Stage 8

The road

At the start

Wiggins in yellow, seven climbs to ride

La Planche des Belles Filles delivered what everybody expected of it: Chris Froome took the stage, Bradley Wiggins took the yellow jersey. Cadel Evans is ten seconds down, Vincenzo Nibali sixteen, and Fabian Cancellara has fallen away entirely. Today has no summit finish and seven categorised climbs in a hundred and fifty-seven kilometres, the Col de la Croix topping out sixteen from Porrentruy.

How it was won

1. 198 km to go

   Samuel Sánchez's Tour, and his Olympics

   Sixty kilometres in, three Spaniards go down together. Valverde and Azanza get up; the Olympic champion does not. Samuel Sánchez abandons with a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, and London is three weeks away.

2. 280 km to go

   Kessiakoff joins Roy

   Jérémy Roy has been out alone for an hour when Fredrik Kessiakoff bridges across to him with just over eighty kilometres left, and the two of them start putting real time into a peloton that has stopped paying attention.

3. 350 km to go

   Pinot bridges, Kessiakoff answers

   The Tour's youngest rider jumps out of a twenty-two-man chase and gets across to the leaders with De Weert and Kruijswijk. Kessiakoff's response is immediate: he attacks the moment they arrive and takes a minute forty-five out of everybody.

4. 415 km to go

   Over the top with seventeen to go

   Thibaut Pinot has been climbing all day at a level nobody expected of a twenty-two-year-old, and at the summit of the Col de la Croix he simply rides past Fredrik Kessiakoff and keeps going. Seventeen kilometres of fast Swiss descent to Porrentruy, on his own, with Evans, Wiggins, Nibali, Menchov and Schleck flinging themselves down the road behind him.

5. 5At the line

   Twenty-six seconds, and a country in uproar

   Pinot holds twenty-six of them to the line for the first French win of the Tour, his directeur sportif hanging out of the car window screaming at him for the last five kilometres. Evans takes second, Gallopin third, and Wiggins is fourth and still in yellow.

The result