Cavendish doubles up

Cavendish, riding for the T-Mobile team, prevailed in a mass sprint, edging Milram's Erik Zabel into second place with CSC's Matthew Goss in third.

A quintet including Cedric Vasseur and Britain's Bradley Wiggins had tried their luck in a morning breakaway, but never looked like preserving their lead, and were caught with 40 kilometres to go, leaving the sprinters to battle it out.

Ladagnous, who led the general classification by less than a second from Dominique Cornu at the start of the day, picked up a few bonus seconds at the intermediate sprints, while Cornu was eventually demoted to third overall behind Bouygues Telecom's Laurent Lefevre.