They need mountains to climb. The race is engineered so that the sprinters can star in the first week, because many of them won't make it over the mountains, for physiological reasons. The first half-dozen stages are fairly flat. You generally get a breakaway group which gets chased down before the final sprint.

So today we got :

• another mass crash a few km before the finish, as everyone jockeys for position
  
• the breakaway group nearly made it, getting swallowed up only in the last few hundred metres
  
• André Greipel, a German rider, won his second stage in a row. Exceptional.

In fact the thing I find most interesting so far this year, is that the speeds are relatively slow. The stage was expected to average about 45 km/h, it was more like 43, and it's been like that every day so far.

This may conceivably be not unrelated to the fact that several recent Tour winners have been subsequently disqualified for doping.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}