Blel Kadri solos to Tour de France stage eight victory

Alberto Contador takes the fight to overall Tour de France race leader Vincenzo Nibali on final climb

Biel Kadri escapes on stage eight of the 2014 Tour de France

(Image credit: Graham Watson)

France was spared one of its all-too-frequent agonising waits until the Tour de France’s second or third week for its first French stage winner when Blel Kadri (Ag2r-La Mondiale) won stage eight from Tomblaine to Gerardmer la Mauselaine. The sole survivor of a five-man break that at one point had over ten minutes on the bunch, he hung on relatively comfortably on the final climb to win by over two minutes.

Meanwhile, behind him, the 2014 Tour de France’s general classification began to come into some sort of focus after the trio of short sharp climbs, culminating in a very steep 3rd category summit finish, that came in the last 30km of an otherwise fairly straightforward stage.

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Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine