Zabel reaps rich reward for efforts

CYCLING/TOUR DE FRANCE: It is seven years since the Tour de France made so deep an incursion into its western heartlands of Normandy and Brittany. Yesterday's trip across the lush pastureland of the Eure and Orne departements, which finally gave Erik Zabel the stage win he has been seeking for the last week, was the second of five days in the regions. William Fotheringham reports

Today's finish is in Avranches, the site of Patton's decisive breakthrough in the Battle of Normandy in 1944, while Monday sees the first decisive stage of the race, the time-trial on the western seaboard.

Tomorrow, Bastille Day, will be the climax, though. For France's national holiday, the organisers have chosen to start the stage in the little village of Saint Martin de Landelles, population 1,200, home of the Tour's "speaker", Daniel Mangeas, who has introduced the riders at every stage start since 1976.

Yesterday's stage was firmly rooted in the Tour's past, and not just thanks to little reminders like the pennant from the 1955 race dangling from an elderly 2CV, or the poster declaring Jacques toujours parmi nous - Jacques still among us - with a picture of the late five-times winner Jacques Anquetil.

The angry agriculteurs also appeared right on cue. A placard brandished by the local Confederation des Paysans called for the release of Jose Bove, the countryside movement leader.

With no living regionaux in the race those from neighbouring areas got their share of support. Laurent Brochard, a son of the neighbouring Sarthe, made a brief bid for glory, and his Mayennais neighbour, the ebullient Jacky "Dudu" Durand, infiltrated the only attack of the day that looked vaguely threatening, and that largely thanks to the fact it headed west just when the race leader Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano, stopped to answer nature's call.

Durand has built a reputation for spectacular but usually fruitless attacking, to the extent that France's leading cycling magazine, Velo, runs a "Jackymeter", a tally of the number of kilometres he has spent ahead of the bunch in his breaks. At the start of the Tour, it had registered 550 miles, but he has added 100-odd miles en route to Reims on Tuesday, and is already wearing the red race number awarded to the most aggressive rider in the race.

Sometimes, however, his aggression works, and he has won French national titles, Tour stages and World Cup races. Yesterday Dudu took with him another local, Emmanuel Magnien, and significantly for the eventual outcome of the stage, Zabel's Telekom team-mate Steffen Wesemann. For the first time in five road-race legs since the Tour began, the Germans got their tactics right.

With Wesemann in the escape, along with the Belgian Paul Van Hyfte, the Italian Massimo Apollonio and the little Spaniard Tino Zaballa, Zabel's Telekom had no need to assist the other sprinters' teams - Robbie McEwen's Lotto, Oscar Freire's Mapei, and Stuart O'Grady's Credit Agricole - who had no option but to drag the Germans along with them in the knowledge that they would be fresh when the stage finish arrived.

Seven miles out it was all over for Dudu and Magnien, setting the scene for the most spectacular sprint of the race so far, with Zabel, McEwen and Freire thundering to the line side by side. Another sub-plot is emerging, the battle for the green jersey of best sprinter, between Zabel and the Australian national champion McEwen, and it is nip and tuck. McEwen provisionally relieved the German of the lead in an early intermediate sprint yesterday, lost it again at the finish, and will try again tomorrow.

Guardian Service