A beautiful first stage took place in Corsica today. Phil Ligett was hilariously excited on this first stage. He kept grinning like a cheshire cat and practically bouncing out of his seat on TV while providing race commentary this morning.
The first stage went very smoothly and predictably until disaster struck. First of all, to the amusement of couch fans and the dismay of the race organizers, a team bus became stuck right on the finish line! It had become stuck under a low hanging race banner which caught the AC unit on top of the bus. You could feel the utter embarrassment and frustration of the driver of the Orica-Greenedge bus as he did a major face-palm while trying to cover his face while on international television.
The first stage went very smoothly and predictably until disaster struck. First of all, to the amusement of couch fans and the dismay of the race organizers, a team bus became stuck right on the finish line! It had become stuck under a low hanging race banner which caught the AC unit on top of the bus. You could feel the utter embarrassment and frustration of the driver of the Orica-Greenedge bus as he did a major face-palm while trying to cover his face while on international television.
To add to the confusion, the racers were only 20 km away. This left race organizers about 15 minutes to figure the situation out. And then, just when the race organizers let the race teams know that the finish line would actually be moved up to the 3km-to-go mark, there was a huge crash taking out all the major sprinters -Cavendish, Andre Greipel, and Peter Sagan. The confusion on where the finish line was the instigation for this crash as racers nervously tried to figure out what the heck was happening in the last 10 km of the stage. This left the victory to Marcel Kittel who looked as if he was screaming with joy as he snuck past the other sprinters and crossed the finish line by half a bike length.