Columbia’s Kim Kirchen remained in the maillot jaune Friday at the Tour de France, finishing in the group six seconds behind Stage 7 winner Luis -Leon Sanchez, a lieutenant Caisse d’Epargne’s Alejandro Valverde.

Most of the top contenders — Silence-Lotto’s Cadel Evans, Gerolsteinger’s Stefan Schumacher, Christian Vande Velde of Garmin-Chipotle, Denis Menchov of Rabobank, and Valverde of Caisse d’Epargne — finished with Kirchen in the 22-man group.

The tight finish isn’t indicative of how exciting the stage was, with an early breakaway including Garmin-Chipotle’s David Millar and Big Jens Voight, a big effort by Team Columbia in pulling back the breakaway, a big effort by CSC in creating splits in the field after a crash by Lampre’s Damiano Cunego. Not very sporting of them to take advantage of a fallen contender.

Kirchen wasn’t too happy with CSC. The split caught Columbia captain Big George Hincapie at the back of the peloton fetching water bottles from the team car. Hincapie caught back up, but he was gassed and unable to shepherd Kirchen on the final climb to the finish.

“Frank Schleck and I had been friends but now that we’re racing against each other it’s a little different,” letour.com quoted Kirchen as saying about the CSC rider. “We saw today that his team was very intent on trying to take the yellow jersey from me. There are two guys from CSC who I’m not so happy about. They tried to blow up the whole peloton when my team had been working very hard and I don’t think it was really fair.

“My team controlled very well from the start. They did a hard job and I just had to follow. Then, when CSC came up to ride, they saw the team had a little bit of difficulty because we’d already done 50km at full gas and I couldn’t really understand what they were doing but now I’m happy that we have the yellow, green and white jerseys in the Columbia team.”

Voight and Fabian Cancellara were driving the charge for CSC, and Team Columbia ended up gassed at the end with Hincapie losing 10 minutes. Only youngsters Thomas Lovkvist and Konstantin Sivtsov could stay near the front, with Lovkvist losing 33 seconds and Sivtsov dropping into the group 2:31 behind.

Kirchen ended up alone on the final climb before the finish, but he rode strong and made a strong sprint to the finishing line to place fourth in the stage.

“My team-mates had a pretty hard day,” letour.com quoted Kirchen as saying. “I had everything under control and, okay, in the final I was a little bit on my own on the uphill but I had great legs and could follow even the best guys.

“I went the final climb in control, there was just one moment when I had to do 200 meters at full speed but I managed it and everything went according to plan.”

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