Mark Cavendish has overtaken Eddy Merckx as the Tour de France’s stage win record-holder with 35 wins after triumphing on stage five of this year’s race
The very same day Biniam Girmay became the first black African to win a Tour de France stage, Olympic champion Richard Carapaz became the first Ecuadorian to pull on the overall leader's yellow jersey.Eritrean Girmay was swift to dedicate his triumph to the "whole African continent", a continent barely represented at the Tour de France.
Asked to assess the damage to his Tour de France hopes of another breathless stage in which he shipped almost a minute to his great rival Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard smiled. And then, like Emma Raducanu at Wimbledon on Monday, he reached for a footballing analogy. “We’re 1-0 down,” the Dane admitted to reporters outside his team bus in the Alpine resort of Valloire half an hour or so after the stage ended. “But we expected to be 3-0 behind by now. So I think that’s a small win. We know what