This is what we have to look forward to tomorrow, a 231km slog from Fougères to Chartres. And with that, I’m gone. Bye!
Dumoulin is now 15th in the classification, one place and one second behind Froome.
Dumoulin was seventh going into this stage, 44sec ahead of Chris Froome. I haven’t seen a full list of the GC standings yet, but he will certainly trail in behind Froome, and was the day’s big loser.
Here’s Geraint Thomas on stealing the bonus sprint:
I was going for it cos I saw the opportunity. Like I said, I don’t think anyone will let me get away with it three times. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite get on the podium there.
Here’s our first report on today’s stage:
Dan Martin speaks:
I really hope my wife hasn’t just gone into labour. I was a bit nervous because of the headwind, I didn’t think it was going to happen. I thought, why not have a try? So I did. The legs were just there, all the time. I don’t know, maybe adrenaline. I felt good yesterday but didn’t quite get an opening in the final. I was really relaxed all day, not confident but looking forward to having a crack, to having a good race on the last climb. Today I just attacked as hard as I could. It makes this Tour de France a success for us already, and anything else is a bonus.
Geraint Thomas is second in the general classification, three seconds behind Greg van Avermaet:
📊 Here is GC Top 10 after stage 6!
— Le Tour de France (@LeTour) July 12, 2018
📊 Voici le Top 10 au général après l'étape du jour!#TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/xljk7WnJDX
Alejandro Valverde was third over the line, behind Martin and Latour.
📊 Here is today Top 10 !
— Le Tour de France (@LeTour) July 12, 2018
📊 Voici le Top 10 du jour !#TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/Wnj2tbHWlU
Tom Dumoulin crosses the line 51sec back after his nightmarishly-timed puncture.
Dan Martin wins the sixth stage of the 2018 Tour de France
Martin has judged that to perfection, and Latour is still a couple of metres behind his back wheel as Martin crosses the line!
Updated
250m to go: Pierre Latour closes in on him. It looks like one of them can do this.
600m to go: Dan Martin has a 20m lead here!
1.1km to go: Dan Martin now goes, with Geraint Thomas trying to match him. Adam Yates is also involved.
1.3km to go: Julian Alaphilippe attacks!
2km to go: The climb has officially begun.
3km to go: Dumoulin is being helped by a couple of team-mates as he attempts to rejoin the peloton. He’ll have to cover the final climb to Mûr-de-Bretagne extraordinarily fast if he’s to make it.
4km to go: Bauer has been caught, with the final climb still not started. Dumoulin is ushered back towards the pack by a team car, but when it hits traffic he’s on his own.
5.5km to go: Tom Dumoulin has had to stop and change bikes! That’s horrible luck, his front tyre going just as the peloton accelerates away.
The bonus brings Thomas closer to the yellow jersey, and he will be dreaming of donning it this evening. Bauer remains alone in the lead, 14 seconds ahead now.
11km to go: The race now heads downhill, and soon it will without pause head right back up the hill again.
🆙🏁 - 13 km
— Le Tour de France (@LeTour) July 12, 2018
Bauer grabs 3", Thomas 2".
Bauer prend 3", Thomas 2".#TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/x4Rx3ybnZJ
Bauer is 29 seconds ahead of the pack as the peloton reaches Saint-Mayeux, with Geraint Thomas the first of them to do so.
After the excitement of the climb, Jack Bauer moves off all alone. There’s a bonus sprint at Saint-Mayeaux, just a couple of hundred metres away.
And Grellier is taken! Toms Skujins emerges from the pack to take the points at the peak!
Grellier leads by a smidgeon with a kilometre to go to the top of the climb, his face creased by a pained grimace. Smith, meanwhile, has been gobbled up by the peloton and then pooped back out the other end.
The first four riders in the peloton are all in Team Sky jerseys.
The peloton has arrived! Grellier continues to lead, with Smith just behind him, but he’s only five seconds ahead of the pack now.
Fabien Grellier has attacked, and is on his own at the start of the categorised climb, which is 2km long.
19km to go: The leaders have gone through the town of Mûr-de-Bretagne, and are less than 4km from the top of the hill named after it. Their lead is just over 30 seconds.
The front three are a front five again, with a lead now of just over one minute.
This is what the final kilometre looks like: very straight, and very consistently graded. Notice the flags flapping:
Oh this is going to be one hell of a last kilometer! 🔥
— Le Tour de France (@LeTour) July 12, 2018
Voilà qui devrait être un dernier kilomètre de feu ! 🔥#TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/80Mt0gFR26
Some clarification on the rook/crow/jackdaw issue:
@Simon_Burnton "wha thas Rook, thas crows, wha thas crows, thas rooks." - Crow Country, Mark Cocker, who used to write the Grauns Country Diary. Rooks are communal, crows are solitary, jackdaws are evil grey headed bastards.
— Mac Man (@McAndyMac) July 12, 2018
30km to go: And now Gaudin, along with Anthony Turgis, has been dropped from the breakaway five, with Gaudin’s team-mate Fabien Grellier in the leading mini-group.
Gaudin has been caught, as the leaders head uphill. The first pass over the Mûr-de-Bretagne is still a little over 10km away.
33km to go: Gaudin is maintaining a steady 20sec lead over the other four members of his breakaway group, with the peloton now 1min 30sec behind them.
The full results of the intermediate sprint to Plouguernével are in:
1. Laurent Pichon (20 points)
2. Anthony Turgis (17)
3. Dion Smith (15)
4. Damien Gaudin (13)
5. Fabien Grellier (11)
6. Alexander Kristoff (10)
7. Fernando Gaviria (9)
8. Peter Sagan (8)
9. Daniel Oss (7)
10. André Greipel (6)
11. Julien Vermote (5)
12. Yves Lampaert (4)
13. Mark Cavendish (3)
14. Edvald Boasson Hagen (2)
15. Serge Pauwels (1)
“I live in the only town in the area that the tour seems to be avoiding today,” writes Simon Darvill, apropos the problem apparently being experienced by Rostrenen (see below). “I can confirm that the area has an enormous problem with crows/ravens/jackdaws (never really sure what the difference between them all is). There is an empty house behind us where they hang around in the morning and evening and it is no exaggeration that there will be 200 to 300 of them flying around. Known in our house as Hitchcock Hour.”
Of course the collective noun for crows is a murder, and today’s stage ends at Mur-de-Bretagne. Can this be a coincidence?
The peloton crosses the sprint finish, and Mark Cavendish, having positioned himself at the front of the group with a couple of kilometres to go, didn’t get involved.
And Damien Gaudin immediately attacks! The Direct Energie rider leaps into (greater) action immediately after the sprint.
The first man to finish the sprint is Fortuneo-Samsic’s Brettonais rider Laurent Pichon, who has gone past his hometown and collected some points on the same day.
46km to go: It’ll soon be time for the real action to begin. Less than 50km to go, and the pace has gently increased over the last 10 minutes. In the peloton, Quick Step, who led the split a while back, have dropped off a little bit. In their stead, Mark Cavendish’s Team Dimension have come to the front.
56km to go: The one, intermediate sprint of the day ends in Plouguernével, which is about 10km away now. The gap between the peloton and the breakaway group has stabilised again now at around 2min.
62km to go: The leaders are 10km away from Rostrenen, the next staging-post on the stage. Apparently they have a problem with crows. “A questionnaire concerning the damage caused by the jackdaws of the towers is available in town hall,” reports the town website.
Updated
Now Roglic is in trouble again, having attempted to ride over a central reservation and failed. He’s had to change his bike, having busted up his front tyre.
The leaders’ lead is being eaten away with gluttonous speed, and is now down to 2min 10sec. There’s good news for Roglic, though, whose group has caught up with the rest of the peloton.
In a few kilometres the race will reach Carhaix-Plouguer, site of one of France’s biggest music festivals, the Festival des Vieilles Charrues, or Old Ploughs Festival. This year’s event will be held next week, and headlined by Depeche Mode and Gorillaz.
Quick Step are still pushing at the front of the first peloton, and that group is now 1min 35sec ahead of the second. This is being widely interpreted as a very bad thing for Roglic.
85km to go: All of this excitement and acceleration has eaten into the breakaway group’s lead, which is now down to 3min 20sec.
Most of the yellow jersey favourites are in the first group of the peloton, with Primoz Roglic the biggest name left behind. LottoNL-Jumbo are currently working hard on trying the improve his situation.
The next town on the route is Poullaouen, which literally means “hole of joy”. The mind boggles.
98km to go: The leaders will soon reach Huelgoat, an apparently sleepy town, with a lake and a handsome old watermill. The breakaway group still have a healthy lead but it’s a lot less healthy than it was a few minutes ago, now at 5min 30sec.
The peloton has split, with 50-odd riders hiving off the front, with Quick Step very much to the fore.
“Surely one good thing about the environmental impact Tour is that it goes through so many places,” suggests Ben Everard. “For most sporting events, all the spectators have to travel to the stadium and all this travel must release loads of CO2. With the tour, just wait in your French village and watch as the cyclists come to you.” But does it take more energy for the Tour, with all its support vehicles, team vehicles, random sponsorship promotional vehicles, signage and stuff, to travel France than it would for it to stay still and all the interested Frenchmen to travel to it?
112.5km to go: And Smith does reach the arch first, taking his fourth point. He is level with Toms Skujins, who is wearing the polka dot jersey today, but behind on countback. So his day’s work is far from done.
Smith will want to gobble up the single point available at the top of this climb, which is just a couple of hundred metres away with the five breakaway riders clustered together.
Here’s a picture of Plouneventer, complete with giant haystack man and flying bike.
124km to go: The breakaway continues to break further away, the gap now approaching seven minutes. The day’s second categorised climb, the category four Côte de Roc’h Trévézel, is looming.
Fortuneo-Samsic’s Laurent Pichon, another Breton-born rider, has just cycled past his family and given them a thumbs up.
“I have done some calculations, and fear the Tour de France is bad for the environment,” writes Andrew Benton. “A car driving the 3500km route would release about a tonne of carbon into the air (I think), and a cyclist about 90kg (due to production of the food he eats), ie about 11 times less. So on the face of it, 200 people cycling the route should be far more environmentally friendly than 200 people driving the route. However, the cyclists need a huge number of support cars that would not be needed if they were driving themselves, and you can get four or five cyclists in one car, thus reducing the per-person emissions enormously. Environmentally, it would therefore probably be best to bus the cyclists round in electric busses. This is how Tours could be in twenty years’ time.”
I think that would be a lot less fun. What I worry about most are the television helicopters, the single-use disposable bottles and gels, the unwanted promotional handouts to fans and the effort, expense and materials that go into roadside displays destined to be glimpsed on television for a fraction of a second.
128km to go: The leaders are about to reach Sizun, a town that grew on the back of a flax-related boom that carried it through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It has a magnificent-looking church and its very own and really quite handsome Arc de Triomphe.
137km to go: Smith reaches the summit first, and pockets a couple of points. He could be back in the polka dot jersey by the end of the day, if it goes his way.
Fabien Grellier goes for it on the climb, but Dion Smith follows him and the two of them will contest the points.
139km to go: The Côte de Ploudiry, a category three climb, is the day’s first significant challenge, and the leaders are about to head up it.
The New Zealander Dion Smith is the notional race leader, being the best-placed of the five breakaway riders. They are now nearly six minutes ahead of the peloton.
Updated
“I have noticed some bikes in the peloton with disc brakes and others traditional rim brakes,” writes Ian Macaskill. “What is the feeling in the peloton about the mix, especially when big downhill stages with braking into corners are encountered?” Disc brakes were only introduced to the Tour last year and are still very much lesser spotted, though André Greipel and his Lotto Soudal team-mates have all used them this year, for the first time. Peter Sagan spoke about using them last week, and said he expected to use them in most stages of the Tour:
With the disc brakes now, the handling is just amazing. I was racing at the Tour de Suisse with the disc brakes, and I can say it’s a big advantage. There is a big difference [with braking] compared to the rim brakes.
The next significant town on the route is Plounéventer, AKA Gwineventer in Breton. The history of the town on its website has a chapter on “mayors, lawyers and tax collecters”, which doesn’t sound enormously exciting.
160km to go: The breakaway group has extended their lead to very nearly five minutes.
Groupama’s Olivier du Gac comes from Plouvien, so this will be a special day for him. He’s riding into town a little ahead of the peloton, and past a massive “allez Olivier, Plouvien avec toi” sign.
Updated
The five-man breakaway includes Laurent Pichon of Fortuneo-Samsic, Direct Energie’s Damien Gaudin and Fabien Grellier, Anthony Turgis of Cofidis and Dion Smith of Wanty-Groupe Gobert.
173km to go: The first staging post of the day is Plouvien, a small town which has never been visited by the Tour before. Their historical sites include The Garden of the Prat, which seems unnecessarily rude.
Two riders from Direct Energie, including Fabien Grellier, lead an immediate breakaway.
Updated
181km to go: The rollout is done, and the racing begins.
Here’s our report from the last time the Tour visited Mur-de-Bretagne, back in 2015:
And here are some highlights from that day:
While the race remains neutralised, there’s still time for a bit of reading.
The riders are making their way calmly through Brest, with the actual racing due to start in 10km and about 15 minutes.
Updated
Hello world!
So today we hit Mûr-de-Bretagne, a place whose first two syllables are “murder”, and which might have a few riders dreaming of doing something like that to whoever made them do that climb not once but twice. It’s a 181km stage that the GC contenders will be eyeing greedily, and it’s about to get under way.
Updated
