Relaxed pace the big story early from cleaned-up Tour

	While there has been some exciting finishes so far, the peloton has kept up a relatively slow pace in the early stages. Bryn Lennon/Getty Images
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Yes, Tuesday's Stage 3 into Compiegne featured an electrifying finish, with race leader Fabian Cancellara of Team CSC schooling the sprinters, throwing down a vicious acceleration 700 meters from the finish line, then holding off the muscle-bound likes of Erik Zabel, Tom Boonen and Robert Forster. To me, the biggest story of the day was not Cancellara's breathtaking speed at the finish, but the stately, unhurried, club-ride pace set by the peloton in the hours before the thrilling denouement. This was the slowest stage in recent memory. As I will explain later, that's a good thing.

Cancellara's heroics came barely 24 hours after he'd limped across the finish line in Gent with one hand on the bars, favoring his left arm, which, it appeared, might have been broken in one of the scariest pileups in memory.

But Cancellara didn't break anything, and was smiling as he took the line Tuesday morning in Waregam, Belgium, for the long, flat 236-km slog south, to Compiegne, which is an hour's drive north of Paris. It was in Compiegne that Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians in 1430 (Thanks, Wikipedia!); and it was in Compiegne that a plucky quartet of breakaway riders -- two of whom, Frenchmen Nicolas Vogondy (Agritubel) and Matthieu Ladagnous (Française des Jeux), had been away for 230 klicks -- was captured by an angry peloton within sight of the finish.

Instead of conceding the stage to the usual suspects -- Boonen, Zabel, Robbie McEwen, Thor Hushovd: sprinters who bide their time behind human slingshots, then go catapulting toward the line in the final moments of the race -- Cancellara caught them while they were still getting organized. The 26-year-old Swiss is having a brilliant season: he's already won four separate time trials, including the Tour de France prologue, which put him in the yellow jersey last Saturday in London. On Tuesday, he demonstrated that he isn't only dangerous in races against the clock.

I'll be filing on the Tour from stateside until I head over to France this weekend. Regardless of the bruised state of this sport, it's still a pleasure to arise early and immerse one's self in the Tour coverage provided by Versus, headlined, as usual, by those honey-tongued Brits, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. (Chapeau, also, to the gap-toothed oracle Bob Roll, whose "Roll-A-Strator" provided the first definitive explanation of who was responsible for Monday's nauseating crash.)

The 236-km stage left Sherwen and Liggett ample time to fill, which they did with their usual panache, Sherwen riffing effortlessly at one point on France's "extensive network of industrial barge canals"; Liggett, his elder, remarking, at the sight of Pieter Weening changing out a flat tire that the Rabobank rider "by the way, is the tallest man in the race." Liggett then corrected himself: "No, he's got the lowest resting heart rate" of all the riders -- at 35 beats per minute.