Tour de France Stage Nineteen

Stage Nineteen:  Navardauskas delivers a Lithuanian first

Ramunas Navardauskas became the first Lithuanian to win a stage at the Tour de France as he claimed a solo victory in Bergerac in a crashed marred finale that took Peter Sagan down and prevented the sprinters from coming across to the last attacker who had jumped in the côte de Monbazillac. It was a well deserved victory for Garmin-Sharp after a very courageous attempt by Tom-Jelte Slagter. Despite the difficult weather conditions, Vincenzo Nibali retained the yellow jersey with no worries ahead of the closing time trial.

Cyril Gautier (Europcar) was the first attacker of the day. He was rejoined by Martin Elmiger (IAM) and Arnaud Gérard (Bretagne) at km 4, by Tom-Jelte Slagter (Garmin) at km 8 and by Rein Taaramäe (Cofidis) at km 16. Cannondale took the command of the peloton to stabilize the deficit of the peloton around 3.30 after the first hour of racing. Stormy weather affected the riders after 45 kilometres into stage 19. Three other sprinters' teams, Giant-Shimano, Lotto-Belisol and Katusha, united their efforts and the time gap went down to two minutes even before there were 100 kilometres remaining.

The time gap remained around two minutes for 60 more kilometres while the pouring rain didn't discouraged Jean-Marc Marino, Ji Cheng and Lars Bak to pull the bunch, respectively for Cannondale, Giant-Shimano and Lotto-Belisol, until they gave way to their team-mates for the last hour of racing. Slagter attacked from the front group with 32km to go. The two time stage winner of Paris-Nice was very courageous to fight alone against the peloton. He passed first atop the côte de Monbazillac but was rejoined by his team-mate Ramunas Navardauskas who continued solo with 13km to go.

Read more at http://www.letour.com/le-tour/2014/us/stage-19/news/flm/-navardauskas-delivers-a-lithuanian-first.html