cent

   The last hundred metres of La Planche des Belles Filles stand up at fourteen per cent, and it is there that Chris Froome comes off Evans's wheel and rides away from him. Sky take the stage and the yellow jersey in the same movement — Wiggins third, in Evans's time — and the whole shape of this Tour is set in about eight seconds of climbing.

The result