Geraint Thomas (Sky) has refused to heed the advice of his mother. “I'll try to continue at all costs, even if she does not like that,” the Welshman laughed as he descended his bike Monday afternoon. The Sky rider still had the taste to joke despite a day of suffering.

Caught in the collective fall Saturday he endured more than twenty-four hours of waiting before being given an accurate diagnosis: "I have a small fracture at the hip, but doctors say it cannot get worse. I have to endure the pain a few days and then the situation will improve," Thomas told L’Equipe.

Lost in the gruppetto Sunday between Bastia and Ajaccio, Thomas resisted as long as possible in the peloton on Monday before performing a stunt that put a smile on the faces of his teammates. Meanwhile, Sky leader Chris Froome was relieved to turn his back on the island of Corsica and three hectic days. “At 100 km, he went to the front of the race to see us and he screamed: Yeah! This made us all smile. This shows his fighting spirit,” said Chris Froome. The leader of Sky spent the day safely and left Corsica without injuries or any lost seconds to his rivals: “It's a relief. I was expecting worse today but with the headwind, it was not easy to make the peloton explode. Now the race should calm down a bit after the race against the clock.”

The setbacks suffered by Sky during the opening three days of the race have inevitably raised a few question marks inside the team, even though Sports Director Nicolas Porte still believed the team to be competitive and took comfort in the fact that Froome’s most feared rival, Alberto Contador, lost some riders on the final ascent of the day.

“Geraint is one of the best chasers in the world so he is crucial for us,” said Richie Porte. “It will slow us down a bit,” admitted Froome.

On Sunday Lopez suffered in the heat and yesterday it was Kiryenka who saw his powers weakened by heat. Nevertheless, Sports Director Nicolas Porte refused to throw in the towel: “I think we still have powerful locomotives in Froome, Richie [Porte], Edvald [Boasson Hagen] and Kosta [Siutsiou],” Porte added. “And besides I saw that Saxo lost a lot of guys in the last bump today.”

Wishful thinking or psychological warfare? The TTT today will tell.