Mont Ventoux is often described as a mountain with a personality and a particularly malevolent one at that, so the bizarre Bastille Day finish at Chalet Reynard seemed somehow in character for a mountain which has ended dreams, careers and lives when the Tour de France has scaled its heights.
The sight of the yellow jersey, Chris Froome, running up Mont Ventoux without his bike was surreal, on a par with the episode at Gap in 2003 whenLance Armstrong was forced to take a short cut across a field to avoid a crash and ran back on to the road with his bike on his shoulder, cyclocross style.
The chaos on the road was followed by confusion among race officials over the yellow jersey and it all stemmed from the latest in a long series of incidents in which spectators and race vehicles have affected the race, sometimes to far more dangerous effect – the gendarme wielding a camera who brought down the bunch sprint at Armentières in 1994 and the television car that took out Johnny Hoogerland and Juan-Antonio Flecha in 2011, to mention only two.