Tour de France 2012: Carpet tacks cannot force Bradley Wiggins off track

The Mur de Péguère is a savage little climb, its last four kilometres a narrow tunnel of trees and excited spectators urging on the straining riders. On Sunday afternoon it was as dark as night, with barely room for two riders abreast on a gradient that touches 20%. A tough test for even the strongest climber, it was new to the Tour de France this year, but its debut will be remembered for the wrong reasons after one of those spectators scattered carpet tacks on the road and induced around 30 punctures among the group of riders including Bradley Wiggins, the Tour's overall leader, and his chief rivals.

The summit of the climb came 38km from the end of stage 14, which began in Limoux and ended in Foix in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and the incident occurred as the peloton emerged into the light and passed under the banner at the top, a quarter of an hour behind a five-man breakaway.

Cadel Evans was the first to suffer, quickly dismounting and waiting to take a bike from one of his BMC Racing team-mates, only to discover that the first of them had also punctured. The next one surrendered his bike, only for that, too, to give him a second flat as he started the descent. There would be another bike change, and the sight of his mechanic falling into a roadside ditch, clambering out, and falling back in again.

The timing of the incident raised the question, almost certainly destined to remain unanswered, of whether, having allowed the escapers to pass by unhindered, the culprit had waited specifically for the yellow jersey group before sowing his mischief.

Such incidents, part of the cherished mythology of the Tour's early years, are rare in modern cycling, although a 62-year-old local councillor was arrested and subsequently released after tacks had been scattered during the 2009 Etape Caledonia, a sportive held on closed roads in Scotland, causing countless punctures among the 3,500 riders.

Cycling's complex etiquette contains an unwritten rule that riders in contention for a race win should not be penalised for sheer misfortune. Wiggins, who suffered a puncture of his own, took immediate steps to control the peloton's pace, ensuring that the group waited for Evans and allowing the other sufferers from punctures to catch up and ride in to the finish together.

"I just thought it was the honourable thing to do," he said. "No one wants to benefit from someone else's misfortune. There's nothing to stop that sort of thing happening, whether it was aimed at someone in particular or not. It's the sort of thing we have to put up with as cyclists. People sometimes take for granted how close they can get to us. If it happened at a football ground, there would be arrests."

There was the sternness of an old-fashioned Tour patron in his rebuke to the young Frenchman Pierre Rolland, the only one to ride away from the peloton and seize the opportunity for a lone attack before being absorbed back into the bunch, where he was received with coolness.

"I thought that was a bit uncouth," Wiggins said. "The gap was 17 minutes, we'd all been up a climb that was really tough, a lot of people had punctured and the race was over. Only he would know why he did it. It didn't seem an honourable thing to do." Rolland later claimed he had not known about the punctures.

Jean-Claude Pescheux, the race director, paid tribute to the decision of Wiggins, helped by his Team Sky colleagues, to moderate the pace. "We couldn't neutralise it straight away because we didn't know what had happened," he said. "Fortunately Sky neutralised the race. We've found some of the tacks. They were obviously thrown by a spectator. We don't know who it was. No one saw anything. There were around 50 riders together in the front peloton at the top and about 30 of them ended up with punctures. Some of them had three or four nails in their tyres. They are imbeciles to have done this."

For Evans, this was not a new experience. "This has happened to me before, two times in Spain," he said. "That's why I don't race in Spain very often. There's a few people that just take things too far. It's cost me a Vuelta and cost me other races." It may have been no more than a coincidence that Sunday's crowd contained a high proportion of Spanish fans who had travelled across the Pyrenees to watch the race.

There were no changes to the overall standings after a stage won by Luis-León Sánchez, the Spanish rider with the Rabobank team, who broke away from the other four escapers – a powerful group including Peter Sagan, the wearer of the points leader's green jersey, who had initiated the break almost as soon as the stage began, and Philippe Gilbert – as they entered Foix and began a 12-kilometre circuit on flat roads before returning to the finish in the town centre.

This was a fourth Tour stage win for the 28-year-old Sánchez, who suffered a bad crash in the first stage two weeks ago. He crossed the line 45 seconds ahead of his pursuers with his fingers pointing to the sky, a dedication to his late brother, also a rider, who died seven years ago in a quad-bike accident.