Stage 6

The road

At the start

Nothing moved, and nothing should today

The top of the classification is untouched: Nibali by three seconds from Horner, eight from Roche, sixteen from Zubeldia. Today runs a hundred and seventy-five kilometres across Extremadura to Cáceres with one small climb in the middle of it and every reason to end in a bunch sprint.

How it was won

1. 1149 km to go

   Tony Martin goes alone from the flag

   The world time trial champion attacks the moment the neutral zone ends, on his own, and keeps going. After twenty-six kilometres he has 7:24 — a training ride for Florence, apparently, conducted at the head of a Grand Tour.

2. 220 km to go

   One minute, twenty to go

   Orica and Belkin have held him at around five minutes all day; Argos-Shimano eventually join in and the arithmetic becomes cruel. At the twenty-kilometre marker the gap is exactly a minute. When it falls to nine seconds he finds enough to double it again.

3. 3At the line

   Caught at a hundred metres

   Six seconds under the red kite, still clear at five hundred metres — and then the sprinters arrive. Fittingly it is Fabian Cancellara who leads the charge that swallows him, and Michael Mørkøv who uses his track legs to come past the Swiss on the line. Martin, after 174.9 kilometres alone, is seventh.

The result