Zabel sprints to a Norman conquest

German triumphs in France's cycling heartlands, writes William Fotheringham in Alençon

It is seven years since the Tour made so deep an incursion into its western heartlands of Normandy and Brittany. Yesterday's trip across the lush pastureland of the Eure and Orne départements, which finally gave Erik Zabel the stage win he had been seeking for the past week, was the second of five days in the regions which have produced France's greatest cycling champions and where almost every village has its annual "Prix du comité des fêtes".

Today's finish is in Avranches, the site of Patton's crucial breakthrough in the Battle of Normandy in 1944, and Monday sees the first crucial stage of the race, the time-trial on the western seaboard. Tomorrow, Bastille Day, will be the climax, though. For France's national holiday the organisers have chosen to start the stage in the little village of Saint Martin de Landelles, population 1,200, home of one of the Tour's linchpins, its "speaker" Daniel Mangeas, who has introduced the riders to the public in his breathless voice at every stage start since 1976.

Like the rest of the long weekend, yesterday's stage was firmly rooted in the Tour's past, and not only thanks to little reminders such as the pennant from the 1955 race dangling from an elderly 2CV, or the poster declaring "Jacques toujours parmi nous" - Jacques still among us - with a picture of the late five-times winner Jacques Anquetil.

The roadside scenes spoke volumes. Virtually every car had a French number plate, which is a rare thing on the Tour these days, and the few foreigners along the route were from Britain. For once the majority of vehicles pulled up on the lush verges with picnic chairs carefully planted alongside in the bracken below the oak and beech trees were Citroens, Peugeots and Renaults.

As a reminder that we were now in La France Profonde, that mystical rural idyll which every Frenchman holds so dear, hens scurried in tiny apple orchards amid signs advertising Calvados and farm cider. There was a sprinkling of roadside crosses and the bocage, the thick hedges along the roadsides, could hardly have been more bosky. The angry agriculteurs also appeared right on cue. A placard brandished by the local Confédération des Paysans called for the release of José Bové, the countryside movement leader. Finally, as a reminder that the race was going westwards, it began to rain.

With no living régionaux in the race those from neighbouring areas got their share of support and they did their best to live up to it. Laurent Brochard, a son of the neighbouring Sarthe, made his mullet haircut flow in the wind during a brief try for glory, and his Mayennais neighbour, the ebullient Jacky "Dudu" Durand, infiltrated the only attack of the day that looked vaguely threatening - if only because it headed west just when the maillot jaune, Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano, stopped to answer nature's call in the bocage.

Durand has built a reputation for spectacular but usually fruitless attacking, to the extent that France's leading cycling magazine, Velo, runs a "Jackymeter", a tally of the number of kilometres he has spent ahead of the bunch in his various breaks. At the start of the Tour it had registered 550 miles, but he has added 100-odd miles en route to Reims on Tuesday and is already wearing the red race number awarded to the most aggressive rider in the race.

Sometimes, however, his aggression works, and he has won French national titles, Tour stages and World Cup races with long-distance moves. Yesterday "Dudu" took with him another local, Emmanuel Magnien - inevitably known as "Manu" - and, significantly for the eventual outcome of the stage, Zabel's Telekom team-mate Steffen Wesemann.

For the first time in five road-race legs since the Tour began, the Germans got their tactics right. With Wesemann in the escape, along with the Belgian Paul van Hyfte, the Italian Massimo Apollonio and the little Spaniard Tino Zaballa, Zabel's Telekom had no need to assist the other sprinters' teams - Robbie McEwen's Lotto, Oscar Freire's Mapei, and Stuart O'Grady's Crédit Agricole - who had no option but to drag the Germans along with them in the knowledge that they would be fresh when the stage finish arrived.

Seven miles out it was all over for "Dudu" and "Manu", setting the scene for the most spectacular sprint of the race so far, with Zabel, McEwen and Freire thundering to the line side by side. Another subplot is emerging, the battle for the green jersey of best sprinter, between Zabel and the Australian national champion McEwen, and it is nip and tuck. McEwen provisionally relieved the German of the lead in an early intermediate sprint yesterday, lost it again at the finish, and will try again tomorrow.

The return to France's cycling heartland this weekend could offer spectacle of another, less welcome kind: crashes. The Breton roads are winding, liable to be wet and sometimes strewn with cow-dung, and massive crowds will make it hard for the riders to see where they are going and hear the shouts the front runners in the peloton make when they see a hazard. If the current rate of a major pile-up a day continues, Brittany and Normandy will take their toll.

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