TOUR DIARY:Going for a stage and the mountains jersey are my priorities so this time loss could help in those goals

WELL, THAT was a crazy day. I guess you could call it “Welcome to the Tour”. It was the first real Tour de France stage, all chaos, tiny little roads, gravel, loads of crashes. If you were one of the few who didn’t hit the deck yesterday, you were very lucky.

I lost a lot of time, but managed to stay out of trouble. I didn’t end up on the floor myself, even if I was a bit unfortunate. I was looking after my team leaders Christian Vande Velde and Ryder Hesjedal, as expected, then Christian punctured both wheels. I gave him one of mine, got a spare and helped him get back up. I thought that was it but was caught out when the big one happened with 30 kilometres to go.

I was riding with Ryder at the time, a lot of guys went down and we rode up on the grass banking to avoid it. I was fine but then this guy hooked his bike into me and I had to stop and untangle mine.

When I got going again, Ryder was only about 50 metres ahead of me. I tried my best to get to him . . . I was in a line of riders, it was all strung out, and then someone up ahead cracked, let the wheel go and a gap opened up. If that hadn’t happened, I would have been there in the finale of the stage with Ryder, going for the stage.

Instead, I was back from the peloton with a gap to close. The group I was in worked really hard and held the group at about 10 seconds for five or six kilometres, but we couldn’t get any closer. The gap started rising little by little, going to 15 seconds, 20 seconds. Christian caught up from behind and shouted at me to go, to try to get him back up to the others. I kind of made a mistake at that point – I saw some team cars up ahead and I went as hard as I could for as long as I could, putting myself into the red.

It wasn’t the best thing to do because while normally the cars are left in the gap between two groups when there has been a crash, helping the riders to slipstream and get back on, they pulled them out this time.

I busted myself to get up to the cars, to no avail. I was completely cooked then – looking back, it would have been better if I had just paced myself, as myself and Christian might have got to the finish together and only lost a minute and a half to two minutes, rather than the five minutes I dropped.

You might wonder how I feel; before the stage I was 23rd, but now I’m a long way back. To be honest, it is more Christian’s time loss than mine that I am worried about, as it was always unlikely that I’d be going for the general classification in my first Tour, especially when my role is to ride for others.

Going for a stage and maybe the mountains jersey are my own priorities, and in some ways this time loss could help in those goals.

There are three sprint stages in the next few days. I might be able to go in the breakaways at the weekend, the time loss means I might be able to get a bit of freedom. However if I hadn’t lost time, I would definitely be a marked man.

The good thing is we still have Ryder up there for the general. That’s just as well, as some of the other guys are pretty banged up. Tom Danielson has gone to hospital to check his shoulder, and it’s not sure if he will be able to start the next stage or not. And Tyler has got a few nasty bangs – he actually hit his nuts on something. Obviously that’s painful, but he said he was actually proud of the fact that they are twice as big now . . .

The stage was won by Peter Sagan, the Slovakian rider who also took stage one, the day I was eighth. He’s been really dominant this season.

At the moment, I feel like I’m the only one who has beaten him. Last year I beat him fair and square on a stage of the Tour of Poland.

Okay, he won the overall the next day, beating me on time bonuses, but considering how incredible he is at the moment, it makes me quite proud to have got the better of him that day.

There was a bit of debate after the stage because of his celebrations. He does some pretty wacky gestures when he wins, doing the Forest Gump running impression yesterday. Feelings are mixed in the peloton, being very much split down the middle.

We were talking about it on the team bus going to the hotel. Some guys are a bit offended by it, feeling it is almost showing off, saying “look how good I am”.

But then other guys counter that it is just a case of him having a laugh. I think cycling needs a character like that to have that bit of fun.

He’s not the friendliest guy and doesn’t say very much, though – the gestures are fine, but maybe he needs to show that personality in interviews too.