Greipel Strongest In Montpellier
André Greipel of the Lotto-Belisol team has won the mass sprint in Montpellier before Sagan, Kittel and Cavendish.
The team mates of Greipel led the German champion in such a good way that he was able, at 150 meter before the finish, the pull around his last helper and muscled towards the finish line.
Peter Sagan the Slovak super sprinter, leading the race for the green jersey, again had to take the second place. Marcel Kittel showed his good shape of this year and ended third.
Cavendish was unlucky today. At 20.5km before the finish, a roundabout made him fell. He jumped immediately on his bike and chased towards the first ranks of the pack. However, for this action he used some energy which he actually needed to defeat Greipel in the sprint.
Danny van Poppel was at the front again and ended at position eight.
Because the teams with sprinters drove the speed up in the final meters of stage 6, the peloton broke in two pieces. The five seconds difference between the first half of the pack and the second part was enough to let Simon Gerrans lose his yellow jersey. Fortunately was the one taking over the yellow tricot, his Orico-GreenEdge team mate Daryl Impey.
Impey, the first African ever to lead the Tour, was very happy and showed a lot of respect for Simon Gerrans. “I couldn’t have done it without the lead out from Simon.” Gerrans, although wearing the yellow jersey put himself in service of the sprinter of his team, Matt Goss. When his job was done he pulled back a little and ended up in the second group. Impey, however, was still doing his work for Goss and so ended up in the first group of the pack.
Montpellier seems to have a special relationship with South Africans. In 2007 it was Robbie Hunter to become the First South African to win a stage in the Tour de France, in Montpellier.
While stage seven, 206km from Montpellier to Albi, is expected to end in a mass sprint, the cyclists can already get used to climbing. There are for mountains of which one is of category 2. The riders hope however for a calm day with a sprint at the end, because this weekend goes high up into the Pyrenees.
