CYCLING/Tour de France:Dripping blood from one buttock and covered in grazes after a mid-stage crash, the Frenchman Sandy Casar won the stage here after a run of three second places in recent years, his battered state an apt image for a damaged Tour limping its painful way towards Paris amid a spate of rumours of at least one fresh positive drugs test.
Proving that, as the French pun has it, this is in every sense un Tour de chien - an execrable Tour as well as one in which dogs have played an unusually active part - Casar became the second rider on this year's race to go head over heels because of a wayward pooch.
Not long after the Frenchman had escaped the peloton with three others, Laurent Lefevre of France, the Belgian Frederic Willems and Michael Boogerd of the Netherlands, the dog wandered out under Casar's front wheel on his descent and sent him flying, Willems landing on top of them both.
The crash came 10 days after T-Mobile's Marcus Burghardt had a spectacular collision with a dog in the Alps.
While Willems did not get up quickly enough and was caught by the peloton, Casar linked up with another Belgian, Axel Merckx, son of the legendary Eddy.
Merckx had undertaken what initially looked set to be a fruitless chase behind the leaders until, aware that in a long escape the work would be better shared between four than two, Boogerd and Lefevre slowed down to allow the eventual stage winner and his Belgian partner catch up.
In the streets of Angoulême Casar looked to have won the game of cat and mouse with the cycling equivalent of a nutmeg in soccer, attacking down the left of a traffic island while his breakaway companions went down the right.
It was an audacious move and, although the others caught him up with 500 metres to go, Casar had enough in hand to take the finish sprint.
Today the 34-mile time-trial through the rolling Charente countryside will decide who is awarded the yellow jersey in Paris.
On paper it should come down to two men: the Spanish race leader, Alberto Contador, and the Australian Cadel Evans, who will be awarded the stage win for the Albi time-trial a week ago if Alexandr Vinokourov's positive test for blood doping is upheld.
Evans's margin over the Spaniard in Albi was 64 seconds. That gives both men reason to hope and yesterday a split in the front of the field at the finish enabled him to gain a further three seconds on Contador, meaning he now trails him by one minute and 50 seconds.
Whether the yellow jersey should be awarded at all this year following the exclusion of the then race leader Michael Rasmussen on Wednesday evening remains moot.
Yesterday the three-time winner Greg LeMond said that in his view the maillot jaune should stay on the shelf.
"I would prefer the organisers not to give out a maillot jaune," he said. "It would be a symbolic gesture."
Rasmussen, meanwhile, went on the attack, telling the Danish newspaper Politiken, "I feel I have won the Tour de France . . . but the victory has been stolen from me. I'm very, very down.
"I still can't understand what has happened. But I've had time to gather my thoughts and I can guarantee I'm not finished as a cyclist.
"I can't say any more about how the future is going to turn out but I'm certain I will get a job even though I've been sacked by Rabobank."
Guardian Service
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