Cycling: Home Riders Hit the Jackpot With a 1-2-3 on the Golden Mile

With the pleasure beach a few metres from the finish line, and the casino just over the tramlines by the pier, the home riders hit the jackpot on the Golden Mile yesterday in stage two of the Tour of Britain.

Roger Hammond become the first Briton to win a stage of the relaunched race, with Robin Sharman, who rides for the recycling.co.uk professional team, and 20-year old Mark Cavendish hot on his heels. Hammond took the lead in the intermediate sprints standings, Sharman captured the King of the Mountains jersey and sixth-placed Jeremy Hunt went top of the points standings. Only the yellow jersey, retained after controversy by Belgium's Nick Nuyens, escaped the home men.

Hammond and Sharman led for 88 miles, forcing through a breeze to carve out an eight-minute lead at the halfway point, but the chase became intense. The third man in their escape, Belgium's Kevin Van Impe, had a puncture in the final miles but Sharman and Hammond clung on to a lead of a few yards with the field bearing down on them for the length of the Promenade, where the sprint was a formality for the Buckinghamshire rider.

"I missed the cake so I'm picking up the crumbs," said Hammond, an angry man after Tuesday's Scottish stage when he was the only favourite absent from the lead group. "The last thing you want is to ask for a place in the Great Britain team and then perform badly.

"I came here to do something so I put myself under a lot of pressure. I wasn't easy to be around on Tuesday evening." His main target for the next few weeks is the world road race title in Madrid on September 25. "The circuit will suit me, and this win shows I'm on course."

Cavendish's third place was about guts in the other sense. He had been a doubtful starter in Glasgow because of a stomach upset, had fought his way through the first stage, then awoke the British team manager John Herety at midnight to complain of renewed sickness and diarrhoea. Herety sat with him until 2am and during the stage any talk of the youngster centred on whether his antibiotics would arrive at the finish.

Nuyens will not recall Blackpool with affection after initially being deprived of the yellow jersey. The 25-year-old winner of stage one was held up by a pile-up as the field swung through the sodden left-hand bend on to the Promenade and finished several seconds behind his closest rival, Denmark's Michael Blaudzun.

"The rules say when it happens in the last three kilometres the whole peloton is given the same time but the judges said there was a big time gap and gave the jersey to Blaudzun, but I was sure I had kept it," he said. "I went to the podium and they just told me to go away. I didn't like the way they handled it." But he was reinstated as overall leader after the race referee realised his error.

Today, the 103-mile loop through the Pennines between Leeds and Sheffield should see the overall standings reshuffled - without the intervention of the race referees - over the climbs of Holme Moss and the Snake Pass.