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Tour de France Stage 10 Thor Hushovd Keeps Green Jersey

by Barbara McPherson | July 14, 2009 at 08:10 am

607 views | 46 Recommendations | 4 comments

Tour de France stage 10 saw Mark Cavendish riding for Columbia win the sprint finish to cross the line first, but Thor Hushovd riding for Cervelo Test Team coming in second gets to keep the green jersey. Tyler Farrar, Team Garmin, crossed third. Mark Cavendish has chalked up three stage wins in this Tour.

The overall standings for the race remain the same. Rinaldo Nocentini, Team AG2r, retains the yellow jersey. Alberto Contador rides second, Lance Armstrong rides third, both for Team Astana. Team Astana remains the top team in the Tour. The first three riders are separated by only 8 seconds after hundreds of kilometres.

This Bastille Day contest from Limoges to Issoudun was an undulating 194.5 km run. At about 4 km from the start, four riders started a breakaway and stayed out in front until about 1.5 km from the finish line.

A big part of finishing the Tour is the need to avoid catastrophic injuries. A Team Katusha rider took a hard fall 1.4 km from the finish. Kurt-Asle Arvensen, Team Saxo-Bank, crashed hard and will be off to the hospital for x-rays. So far in this Tour riders' injuries forcing them out of the Tour have been: broken collarbone and punctured lung, broken arm, broken wrist.

A great deal of attention was given to the experiment of no race radios or electronic communications between the riders and their team coaches. The experiment is sceduled to be repeated in Stage 13. The majority of teams were against the experiment. As it was, the lack of radio communications didn't seem to affect the outcome of this stage of the Tour. There might have been a mild protest registered by the riders today. The peloton rode very slowly for much of the race, only picking up the pace about 20 km from the finish. Or it might have been that the riders were saving their energy for the Alps.

Stage 11 the Tour heads in an easterly direction from Vatan to Saint-Fargeau, a distance of 192 km

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Paschen

at 08:20 on July 14th, 2009

I am glad you keep on posting about the Tour de France, saves me having to look elsewhere on the net. Thank you.

Roy C

at 11:38 on July 14th, 2009

Any explanation of the part about no radio communication?

Edmund Jenks

at 14:27 on July 14th, 2009

There or is another planned radio outage scheduled for Friday's Stage. I think the race organizers believe that this ruling will increase the opportunity for competition between the teams.

Is Team Astana just that strong? Is it that they do better radio than all of the other teams? I know, maybe Johan Bruyneel (Team Astana Manager) is just too good a team manager!

Nobody in the field likes it but they do not get a vote.