CYCLING:There is no literal translation for the cycling term étape piège, which is used to define a stage of the Tour that looks relatively innocuous in its profile but in fact includes narrow roads, hidden hills or stretches of cobbles to catch out the unfit, the unwary or the simply unlucky. "Pitfall day" comes near.

However you put it in English, or even in German or Kazakh for that matter, a crash in the Burgundy hills yesterday caught the Astana riders Andreas Kloden and Alexandr Vinokourov as securely as Pooh Bear in the Heffalump trap, and this ironically on a stage that should have suited Vino at least.

The Kazakh struggled into the finish one minute and 20 seconds behind the stage winner, Filippo Pozzato, and his chances of overall victory are now compromised, although not ruined.

Kloden lost no time to the leaders but there are fears he has damaged his coccyx.

Vinokourov's crisis was the first moment of true drama in this Tour. There was a succession of minor chutes all day as the narrow, twisting roads and succession of small hills created a vicious circle among the riders: they feared crashes, so fought for position at the front of the bunch, thus causing crashes, which made them more nervous, and so on.

Kloden was among the fallers on the run-in to the long drag to the first second-category ascent of the race, the Haut Folin, and was momentarily unable to get out of the ditch. He regained contact with a bunch that was moving only steadily, but after the finish Astana took him to hospital for X-rays, fearing a repeat of a coccyx fracture of three years ago.

"We are not optimistic," said the team manager, Marc Biver.

Vino's crash came at a worse moment, with 15 miles remaining when the field was flat out on the approach to the final climb. Initial reports suggested he had collided with a television motorbike and fell heavily, ripping his shorts and skin on his right buttock and grazing an elbow and knee.

As he picked himself up, no fewer than six of his Astana team-mates waited for him. Then they engaged in a desperate chase after the bunch, where the CSC team of race leader Fabian Cancellara were setting a searing pace. Had it been Lance Armstrong in trouble they might have slowed up, but Vino is not feared by the peloton in the same way.

As the field split on the climb, the Côte de la Croix de la Libération, Vino and his domestiques had to fight their way around groups of riders who had slowed almost to walking pace and through the cars waiting for the backmarkers. It was desperate stuff and his team-mates' strength rapidly ran out, to the extent that as he rode down the twisting roads to the finish he had no help at all in the chase.

The Kazakh was not the only cyclist who scraped the Burgundy barrel on the descent from the Croix de la Libération. Cancellara almost ended his race when he went onto the verge on one acute left-hander. He held his bike upright, but only after awkward lurches that suggested he had been sampling the local speciality, and his painful landing in the saddle may give him a hangover of a very particular kind.

Only 74 riders were left in the lead bunch to contest the finish, a tight sprint between Pozzato, his fellow Italian Daniele Bennati and the triple world champion Oscar Freire.

It went, by half a wheel or so, to the voluble "Pippo".