Corsican Carnival

While The Falcon has been globetrotting around the Basque country for the weekend, the Tour de France seemingly got off to a low key start on the island of Corsica.

Stage 1 will forever be remembered for the Orica Green-Edge team bus getting stuck under the finish line because it was too tall, an organisational oversight more reminiscent of the high school athletics carnival than the greatest annual sporting event on earth. The result was a laughable decision by the organisers to bring the finish line forward 3km with just 10km ago. The ensuing panic in the peleton caused the mother of all crashes which took out most of the races top sprinters. And after all that they finally managed to move the bus and again change the finishing post back to the original location. Andre Greipel looked to be the only main sprinter to have missed the pile up, but amazingly punctured within the final kilometer, allowing another German Marcel Kittel to take his first Tour de France victory and the race's first yellow jersey.

Stage 2 was a rather more standard and hilly affair, with most of the top sprinters again shelled off the back. This left the stage seemingly at the hands of last year's Green Jersey winner Peter Sagan, but he was eventually denied by little known Belgium Jan Bakelants, who jumped clear in the final kilometers and held off the Sagan led peleton by a single second (Sagan was soon to have deja vu in Stage 3). Chris Froome put in a little tester, attacking on a late climb but most of the favourites were soon to respond and the group eventually finished in the bunch. However, Bakelants win was enough to see him take the Yellow Jersey off the Kittel.

Stage 3 was a day for the Aussies, as Billanook College's finest, Simon Clarke, got into the day's break and was one mountain from taking the lead in the King Of The Mountains classification, before France's best rider Pierre Rolland denied him with a stinging surge on the final climb. Clarke has the ability to win this classification (having won the equivalent jersey at the Vuelta), but will have a major rival in Rolland, who seems to have put all his eggs in this basket, having seemingly wasted a lot of energy trying to pick up cheap points in the first few days. The day was topped off by a win for Simon Gerrans, nabbing Green-Edge's first ever Tour stage win with a perfectly timed sprint to hold off the fast finishing Sagan, who was forced to settle for second for the second straight day. He did however take the lead in the points classification and with Mark Cavendish a virtual no show at this years Tour so far, you could almost already declare him the winner. The main packed finished together allowing Bakelants to maintain his hold on the Yellow Jersey.

That is all likely to change tomorrow though when the Team Time Trial is sure to shake up the top of the GC - christ I hope Sky don't win.

Yellow Jersey - Jan Bakelants
Green Jersey - Peter Sagan
Polka Dot Jersey - Pierre Rollande
White Jersey - Michal Kwiatowski