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Mark Cavendish strikes again to take stage 7

A CHAOTIC crash involving up to 80 riders inside the final 40km took a little of the gloss off Mark Cavendish's stage win - his second in three days.

A CHAOTIC crash involving up to 80 riders inside the final 40km took a little of the gloss off Mark Cavendish's stage win - his second in three days.

It was a win right out of the textbook of HTC-Highroad's racing manual for Cavendish, to chalk up the 17th career win of his career at the Tour de France in a time of 5hr 38min 53s.

Cavendish, who won the corresponding stage in 2008, edged out Italian Alessandro Petacchi and Andre Greipel.

With both Thor Hushovd (Garmin-Cervelo) and Cadel Evans (BMC) finishing safely in the depleted main bunch, there was no change at the top of the race leaderboard.

Evans stills finds himself one second adrift of the Norwegian.

But what appeared to be just a routine day at the Tour at the start of the day turned into total chaos and mayhem when a large group of riders crashed inside the final 40km when they were caught out by a strong wind change that fractured the main peloton.

The biggest casualty was Bradley Wiggins, the British road champion on Team Sky, who was rushed to hospital by ambulance with a suspected broken left shoulder as a result of a nasty accident.

Wiggins, whose late father Gary was born and raised in Victoria's East Gippsland and rode as a professional in the late 1970s, was sixth and in touching distance of the yellow jersey when he crashed out of the race.

Other leading men involved in the pile up and who hit the deck included Edvald Boasson Hagen, Wiggins' Sky team mate who edged out Matt Goss for the stage honours yesterdayr.

In total some 80 riders were involved in the mass pile-up or were caught up in the carnage including Tyler Farrar (Garmin Cervelo), himself a stage winner this week, along with fellow Americans Chris Horner, Levi Leipheimer of RadioShack, Geraint Thomas, the leader of the best young rider competition, and Rigoberto Uran of Sky, and the Canadian Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin Cervelo.

Yet again Evans escaped the carnage.

The warning signs were there a little earlier when the experienced Yaroslav Popovych (RadioShack), Roman Kreuziger (Astana) and Tony Gallopin (Cofidis) caused a moment of panic in the main field, slowing down the chase to bring back the early breakaway.

The main group were motoring to chase down four riders who went on the attack virtually from the start. The FDJ pair of Mickael Delage and Gianni Meersman along with Yannick Talabardon (Saur-Sojasun) and Pablo Perez of Euskatel-Euskadi were the early escapees and at one point led by as much as 8min and 20s before being swept up by the worker bees of the teams with the pure sprinters.

Only two teams, HTC-Highroad and Garmin-Cervelo, did the bulk of the work at the front of the peloton to bring back the escapees, with French television reporting that the HTC domestiques were doing most of the work.

The riders left the MM Arena Stadium in Le Mans just after noon buffeted by a crosswind, before turning into a headwind after they made the crossing of the River Loire and heading south towards the Pyrenees and the Alps.

The race had earlier claimed its biggest scalp in Quick Step's Belgium superstar Tom Boonen, after he elected to step off his bike 123.9km from the day's stage finish outside the town of Herbault, still feeling the affects of a heavy knock he took in a race fall two days earlier.

He was one of six riders on the squad who had come to grief in a series of falls to Cap Frehel.

Boonen, 30, the team co-captain along with Frenchman Sylvain Chavanel, won the Tour's green jersey in 2007.

In 2005 he won the world road championship on the streets of Madrid and is also a former three-time winner of the Hell of the North, Paris-Roubais, and has twice won the Tour of Flanders.

In a statement released by Quick Step's media manager, Alessandro Tegner, Boonen had told team medico Toon Cruyt he was still suffering from severe whiplash as well a deep laceration to his right thigh after hitting the asphalt.

The Belgian, who last week signed a three-year contract extension with Quick Step, has not got to the finish in Paris since taking the green from the South African Robbie Hunter and the legendary German Erik Zabel four years ago.

His abandonment left 192 riders from the original 198 who started in the Vendee region on the Atlantic coast last Saturday to battle on until the carnage later in the day.

A winner of five stages, Boonen's previous best finish at the Tour was 119th behind Alberto Contador in 2007, the controversial Spaniard's first yellow jersey win.

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/cycling/cavendish-strikes-again-to-take-stage-seven/news-story/ede324be92cba348bd4523c0b4c4bcbe