This has been an unusually busy Tour de France for the commissaires, the referees appointed by the International Cycling Union. Yesterday they were in action again and demoted to third the man who crossed the line first, Sergei Outschakov of the Ukraine, giving stage victory to runner-up Laurent Desbiens of France.

Having watched the video replay of the sprint between the three leaders, Outschakov, Desbiens and Italian Carlo Finco, they took only a few minutes to reverse the verdict in the Frenchman's favour.

The Ukrainian, who specialises in hilly stages such as this one, which favour neither the specialist climbers nor the bunch sprinters, has taken victories in all the major Tours. Yesterday, as he was winding up the sprint, he moved slightly to his left to prevent Desbiens coming past.

Desbiens was forced to think twice, and that was enough for Outschakov to cross the line first. As professional fouls go, it was tame, but cost Outschakov dearly.

The decision outraged the blond-haired Ukrainian, who attempted to follow Desbiens into the area behind the stage winner's podium, in order to remonstrate with the Frenchman. Eventually, he was removed peacefully, expressing his dissatisfaction in a mix of Italian, Russian and French.

Desbiens and his team, a new outfit sponsored by telephone credit company Cofidis, are as much in need of a break as anyone here. The man who was hired as their leader last summer, the former world champion Lance Armstrong, is still recovering from the testicular cancer which was diagnosed in October.

He actually left the Tour yesterday morning, after a flying visit to encourage his team-mates. Of Cofidis's other key men, the Classics specialist Maurizio Fondriest never even made it to the start of the Tour because of a back problem, while Tony Rominger's Tour ended in a pileup in Brittany.

Desbiens had little to say about what went on in the finish straight, but he was probably glad to be on the right end of a referees' decision at last: he missed much of last year after testing positive for the steroid nandrolone.

Once the initial climb out of the duty-free paradise of Andorra was over, much of the stage took the riders downhill, but it still held traps for those with unwary minds and unwilling legs. Bjarne Riis and Laurent Jalabert were among those who were temporarily caught out when the bunch split in the wind towards the finish.

They will welcome today's rest day, but the man who has supplanted Riis as the Telekom team's leader, Jan Ullrich, would probably not have minded another day's racing. His first day in the maillot jaune - and Germany's first since 1978 - was uneventful, and there are likely to be many more.