Theo Bos (Blanco) returned to his winning ways after illness forced him to abandon the Tour de Langkawi with a victory in today's opening stage of the Criterium International. In a hard, uphill finish the Dutchman proved his increased strength by powering clear to take his fourth victory of the season.

The Criterium International is known as the mini Tour de France with its 3 stages in 2 days containing all the major challenges of a Grand Tour. Today's flat morning stage will be followed by an afternoon time trial before the big battle in the mountains awaits the riders in tomorrow's leg.

With a mostly flat route, the opening stage lived up to this reputation as the race followed the traditional script of most flat stages in the Tour. An attacking start with a number of French teams all looking to get early exposure from a stint in the climber's jersey ended up in the creation of a 5-rider break. Yukiya Arashiro (Team Europcar), Romain Hardy (Cofidis), Jeremy Roy (FDJ), Arnaud Gerard (Bretagne-Seche) and Antoine Lavieu (La Pomme Marseille) set off in an attempt to hold off the peloton.

They quickly built up a gap of 3.20m, but with the stage only being 89 km in legth the chase did not take long  to get organized. Team Sky with pre-race favourite Chris Froome stabilized the gap before Argos-Shimano took over at the head and started bringing down the gap. With Simon Geschke in its ranks, the Dutch team had a former winner of the stage, and a rising final kilometer was perfectly suited to the German's characteristics.

The gap started to come down quickly while up ahead the break fought it out for the mountains jersey on the day's only climb. Gerard managed to beat Roy and Arashiro to get a reward for the day's efforts. That was, however, all he would gain since the peloton upped the pace further, and inside the final 2 km it was all back together.

FDJ and Sojasun were at the head of the peloton under the flamme rouge to set up Nacer Bouhanni and Jonathan Hivert respectively, but both were denied by a fast Dutchman. Theo Bos showed his increased strength on the difficult uphill straight to power clear of his competitors to take his first victory after jis return from Malaysia earlier this month. Bouhanni ended up 2nd while Jonathan Cantwell (Team Saxo-Tinkoff) had to be content with third.

With Bos' victory, he takes the first leader's jersey, and he will be the last one down the start ramp in the 7 km time trial this afternoon where the overall contenders are expected to show their cards ahead of yesterday's big final in the mountains.