Kittel delivers: yellow jersey from a stage win

The progress report
The opening stage of the 100th Tour de France began with bright sunshine and clear skies. There were 198 riders at the start of the 213km race from Porto Vecchio to Bastia. The course was categorised as ‘Flat' but the terrain in Corsica is generally undulating and the opening stanza of the stage featured plenty of hills including the only climb with points for the polka-dot jersey, the cat-4 côte de Sottra at 45.5km. The intermediate sprint was in San-Giuliano at 150km. During the 8km neutral zone, Froome (SKY) had a small incident and crashed, prompting little more than a change of bikes. He didn't appear to be injured at all.

Five instigate escape...
The official start was at 12.16pm. And the first attack of the race came from Jérôme Cousin of Europcar; he was joined by: Flecha (VCD), Lobato (EUS), Boom (BEL) and Lemoine (SOJ). After 6km, their advantage was 3'00”. The teams that took responsibility for the pacesetting at the head of the peloton were Omega Pharma-Quickstep, Lotto-Belisol and Argos-Shimano. This is the first time that the race has been contested on the island of Corsica and, as the peloton reached Bonifacio, it's the furthest south that the Tour de France has ever been.
On the first climb, Lemoine attacked and was quickly caught by Flecha, Cousin and Lobato; the Euskaltel rider winning a point and the right to wear the first polka-dot jersey.
The average speed was 41.3km/h for the first hour, 39.8km/h for the second; 42.1km/h for the third; 43.9km/h for the fourth...

Greipel beats his rivals at the intermediate sprint
Flecha and Boom attacked on the approach to the sprint site. The Dutchman claimed maximum points 50” ahead of the peloton that was led by Cannondale, FDJ.fr, Lotto-Belisol and Omega Pharma-Quickstep. Greipel got the jump on his rivals and beat the two other triple stage winners from the 2012 Tour, Cavendish and Sagan. Lobato was caught by the peloton shortly after the sprint. The escape was caught with 37km to go.

GC teams show themselves
With 35km to go, RadioShack momentarily took command of the peloton, then came appearances up front from BMC, Saxo-Tinkoff and Sky. It wasn't until the 20km to go mark that Quickstep again assumed position at the head of the bunch. There was a crash with 12km to go involving Hesjedal, Dennis (GRS), Stannard (SKY) and several other.

Incident of the bus and the finishline
What looked like being a fairly standard sprint finish became a frenzy of last-minute jury rulings to because the bus of the Orica-GreenEdge team got wedged under the finishing structure. With the peloton 8km from the site of the planned finish the commissaires announced that the stage would be contested under the 3km to go banner. With the riders only 2km from that location, the bus was removed and it was back to the original site for the finish. By then there were several crashes that eliminated Sagan (CAN), amongst several others – including Contador (TST) – from the chance of sprinting for the win. The jury declared that everyone in the race would be given the same time as the peloton sped towards the finish.
With the designated sprinters of virtually all teams taken out of the equation in various crashes, it was left to Argos-Shimano to cease their opportunity. They controlled a group of about 50 riders and although Terpstra (OPQ) tried a late attack, and Kristoff (KAT) opened up a fast sprint, it was Kittel (ARG) who won the day, bursting into the lead in the final 100m.
The German earned his first stage win at the Tour and will wear the yellow jersey in stage two.