Peter Sagan taken out by a motorbike

Peter Sagan had 7km to go. He’d got over the two climbs and there weren’t any particularly strong sprinters left in the front group. He should have been confident of finishing one place higher than usual. But then a support motorbike cleaned him out.

Sagan was displeased by this. Standing around in the road immediately after, with his shorts all torn, he screamed at the bloke. He punched a car. He kicked the motorbike. He kicked his own bike. When he rode off, he spurned assistance from the medical car for the simple reason that he was too pissed off to be treated.

Belgian rider Jasper Stuyven won the sprint. No-one really knows who he is, underlining the feeling that Sagan had been robbed. The Slovak can at least comfort himself with the fact that he isn’t Dan Martin, Tejay Van Garderen or Nacer Bouhanni though. All three of them crashed out of the race in the same hefty, destructive incident.