Bernucci rides his luck

ITALY’S Lorenzo Bernucci avoided a mass pile-up in the final kilometre to win stage six of the Tour de France.

The Fassa Bortolo rider finished 0.03 seconds ahead of T-Mobile’s Alexandre Vinokourov, who climbed to third in the general classification.

Lance Armstrong still leads the overall standings after also avoiding the big crash on a sharp right-handed corner.

Vinokourov of Kazakhstan cut Armstrong’s overall race lead to 53 seconds with his second-placed finish on the day and the experienced rider can consider himself unlucky not to have made further gains on the six-times winner from the United States.

Vinokourov, who had been seventh overall at the start of the day and made up 28 seconds on the American to go second, looked poised to win the sixth stage as he closed in on long-time stage leader Christophe Mengin.

However, the Frenchman slipped in the closing 500 metres and Vinokourov was forced to take evasive action which cost him time and momentum. That allowed the unheralded Bernucci to claim the honours on the day and his first race win after the 199km ride from Troyes with a winning time of 4hrs 12min 52sec.

It was Vinokourov who had fired the first real warning shot of the 2005 Tour at Armstrong, who is bidding to quit cycling on the back of a seventh victory in the race he has made his own.

But France’s Christophe Mengin, who had led for most of the last 10km, was not so lucky and crashed in wet conditions.

“I feel more like a boxer after a fight than a cyclist,” said Mengin, whose left eye was black and swollen after he was hit by one of the many bikes which ended up crashing into him. I’ve got a bit of a black eye where I think a brake lever or gear shifter hit it, and I’ve got a sore hip.”

“It’s always dangerous when it’s raining like that,” Armstrong said, admitting he had been helped by the radio advice of his team manager Johan Bruyneel.

“We always have a good look at the stages when they have a difficult finale. But Johan was telling us through the radio earpieces about the dangerous sections in the end, telling us to turn left or right. It was a dangerous stage.”