THE opening stage of the Tour de France looked like being a routine sprint until all hell broke loose in the final 10 kilometres of the road to Fontenay-le-Comte.

Chris Froome was not the first to crash, nor the last, but the sight of the four-time winner hurtling into a field will be the lasting memory of the day.

There should also be a mention for Colombian sprinter Fernando Gaviria, who held off world champion Peter Sagan on the drag up to the line to become the first man to win his debut stage on the Tour since Fabian Cancellara.

Tweet of the day

Velon, which has access to numerous cameras being carried on the bikes of the riders, got the perfect angle of Froome's crash thanks to Jasper De Buyst, the Lotto-Soudal rider who followed him into the field.

Expert view

In a new feature for 2018, Tour organisers are conducting a daily poll of journalists asking who will win the stage, then also asking the Dimension Data predictor, which runs lots of numbers and spits out a name. It's 1-0 to the press then as they picked Gaviria while the machine fancied Frenchman Arnaud Demare - though to be fair the computer could not have predicted his crash with 10km to go.

Round and round

The mechanics of televising a full stage of the Tour de France are enormously complicated, with dozens of camera bikes out on the road and helicopters up in the air. All the footage is then bounced back to base via a plane high in the sky. And judging by its flight pattern, the main challenge for the pilot is to not get dizzy.

Can't stay away

The 2018 Tour is the first Grand Tour since the 2011 edition not to feature Australian Adam Hansen. The 37-year-old Lotto-Soudal rider finished the Giro d'Italia in May to make it a phenomenal 20 grand tours in a row, but then got the news he would not be selected for this Tour. But though he may not be riding, Hansen has found a way to France - working as a television pundit for Eurosport.

Sweepstakes

If Egan Bernal had a rough introduction to the Tour with his late crash, while Geraint Thomas came up smelling of roses as the only Team Sky rider not to lose time on the day, fortunes were reversed once they got back to the team bus and put the football on. With eight riders in the squad and the World Cup down to the quarter-final stages, the Sky riders organised a sweepstake earlier in the week. England's 2-0 win in Samara gave Bernal some consolation, and left Thomas as the one counting his losses.

Comfort food

Prior to those final 10 kilometres, the main incident of note was a nasty crash for Lawson Craddock. The EF Education First-Drapac rider went down in the feed zone, and rode alongside the medical car for long periods as he received treatment with blood running down his face. After the stage, x-rays also discovered a hairline fracture of his shoulder. Riders need to watch what they eat during the Tour, but if there was ever a day for a burger...