Results: Tour de France – Stage 1 – Rotterdam to Brussells

Alessandro Petacchi, riding for the Lampre team, took the stage victory while Swiss Saxo Bank rider Fabian Cancellara kept the yellow jersey after his prologue victory. Typically, the first stage of the Tour de France is a quiet one. With no real opportunity to make up time, the yellow jersey team shares the pulling duties with the other top teams in the tour as the riders wind around fairly flat terrain trying to navigate easily and safely to save health and endurance for the stages that have the most to gain.

This stage one of the Tour as anything but not exciting. With a dog running out into the peloton and several other crashes, this first stage set the mood of what is going to be one of the most exciting Tour de France’s to date. Yellow jersey rider Fabian Cancellara and sprint sensation Mark Cavendish were two of the big names to get caught up in the wreck.

“At the end I couldn’t do anything. I had to brake hard, and ended up doing a bit of a somersault once I landed,” said Cancellara, who admitted he was slowly starting to feel the pain of his tumble. “Now with the time passing I feel like my shoulder and my whole left side are hurting.

The wind was never really that significant a factor. I think some teams were expecting that to play a big role, and that only served to make a lot of guys nervous.

“But the roads were just madness with the amount of people. It was like that from the start. With that, the wind, a lot of turns and quite a bit of nervousness in the peloton I think maybe some guys lost their concentration.”

Covering 223.5km, the Rotterdam to Brussells stage 1 is complete with little shakeup in the overall results. Next stage – Stage 2 – Brussels to Spa 192km