Whether or not Chris Froome goes on to win his third Tour de France he looks unlikely to be threatened by either of the two previous winners in the race. Both Alberto Contador and the 2014 winner, Vincenzo Nibali, lost time in the first serious mountain test of this year’s race, where the stage win and the yellow jersey went to the Belgian Greg Van Avermaet, who built a five-minute advantage that should comfortably sustain him as far as the Pyrenees.

Contador’s travails continued following his two crashes; the Spaniard hung on to the main group of race favourites until the final climb before losing a further 33 seconds to take his deficit on Froome to 1min 21sec, but his hunched, contorted position on the bike and his visible lack of ease when the road plummeted down the two vicious descents near the finish spoke volumes. “I am just trying to recover,” he said after the finish but, with more climbing on Friday his time is running out.

Tour de France 2016: Greg Van Avermaet wins stage five – as it happened Read more

Nibali was not supposed to be targeting the win here but could not be discounted as long as he remained in touch; however, any notion that he might do more than help his young team-mate Fabio Aru was dispelled when he lost contact, without seeming overly distressed, on the Col du Puy Mary 35km from the finish. He crossed the line 13min 45sec behind the group of favourites and seemed utterly sanguine about it.

Van Avermaet’s victory stemmed from an escape that began almost 200km from the finish but the decisive moments came on two short, steep, second-category ascents through the verdant hills of the Cantal in the final 35km. The longer of the two, the Puy Mary, pitches up like the side of a house towards a defile between conical green hills, and here first Nairo Quintana’s Movistar then Froome’s Team Sky visibly raised the pace to see what damage they could inflict. Nibali was an early casualty, so too Peter Sagan, almost at a standstill with his yellow jersey immediately looking a thing of the past; his deficit on the line was almost 24 minutes.

Movistar and Sky jointly whittled the peloton down to just under 30, with Nibali the only absentee of note. Sky had four men in the mix – Froome, Geraint Thomas, Sergio Henao and Mikel Nieve – while Quintana had Alejandro Valverde and Daniel Moreno for company, but this was mere sparring; the two big favourites will weigh each other up again on the Col d’Aspin en route to Friday’s finish at Lac de Payolle in the Pyrenees.

The favourites stayed largely together over the shorter and steeper Col du Perthus but at the top of the final ascent of the day, the third category Col de Font de Cère, largely a dead-straight run up the wide Route Nationale 122 but in the narrow lanes towards the top, the local star, Romain Bardet, set off for the resort where he learned to ski as a child as if someone had promised a packet of sweets to the first one to the foot of the piste. His attack was brief but the reaction saw off Contador and the subsequent sprint for the minor placings split the group.

Adam Yates had flown under the radar on the opening stages – which is the objective of anyone with their sights on a high overall placing – but sprinted strongly for eighth and is now 13th overall, just behind Daniel Martin of Ireland in a bracket of 16 riders covered by 11sec and led by Froome in fifth overall. Thomas, on the other hand, lost a further 16sec on the contenders and now lies 40sec behind Froome.

The Perthus saw the final move in the contest for the stage finish, which was a drawn-out elimination race between the nine members of the early escape including Van Avermaet and the 2014 King of the Mountains Rafal Majka of Poland. By the Perthus only Van Avermaet and Thomas De Gendt remained in the lead and the BMC rider disposed of his fellow Flandrian as the slope steepened. By the finish 17km later De Gendt – third overall in the Giro d’Italia in 2012, which seems a lifetime away now – was more than two and a half minutes behind.

Van Avermaet’s victory came 41 years after his fellow Flandrian Michel Pollentier preceded Eddy Merckx and the rest to the only previous finish here and was constructed in the clinical manner to be expected of a man who boasts a plethora of one-day races to his credit. His past wins include Paris-Tours, the season-opener Het Nieuwsblad, Tirreno-Adriatico and an uphill sprint win at Rodez in last year’s Tour.

Strangely his fine form here could be linked to an unfortunate crash this spring in his – and every Flandrian’s – most coveted one-dayer, the Tour of Flanders, where he broke a collarbone, forcing him to take time off his bike. He should defend his lead on Thursday’s stage south to Montauban, where the sprinters will again take centre stage, but it will be touch and go on Friday’s single first-category ascent.