As I've said before, I'm usually up at 7.30 and first down for breakfast. Yesterday, I was rooming alone and had to be woken up at nine. I was knocked out.

I fell asleep listening to James Blunt at about 10.30, and despite not having raced the day before and 11 hours sleep, I didn't know where I was. I was really tired and was hoping for an easy day.

Every day, I place a radio in a pocket inside the back of my jersey. A cable runs up the inside of my jersey to a tiny microphone that is clipped on just under my collar before an earpiece goes into my ear.

With this earpiece and microphone, I can talk to and hear all my team-mates, as well as the manager, Vincent Lavenu, in the team car. Vincent uses the radio to issue instructions about the route ahead, who the riders in the break are, what the gap to the leaders is, etc. We tell him if we have a puncture, or need bottles. More importantly, he can warn us of dangerous corners, wet roads ahead, a crash or other critical safety information.

ban

There was a bit of a war yesterday morning between the teams and the race organisers at the start in Limoges. The Tour organisation, ASO, had decided to ban the team radios from being used during the stage, with the penalty of being thrown off the race if anyone was caught using one. Three quarters of the teams were against the idea on safety grounds and wanted to neutralise the stage by riding slowly all day and not contesting the finish.

At first we had a laugh. Like big kids, every team had one or two riders who went back to the team car and said stuff like, 'what did you say? I couldn't hear you. I think my radio is broken'. Instead of telling your team-mate to slow down on the front into the radio, we rode up and grabbed their jersey for the craic.

It got complicated though as other teams disagreed with the stand-off and insisted on attacking anyway, with four riders breaking clear early on. French teams Cofidis and Francaise de Jeux are pro radio ban while Skil-Shimano were invited to the Tour by the race organisers as a wild card, so they couldn't disagree with the ban in their first Tour.

All three teams had a rider in the break, as did Katusha, but their rider just sat at the back in protest, I think.

With no radios, we had to rely on a motorbike chalkboard to tell us the time gaps. These four never got more than three minutes or so away as every team decided to put two riders on the front in pursuit.

My role was to take care of yellow jersey Rinaldo Nocentini and also help our other leader, Vladimir Efimkin. It may have looked easy, but after the rest day on Monday, it was a hard enough day. I had to keep them both out of the wind, bring them up the bunch and stop with them if one of them had to stop for any reason. Efimkin had to stop twice as his cranks came loose. I waited with him as the mechanic tightened them and then rode into the wind ahead of him as we chased through the team cars back up the peloton.

The roads were really dead, like Irish roads, and I don't think there was a metre of flat road all day. It was up and down all day. The radio ban actually helped my team though, because if the racing had been flat-out all day, the bunch would have been split to bits.

In the final 25k, the speed really ramped up and we went from 35kph to over 60kph in a flash. I was to help Lloyd Mondory in the sprint, but after bringing him up to the front of the bunch with five kilometres to go, I went back for Nocentini and ended up losing Lloyd. I stayed in my position and just missed a Katusha rider, who fell in front of me on one of the last corners.

It would have been a nice sprint for me but the team hasn't always been happy with me going for the sprints, so yesterday I just did what they asked me to do and didn't even think about sprinting. I crossed the line in 17th place.

I also found out that there was a police investigation into the incident that left me with a massive bruise on my leg. The gendarmes confirmed it was an exploding ice compressor.

But just to keep the conspiracy theory going, my soigneur (assistant) told me that as I lay on the ground clutching my leg, he ran around the back of the lorries to find an old guy bent over laughing. When my soigneur confronted him he said 'ah they were only having a bit of fun', which makes me think somebody did do it on purpose...

- Nicolas Roche