Team Monday sneak a personal best while the rest of the ride crawls

There was only one story on this stage, and it arrived quietly, without fanfare, in the unglamorous middle section of the ride: a personal best on Heaton Road Top, 0:42, set while the rest of the day’s effort was going distinctly the other way. Team Monday’s directeur sportif, wherever they were sat, must have blinked twice at that one.

Everywhere else told a harder story. Benton Road South cost 267 seconds against Iain’s last effort there, and the two sprints either side of it weren’t much kinder, both dropping well over four minutes down on recent form. A 9 km/h headwind doesn’t sound like much on paper, but on the long, exposed drag of Benton Road it was clearly enough to turn fresh Monday legs into leaden ones. Add in a personal-best-free run on Byker Bridge and the Quay, both well off the pace, and this was a stage of two very different rides happening at once.

Which makes the Heaton Road Top best all the more mysterious and all the more delightful. Amid the general capitulation to the wind, Iain found half a minute somewhere and buried it into a stretch most riders wouldn’t look at twice. Whatever happened there — a gap in the traffic, a following gust funnelled off the coffee shops, sheer bloody-mindedness — it was the only genuinely fast thing all morning.

The gulls were doing their thing along the river, as they always are on a still, dry morning like this one, carrying inland long after the water’s out of sight. Dry and 11.4°C is about as gentle as this Tour gets, conditions-wise, even if the legs didn’t feel it.

On the general classification, Team Wednesday still lead at 26.2 km/h, untouched this week. Team Friday sit second, Team Tuesday third, Team Thursday fourth. Team Monday’s overall average won’t trouble any of them today, but Heaton Road Top has quietly gone down as one of the highlights of the whole Tour so far.