Stage 9

The road

At the start

Froome in yellow by fifty-one seconds

Chris Froome soloed the last five kilometres to Ax 3 Domaines and turned the race upside down: he leads his own teammate Richie Porte by fifty-one seconds, Valverde by 1:25, Contador and Kreuziger by 1:51. Today is shorter and much harder — a hundred and sixty-eight kilometres out of Saint-Girons over the Portet d'Aspet, the Menté, the Peyresourde, the Val Louron-Azet and the Hourquette d'Ancizan.

How it was won

1. 1139 km to go

   Garmin scatter Sky on the first climb

   Millar, Danielson, Hesjedal and Dan Martin throw themselves at the Portet d'Aspet one after another, and Sky simply come apart. Twenty-nine kilometres into a stage with a hundred and forty still to ride, the yellow jersey has one teammate left.

2. 2123 km to go

   And then he has none

   On the Col de Menté, Richie Porte cracks trying to restore order, and Froome is alone in a thirty-strong group that Movistar now control. On the descent Valverde tries a cheeky dig; the maillot jaune follows it himself, calmly, on the road where Ocaña lost a Tour.

3. 378 km to go

   Movistar snuff out the revival

   Porte has chased at two minutes for more than fifty kilometres, and Movistar's tempo on the Peyresourde ends it. He will finish more than eighteen minutes down and out of the race for the podium; Froome will ride the rest of the day with nobody at all.

4. 433 km to go

   Martin jumps on Quintana's wheel-marks

   Four kilometres from the top of the Hourquette d'Ancizan, Quintana attacks for the first of four times. Froome answers every one of them smoothly, dragging Contador and Mollema across with him — and while everybody is watching that, Dan Martin slips away immediately after the first.

5. 529 km to go

   Fifty seconds at the summit

   Jakob Fuglsang bridges to Martin and the two crest the Hourquette with fifty seconds on the yellow jersey group. Thirty kilometres of descent to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and the stage is theirs to settle between them.

6. 6At the line

   Martin's cat and mouse

   He puts Fuglsang on the front under the red kite, refuses to be drawn into going first, and then takes the inside of the final left-hander and the sprint with it. Behind them the overall contenders come in together, twenty seconds down — and Sky, for the first time in two years, look mortal.

The result