Must be going around. 
He really, really wasn’t done. The Champs d’Elysee is one of the most prestigious sprints on the calendar and Kittel would have been a massive favourite to take the win there along with the green jersey. 5 TdF stage wins is a hugely impressive haul for him, but it might have been 7 and green.
This is not how Matthews would have wanted to win green, though I’m sure he won’t be turning it down. I have to say Team Sunweb are having an extremely impressive season in grand tours. Dumoulin takes the Giro, at the Tour 3 stages and counting with Matthews in green and Barguil in polka dots.
Yeah Sunweb is having a great season.
Mathews has had a great tour and I can see him having a great future.
However, not only did Kittel drop out but the usual green jersey winner was kicked out.
To me the best thing about this stage was the scenery.
I need to watch the Vuelta this year. I’ve never watched it.
The yellow jersey battle at the Tour is a little frustrating for me.
Sometimes I think the tours were more exciting when they were all using performance enhancing drugs.
Actually that’s not true at all. The basic mode of operation for Armstrong and Indurain was to destroy the field in the individual time trials and then follow the wheels of a dominant team in the mountains. Sure you had antics like those of Pantani, but the GC race was horribly boring. The race leaders essentially had no weaknesses to attack.
Do watch the Vuelta though. And the Giro too. They tend to be much less predictable in their GC battles. One-day races are fun too, and really very different from stage races.
One day classics are my favourites without a doubt. Especially the brutal ones like Paris - Roubaix and Tour of Flanders. Always loved to cheer for Fabian Cancellara.
I did enjoy watching he-who-shall-not-be-named win for 7 years, though.
Sending Sagan home really sucked for everyone, but I’m impressed that they did it tbh. Just unthinkable that would happen in a lot of other sports. Be like sending Ronaldo off in the CL final in the first 5 minutes for a 50/50, could never happen.
Kwiatkowski went deep today - fucking hell. He had to unclip and park up after taking that mighty pull up the final climb. Nearly impossible to compete when you have riders of that calibre riding in support of the guy who’s the strongest himself in any case.
Shockingly bad ITT for Bardet. Retains his podium spot by 1’, and not really sure he deserves it with that performance. I like him, but if he wants a serious shot at a grand tour win he needs to spend a lot of time working on TT technique. Either that or start laying down his mountain attacks from waaaaay further out and fully committing himself to them to give himself the chance of gaining minutes rather than seconds. However, that strategy is just a likely to result in cracking and losing minutes.
Theoretically if Landa can pull a Vino tomorrow he could still knock Romain off the podium. Can’t see it, though. You need to be an absolutely first class rolleur to pull off that sort of thing, and that’s not Landa at all. Of the guys in the pelaton, maybe Greg van Avermaet, Ollie Naesen, Tony Martin, or Edvald Boassen Hagen could pull that sort of thing off, and even they would need everything to break their way for it to work out. Landa is not in that sort of class.
Comfy for Froome in the end, despite the relatively small time gaps. Difficult to know what to make of his ride and if his rivals will take heart or not - on the one hand he had the strongest team by miles and miles, yet never looked really impressive in the mountains (and actually cracked once right at the end of a stage). On the other, he did just enough and was almost always looked in complete control. The one crisis moment, when he was distanced from the leaders with that wheel change, he handled with aplomb.
Be very interesting to see how he does in the Vuelta - whether he really has aimed for a late year peak and is going to crush it or not.