Stage 1

The road

At the start

Corsica, for the first time

The hundredth Tour de France starts on the one part of France it has never visited: two hundred and ten kilometres up the east coast of Corsica from Porto-Vecchio to Bastia, with two small climbs early and a finish flat enough that the sprinters have had it circled since the route was announced. Nobody has raced a metre of this race yet.

How it was won

1. 137 km to go

   A 176-kilometre escape ends

   The break has spent the whole day arguing with itself — sitting up, going again, four minutes, then forty seconds, then four minutes again. Jérôme Cousin, who started it, keeps riding when the others want to stop. Thirty-seven kilometres from Bastia the last four are taken.

2. 210 km to go

   The bus that stopped the Tour

   With the peloton ten kilometres out, the Orica-GreenEdge bus tries to pass under the finish gantry in Bastia and does not fit. Gendarmes converge on it and achieve nothing. The finish of the opening stage of the hundredth Tour de France is hastily moved back to the three-kilometre marker — which sits at the exit of a tight bend.

3. 33 km to go

   Everything happens at once

   The bus is reversed clear and the line is moved back to where it started — just as a mass crash near the head of the race takes down or blocks Sagan, Contador and Cavendish. Greipel avoids it and then has to stop with damage from it. Every lead-out train in the race is gone.

4. 4At the line

   Kittel, out of the confusion

   Terpstra jumps inside the last kilometre and Marcel Kittel simply rides past him: a first Tour stage and the first yellow jersey of the hundredth edition. The organisers, having moved the line twice, give every rider the same time.

The result