Cycling: Armstrong slips back after crash

Tour de France: Debut win for unsung Australian as pile-ups frustrate big names and favourite loses precious time

Predictions that yesterday's seventh Tour stage would be a largely uneventful affair concluding in a predictable bunch sprint were overturned when the overall favourite, Lance Armstrong, was caught up in a crash some two kilometres from the finish, and the Australian Bradley McGee charged out of the shattered peloton to take his country's second stage victory in four days.

Although seemingly uninjured, Armstrong still lost 27 seconds in the resulting hold-up on the current race leader Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano. After the veteran domestique and his US Postal team-mate Slava Ekimov had waited for the Texan to restart, Armstrong revealed the accident had barely affected his form. The 30-year-old accelerated up the final tiny climb to Avranches so powerfully that he succeeded in dropping all of his team-mates crossing the line in a group of four, as well as the Frenchman Laurent Jalabert.

Although Armstrong immediately U-turned in search of the privacy of his team bus without making comments to reporters on the line, he said later: "I didn't crash but I had to put my foot down and then straighten my handlebars. Somebody touched my back wheel and then my team-mate Roberto Heras also made contact with my back wheel. I'm not upset about it. It just means I'll have to ride a bit faster in Monday's time trial."

If Armstrong looked more shaken than seriously affected, and his time loss will most likely prove small enough for him to recover on Monday, the nominally uncomplicated 176km stage all but spelled curtains for the French overall contender Christophe Moreau. The Credit Agricole rider, who has already fallen twice in the Tour, was the most important victim of the stage's first major pile-up some five kilometres from the line.

Moreau hit the tarmac at 70kph and could be seen blinking back tears of pain and wobbling alarmingly from side to side before mechanics handed him his bike. Shepherded to the finish by four domestiques, Moreau was clearly still suffering as he passed under the gantries holding the giant electronic clock which recorded his time lost at 4min 20sec.

At best, Moreau can now hope for stage wins; at worst, he will be repeating his 2001 abandonment of the Tour. This is already the fate of the former French national champion Didier Rou, who left the scene of that same pile-up on a stretcher with a broken left collarbone.

The mass crash, involving around two dozen riders, proved almost as unpleasant for the double world champion Oscar Freire. The Mapei rider, together with the Lampre team worker Luciano Pagliarini, careered into a ditch at top speed, the Spaniard rubbing his back gingerly after the impact, while Pagliarini, stretched out at full length, could only blearily raise his grass-covered head and wonder how he had got there. Freire managed to ride away, albeit clutching his back in pain, and finished some six minutes down.

Like Moreau, the chances of Freire reaching the world championship circuit at Plouay which forms part of the finishing circuit of today's stage now seem limited ­ particularly as he had already told Spanish newspapers he was planning on abandoning before the Pyrenees. His team were reported to have taken Freire to hospital for X-rays and a check-up.

If four of the race's major stars ended stage seven clutching injuries or working out how much time they had lost on the other favourites (in Armstrong's case, the American has slid from second to eighth overall, 34 seconds behind Gonzalez de Galdeano), McGee will remember the twisty roads through the Normandy brocage and the tiny climb outside Avranches rather differently ­ as the moment he hit the big time. Second and third in Tour stages last year, the Australian rocketed out of the 90-strong peloton in pursuit of the Mapei team worker Pedro Horrillo and rode to his first Tour win in the last 300 metres.

A former track bronze medallist in the Olympics at Sydney and Atlanta, McGee drew on his skill on the boards to produce a ferocious acceleration behind the Basque, passing him with just 15 metres to go. "Winning today was more a question of patience than anything else," McGee said afterwards. "The way the Mapei rider [Horrillo] hesitated was crucial as well."

Meanwhile, the favourites are aiming to stay as far out of trouble as possible on today's final transition stage prior to tomorrow's 52km individual time trial. All the signs are that Armstrong, who has won this stage on the two occasions it has featured as part of the route in the last three years, will use the rolling course along Britanny's coastline as the first foundation stone for his fourth consecutive Tour victory.

Alasdair Fotheringham writes for 'Cycling Weekly'