This was a strange day on the Tour, with painfully low average speeds, and stage winner Fabian Cancellara denying a rider go-slow and instead preferring to talk of head winds and cross winds affecting the peloton’s progress across the arable flatlands of northern France.

Were the riders sore from their many crashes, saving themselves for the mountains, fed up with the 236 kilometre distance they had to cover from Waregem to Compiegne, or have we simply spent too many years watching souped-up racing, in the era before the doping clampdown took hold?

Until the final 60 kilometres, the peloton — for whatever reason — was struggling to lift the pace higher than 35 kilometres an hour. That left them with a lot of energy to expend on the run-in to Compiegne’s spectacular finish. Expend it they did, with Cancellara’s extraordinary and decisive acceleration in the past 500 metres leading the way.

For the Swiss rider, this was victory had some synchronicity. In 2006, only metres from today’s finish line, he had set off from Compiegne on the one-day race known as the ‘Hell of the North,’ the cobbled Classic, Paris-Roubaix. Seven hours later, in splendid isolation and clear of the field, he rode into Roubaix’s old velodrome to claim victory.

Prologues, sprint finishes — is there no end to this man’s talents? Undoubtedly with two stage wins and the maillot jaune on his back he has been the man of the Tour so far, but when the mountain gradients bite on next Saturday’s first Alpine stage, he will be among the first to slip to the back of the peloton.