Vincenzo Nibali deliberately gave away the yellow jersey in today's stage of the Tour de France. The Italian preferred to save his team for tomorrow's big mountain stage and was pleased to get more time to rest as he avoided the many obligations that goes with being race leader.

Vincenzo Nibali lost the yellow jersey on Sunday, and now sits 1:48 behind new race leader Tony Gallopin of France. Over nine days the Tour de France has rolled from sunny England, onwards into the rain and wind of northern France and for seven of those days Astana Pro Team has defended Nibali’s yellow jersey, spending valuable energy at the front of the peloton to protect the leader.

The tactical choice to chase a breakaway before the finish is a frequent practice in the team sport of professional cycling, but rarer still is the equally tactical choice to calculate the time difference of escaped riders on a given day, compute the future risk,  and then choose to let them ride to a stage victory.

Astana Pro Team, in full cooperation with many other squads in the race, chose to let Gallopin’s 28-man breakaway succeed, though Gallopin himself deserves full credit for the yellow jersey, and his Belgian Lotto-Belisol team tonight can celebrate on the eve of France’s national holiday tomorrow when the young rider will no doubt find a new depth of emotion in himself amid the cheers and support he finds along the road during stage ten.

"The team worked hard all day after everyone seemed to want to go in the break," Nibali said. "We knew that today was a day for breaks. Nobody helped us with the chasing and so we worked all day. Tony Gallopin took the jersey but it's not worth losing sleep about. Now tomorrow it won’t be up to us to work and we’ll see what happens.

"Today was really hard and we got through it okay. I think Pierre Rolland was the only real GC contender to gain time and perhaps we could say Tony Martin too but tomorrow's stage is tough, a real mountain finish.

"I spoke to Michele (Scarponi), and the other riders did a lot of work, so they're tired but we'll see what happens. I've lost the jersey but I'll have some extra time to rest up for tomorrow. We'll be ready."

“It’s beautiful to have the yellow jersey, it’s beautiful to defend it," his teammate Alessandro Vanotti said. "But we have to think strategically about tomorrow, when the first real changes to the classification will begin."

"We saw that Gallopin was in that group but we were not going to kill our team to keep the jersey. The most important thing was to save energy for tomorrow's stage," manager Alexandre Vinokourov said. 

"Tomorrow will be another great finale between Vincenzo and Alberto at La Planche des Belles Filles. This yellow jersey was a present for France," he added jokingly in an allusion to tomorrow's Bastille Day in France.

 
Team director Giuseppe Martinelli added: "We did not lose the jersey, we left it. It was a good move because we need to keep strength for tomorrow.It will be the toughest stage in this first part of the Tour. Before the start we would have dreamt to lead Contador by 2:30 at that stage."