If the UCI commissaires wanted to send a message to the sprint teams by kicking Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) out of the Tour de France after the stage 4 melee, they might have to go back to the drawing board.
The stage 6 finish in Troyes was crash-free as Marcel Kittel (Quick-Step Floors) took his second stage win of the 2017 race ahead of Arnaud Demare (FDJ) and Andre Greipel (Lotto Soudal), but the risk-taking and ensuing polemics have not eased.
As the sprinters and their lead-out men bore down on the finish line, Demare came up the right-hand side of the road along the barriers – the same position Mark Cavendish (Dimension Data) was in before the stage 4 crash that sent him home with a broken scapula – and then used a nudge of his head to move Edvald Boassan Hagen over to create the space he needed to go past.
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Boassan Hagen shook his head as Demare went by, and Katusha lead-out man Marco Haller threw up his right arm to protest that Demare had bumped his bars as well.
More incriminations came after the stage as tempers flared in the finishing straight and among the buses. Demare lead-out man Jacopo Guarnieri pointed the finger at Cofidis sprinter Nacer Bouhanni, whose wheel Demare had severely chopped two days before in the stage 4 finale.
"Bouhanni is an idiot," Guarnieri said in a television interview after the stage. "He didn't just pass me, he also put his knee into my bars. He's a dick, he's always making people crash. We know he's like that. He's probably upset with us because he always loses…"
— Nacer Bouhanni (@BouhanniNacer) July 6, 2017
— Jacopo Guarnieri (@jacopoguarnieri) July 6, 2017
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