Fabian Cancellara, yet again Bradley Wiggins’s bête noire on the opening day of the Tour de France, is not a potential challenger for final victory in Paris. The Swiss may, just as he did in London in 2007, at the last moment have dashed the Londoner’s hopes of snatching his first yellow jersey, but he will fade into the background when the mountains loom large.

Cancellara, winner in Monaco this evening, will relish his spell in the maillot jaune, knowing that it will end when — if not before — the race route climbs into the Pyrenees on Friday. Meanwhile, the first stage of the race did reveal that the contenders for final victory in Paris on July 28 are as predicted — Alberto Contador, Cadel Evans, Andreas Kloden and Levi Leipheimer, all of whom finished close together.

There is a notable absentee, however, and Lance Armstrong, who squeezed into the top ten, 40 seconds slower than Cancellara, summed up his comeback ride in the Tour merely as "not bad". In many ways, after three summers’ absence, that was a fair assessment. The lean and tanned seven-times Tour winner looked in good shape, but he never seemed that comfortable as he climbed out of Monaco. As he admitted afterwards, he was "a little bit all over the place".

In his heyday, Armstrong slammed through each pedal stroke with impressive force, punching out a rhythm that propelled his bike and even the steepest gradients appear flat. Yesterday, the gear changes were more frequent, his tempo more irregular, and his style more wayward.

Even afterwards, surrounded by camera crews, journalists and minders, he looked a little taken aback, batting away boom microphones as they hovered over his head. "I was nervous, but that’s logical," he said. ‘It’s been a long time. It’s almost like a foreign environment. You can’t replicate it in training."

Even so, the Texan hovered near the top of the Tour leader board for most of the afternoon, finally slipping down the classification as the pre-race favourites — including his own team-mates, Kloden and Contador — took to the twisting corniche roads overlooking the Mediterranean.

David Millar, of Great Britain, who remained upright despite flirting with disaster on one tight bend, might have beaten Armstrong had it not been for the back-wheel slide, just three kilometres from the finish, that cost him a few seconds.

Millar, now 14th, is well positioned for Tuesday’s team time-trial stage, a discipline in which his Garmin-Slipstream team has excelled in the past. But with two probable sprint finishes to come before that, in Brignoles on Sunday and La Grande Motte on Monday, all eyes will now be on Mark Cavendish, the renowned sprinter from the Isle of Man.