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bridge above the
line.
    There, under a big sign for Vittel mineral water, the bus got jammed, seemingly unable to move forward or back. When something unforeseen happens on the Tour, the space between the incident and
a proper understanding of how it came about is filled with hearsay. These can be juicy and the excitement lasts until the truth comes out.
    So this is what came off the production line at the rumour mill: driver is cruising along the road to Bastia when he decides what he’d really like to do is watch the second test of the
rugby union series between Australia and the British and Irish Lions. So he stops, orders a sandwich, watches the game, arrives late at the finish line after the gantry has been lowered and his bus
gets stuck.
    The president of the race jury, Vicente Tortajada Villarroya from Spain, sees the pictures of the bus wedged into the timing bridge and decides to switch the finish to the 3km-to-go mark and
communicates this to the team managers. This causes panic among the riders because they’re guessing the new finish is now located in the midst of narrow roads, sharp corners and short
straights.
    What dissuaded Señor Tortajada Villarroya from stopping the race until the bus was freed and then re-starting it, no one knows. But, just in time, the bus extricates itself from the
timing bridge and it’s decided to revert back to the original finish line. Problem being that some of the riders now knew about the change and others didn’t.
    Chaos.
    Pandemonium.
    And the crashes that might have taken place before the hastily chosen new finish line happen just before the original finish line. The stage is won by Marcel Kittel, the German sprinter with the
Argos team. People presume this is typical of what happens in the first mass sprint when everyone is fresh and the result is not to be trusted. Kittel, it is assumed, shouldn’t beat
Cavendish. The following three weeks would dismantle that assumption.
    Similarly, the assumption about the rugby-loving Aussie bus driver proved to be false. Garikoitz Atxa who drove the Orica team bus into Bastia that afternoon is in fact Spanish, and is not a
rugby union fan.
    Things improved for the race from there on. A second stage streaked over the jagged mountains from Bastia towards Ajaccio and Team Sky, depleted and sapped by the first day’s crashes, had
the pleasure of seeing Froome attack alone on one of the climbs.
    Nothing too serious, just a boyish checking out of his own powers and a desire to poach a little lead so that, when they began the descent, he would be able to pick his own lines and decide how
fast he wanted to go. While not the worst descender in the peloton, neither is Froome the best. Instead, he uses his class going uphill to pick and choose in whose company he negotiates the
descents.
    And if the stretching of legs sent a little flare over the heads of his rivals, that would have pleased him. No one with half a brain mistakes Froome’s politeness and softly spoken
sentences for expressions of timidity. He has come to the Tour to win it and, such is his desire, the challenge for him is not the courage to attack but the discretion to know when not to.
    Jan Bakelants of RadioShack took the stage on a day when Geraint Thomas was Sky’s big concern. His horrific crash at the end of the previous day’s stage left him sore around the hip
and pelvis but an initial X-ray didn’t show up any break. But soon after leaving Bastia, Thomas was in trouble and immediately after the finish in Ajaccio, he was sent for another X-ray. Not
many around the team expect him to last more than another day or two.
    Thomas is someone that the team’s brains trust – Brailsford, Kerrison and Ellingworth – believe could develop into a Tour de France contender. Without the injured Wiggins, the
Welshman’s role in this race is greater because his intelligence and outgoing personality make him the obvious man to captain the team on the