Brazilian Murilo Fischer won the mass sprint of the longest stage of the tour (255.7 kilometers). Danilo Napolitano retained his lead in the general classification, but that will all change on Friday when the riders move into medium-seized mountain ranges. "There will probably be a severe correction in the general classification," expected Rabobank sports director Frans Maassen. Therefore, the most important thing to him was that Rabo's trump for the two final days, Robert Gesink, made it through Thursday's longwinded stage unscathed.

"Stages this long are outdated. I do not understand why they put a stage like this in the tour. There is no fun whatsoever. Shorter stages are much more spectacular," grieved Maassen, who is glad that Friday's and Saturday's races will be more fiery. "We are ready for it. Gesink is in good shape. It will not yet happen on Friday because the final climb, which is 800 meters high, is on twenty kilometers from the finish. We finish uphill on Saturday."

The team manager thinks that Mathew Hayman will start on Friday. Just like Graeme Brown on Thursday. "Graeme did sustain some damage on Wednesday but I did not hear any complaints from him. He was also determined to participate in the sprint but that did not happen because of that crash. Mathew is such a tough guy; I fully expect him to get on his bike on Thursday like usual."

Before the bunch sprint became a reality Team CSC had dictated events for a while and split the peloton completely.

"It was actually Gerolsteiner, who stepped up and set the pace in the side winds, but we decided to help them straight away. After a while we had eight guys in the front group of about 20 riders, but unfortunately none of the other teams wanted to help out. For example Liquigas had four guys in the group, but they had Danilo Di Luca in the other group so they didn't want to do the work. So in the end the group behind reached us and still no one was really prepared to work hard so in the end the peloton swallowed us all again," explained CSC sports director Alain Gallopin, who was not too disappointed though:

"Some times you get help in situations like that and other times you don't. We were probably too strong to expect any help out there today. But it's okay – it was a very long stage and it provided us with some good training and we learned some things, which will be of use to us during the final two stages, which have got a lot more mountains than the stages so far," concluded Gallopin.