Tour de France gallery: A sketchy day on the Atlantic coast

September 9, 2020
1 minute read

Against the odds, all 165 remaining riders in the Tour de France were able to start stage 10 on Tuesday. It was a super-flat day along the Atlantic coast which brought the promise of strong crosswinds, and while there wasn’t as much echelon action as on stage 7, the race did split into several pieces. There were plenty of crashes too, thanks to an abundance of road furniture.

Route for today’s #TDF2020 is incredibly dangerous. I mean, it’d be fine if the peloton were 25 riders, or if it were 1908 and the guys were all 20 minutes apart from each other. But it’s not…

— Jonathan Vaughters (@Vaughters) September 8, 2020

A group of 66 got to the finish where Sam Bennett (Deceuninck-QuickStep) sprinted to his first-ever Tour de France stage win, and boy did it mean a lot to him.

Here’s how our photographers saw the action on stage 10 of the 2020 Tour de France.

: The Tour’s 10th stage started on the island of Oléron.

: The peloton crossing the viaduct that connects the island of Oléron to the French mainland.

: Swiss duo Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) and Michael Schär (CCC) got away on the viaduct.

: The leaders weren’t given much latitude at all and were caught with a little less than 100 km to go.

: There were no real breakaways after Kung and Schär were caught, but there were splits in the crosswinds, and several crashes.

: Nicolas Roche (Sunweb, right) and Maxime Chevalier (B&B-Vital Concept, centre) were just two of the riders to hit the tarmac. Roche landed on a chainring in his fall and ended up with a nasty gash.

: Davide Formolo was one of the worst injured. After grovelling in for last place on the stage, Formolo got an X-ray which revealed a broken collarbone. Mitchelton-Scott’s Sam Bewley abandoned the race after breaking his wrist in a fall.