It must seem there is nothing Peter Sagan can do to bag a stage win at the Tour de France.

Since picking up his fourth in two years in 2013, Sagan has finished in the top five on 21 occasions without adding another Tour stage win to his palmares.

When Tinkoff-Saxo ramped the pace up on stage 13, dropping green jersey rival Andre Greipel (Lotto-Soudal), the stage looked perfectly set for Sagan to claim victory and open up a sizable lead atop the points classification.

The latter happened, but only thanks to a second place behind Greg van Avermaet, which had looked for so long as though it would instead be an end to Sagan’s incredible drought.

Sagan appeared to misjudge the finale, grinding to a halt as the Belgian claimed victory – and later admitting to a ‘stupid mistake’.

But where the Slovakian champion missed out, van Avermaet did not and rightly took the plaudits for his gritty ride on the uphill finale.

And Sagan was not the only man ruing a near-miss after the breakaway came with a few hundred metres of succeeding.

Read out post-stage thoughts over the following pages.