Tour de France Stage 6, a 185km flat stage, was total chaos that causes major shakeups in the GC. A crash that took out half of the peloton with 24.8km to go left some GC contenders as much as 13 minutes back, with many rolling in between two and six minutes behind the peloton which avoided the crash.
Peter Sagan (Liquigas-Cannondale) won his third Tour stage in the sprint finish, beating Andre Greipel (Lotto-Belisol) and Matthew Goss (Orica-GreenEDGE) to the line.
Omega Pharma - Quick-Step Cycling Team was mostly able to avoid the crash and finish with the front group, except Dries Devenyns. Dries was able to complete the stage despite being involved with the hectic crash.
"I have pain, for sure," Devenyns said. "I went down at a really high speed, 55km/h an hour. There was a crash in front, and I don't know what happened. I saw everyone braking and crashing in front of me. I had the reflex of protecting my head, and I was on top of Van Summeren (Garmin-Sharp), and then a few more fell on top of us. So far so good, but I have some bruises on the right side of my body and then my shoulder. It could have been worse."
Tomorrow is the first mountain stage of the Tour de France. Sylvain Chavanel remains 3rd in the GC, +07" to yellow jersey wearer Fabian Cancellara (Radioshack-Nissan).
"Tomorrow will be the first test for everyone for the GC because after a week withut climbs, the first climb is always an important and demanding test," Chavanel said. "We will see what we can do. It depends on the situation, if there will be a good chance to do something."
Kevin De Weert will be ready to work for the team leaders.
"Tomorrow will be a hard day," Kevin De Weert said. "Until now we did a great job. My job is to stay with Levi and so far everything went well. Hopefully it can be in the same for the coming stages."
Peter Velits will be one of the riders who will do his best in the mountain stages for the same good results he has achieved thus far, with the exception of a stage where he lost time due to a mechanical.
"It's going to be less stressful than these days," Velits said. "But I still feel a little bit cheated when I was at two minutes back the first stage. It's hard to start the mountains two minutes back. But OK, there's a lot of guys, GC contenders who have lost time. Some of them a lot of time. So, it's OK I guess. We need to see how I feel in the climbs because I can feel good now, but then I come to the climbs and I could not feel so good. It's a big test for everybody."
Levi Leipheimer will be another rider for the team who may test his chances in the mountains.
"For GC for tomorrow it's definitely going to become clear who is strong who the favorites are," Leipheimer said. "It's pretty simple math, I think if someone gets dropped tomorrow big time they are obviously not in it. I feel good, but we haven't really been put to the test. I feel like so far — knock on wood — I've been lucky on this tour. Been really close to about 5-6 crashes and I've missed it. Today was really important. We had five or six guys at the front at the right moment. So, we're still in it."