Cavendish wins 7th stage of Tour

CHATEAUROUX, France -- Mark Cavendish captured the crash-marred seventh stage Friday in the same town where three years ago he won a Tour de France stage for the first time. Thor Hushovd kept the leader's yellow jersey.

A pileup toward the end of the 135-mile course across the Loire River valley cost British champion Bradley Wiggins any shot of a top-three finish in Paris. Team Sky's leader crashed out of the race with what the team said was a broken collarbone.

Cavendish, who rides for HTC-Highroad, sprinted out of the speeding pack in the last few hundred yards, beating fellow sprint specialists Alessandro Petacchi and Andre Greipel to the finish. Cavendish also won the sprint in Chateauroux in 2008, the first of his 17 Tour de France stage victories.

"It's a very special day for me . . . It's a very sentimental moment," Cavendish said. "I have to thank the guys for all their work today, it was a hard windy day, and the guys rode hard for me all the way through. They were marvelous."

Wiggins went down along with a few dozen other riders, 23 miles from the finish. Twenty-four hours earlier, Wiggins and his Sky teammates were celebrating Norwegian Boasson Hagen's stage victory, the first in team history.

Now the tour will move into the mountains. After seven days of narrow, sinewy roads and sometimes fierce rain, Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck await a change of scenery. They made it through the crash-marred first week relatively unscathed. Although the hills in Saturday's eighth stage are far less daunting than later climbs in the Pyrenees and Alps, they will be a welcome sight.

"It will be a relief after several nervous and dangerous stages," Schleck said.

Cadel Evans remains in second place, one second behind Hushovd. Schleck is 12 seconds behind in seventh and Contador is 1:42 off the lead in 24th place.

Bigger gaps may start to appear by Saturday evening after the first of two straight medium mountain stages -- although Contador and Schleck might not attack each other just yet.