France's cyclists have had a thin time of it this year, and it will be no surprise if the country's fans and media fall rapidly in love with David Millar, the young Briton who yesterday was untroubled in defending the yellow jersey which he won in astonishing style in Saturday's opening time-trial stage.

Indeed Millar ended the stage, won by the Belgian Tom Steels, looking a slightly more solid incumbent after increasing his lead over the defending winner, Lance Armstrong, by two seconds.

The 23-year-old rides for a French team, Cofidis, and speaks their language fluently with barely a trace of accent, all of which qualifies him as an adopted son here, while his globetrotting past - from Malta to his current base in Biarritz via Forres, Aylesbury and Hong Kong - has the touch of romance the French love.

More importantly perhaps, his youth, charisma and the ingenuous delight he clearly takes in his new-found success have come as a breath of fresh air as the Tour attempts, for the umpteenth time in the last two years, to throw off the taint of banned drug use.

Millar's victory on Saturday will have come as a relief to the organisers after three of the field, the Russian Sergei Ivanov, the Slovenian Andrej Hauptman, and the Italian Rossano Brasi, were expelled for failing routine blood tests before the start.

While Millar owed his victory on Saturday to the power in his gangling legs and his capacity to suffer through what he called "the cramps from hell" in the final third of the 16.5 km course through the fields around the Futuroscope theme park, yesterday race tactics were on his side as the 180-strong field massed for the first road-race stage.

Through the ripe cornfields of Poitou-Charentes, most of the teams with serious pretensions were under orders to save their strength, as any sign of weakness or fatigue will be cruelly exposed in tomorrow's team time-trial, where Armstrong will look to build on the 12 seconds which he gained on the 1997 winner Jan Ullrich on Saturday.

"It didn't seem as hard as expected, but I don't really want to sound like I'm saying that," said Millar, who spent most of the stage close to the head of the bunch, safely in the shelter of his team-mates.

"I was pretty lucky that it was a controlled day. I think because of the wind and because with the team time-trial in two days, teams are afraid of tiring themselves out so no one was going to try too much."

Laurent Jalabert started the day as the only realistic threat to Millar's lead having lost only 12 seconds in Saturday's time-trial, and there were time bonuses on offer at three intermediate sprints and at the finishes, but he too is saving his energy for tomorrow, when a good performance by his ONCE team will put him in line for a serious assault on the overall standings.

In the absence of last year's quadruple stage winner, the Italian Mario Cipollini, no team was willing to take on the task of leading out the charge to the line, but it was Steels who burst out of the chaos, nearly bringing down the whole galloping lot with a dangerous-looking jump to this left, to take his eighth stage in three Tours, with the Australian rider Stuart O'Grady just behind.

"It was the perfect situation for us, no one had any impetus to go when there were two guys off the front and two wasn't too many to be dangerous, so it was easily controllable," explained Millar.