Team Friday gatecrashes the Tour and rides straight into yellow

Nobody saw this coming from a team whose whole ethos is meant to be shrugging into the weekend. Instead, Iain, racing for Team Friday, produced the fastest leg of the Tour so far, a 24.7 km/h time-trial effort that has vaulted his team straight to the top of the general classification on their very first outing. So much for gentle rolls home.

The defining moment came late on the run for the river, on Stepney from the Cobbles, where Iain clocked 0:39 — the second-best time he has ever recorded there, just a second shy of his own best. It capped a closing sequence of near-misses: two seconds off the personal best up Cemetery Drag early on, then two seconds off it again on the Byker Bridge West Cycle Path North as the legs somehow found more. This was not a stage of one big number so much as a rider chipping away at his own history all the way round.

The bridge itself, as ever, took the weather full in the face — though today that meant a helpful westerly rather than a battering, the breeze sitting behind or across him as he crossed, tyre noise changing on and off the deck. Down at the bottom, the Quayside did its late-summer thing, gulls overhead and the Tyne going about its business under the bridges, largely ignored by a rider with no time to admire the view.

The upshot on the general classification is seismic. Team Friday lead the Tour after a single leg, dropping Team Tuesday to second, Team Wednesday to third, Team Thursday to fourth and Team Monday to fifth. Every other team has been shuffled down a place by a rider who was only supposed to be here for the weekend. Whether Team Friday can back it up remains to be seen, but for one stage at least, the opportunists have taken the opportunity.