"The summit of The summit of Mont Ventoux is no place to be when the wind, the feared Mistral, blows. With 100 kilometres an hour winds forecast for today's stage 12 at the Tour de France, to the ‘Giant,' the routing of this Bastille Day spectacular has now been truncated by six kilometres to a finish below the summit, at Chalet Reynard.
Secondly, it manufactured a major crash of Chris Froome and two other GC contenders, Richie Porte and Bauke Mollema. Due to the encroaching crowds near the top, a camera motorbike had to stop rapidly and Richie Porte barrelled into it, crashing down. Froome piled into Porte and also went down with a following motorbike running over and breaking his bike frame.
Froome knew his car was 5 minutes behind so he unbelieveably started running up the mountain. He was given a neutral bike but this didn't work for him so he carried on running until he finally got a suitable bike.
He lost a bunch of time but the race jury overturned this and gave Froome the same finishing time as Bauke Mollema, thereby extending his lead.
Since riding Ventoux a week ago, I had been looking forward to watching the Pros tackle the great mountain. I had recorded it and before I watched it, two people had started saying "have you seen the Tour de France today" so I knew something pretty extraordinary had happened. I wasn't surprised somehow :)