A long grind through the empty highlands and dense forests of central France ended with a popular stage-win for the German team-worker Jens Voigt, while an increasingly battered and depleted peloton finished 25 minutes behind.

Voigt's great strength as a rider has always been his ability to hammer out an unremitting rhythm at the front, but he has always been exceptionally unlucky in Tour stages.

He had beaten furiously on the handlebars in Pau three years ago when the Dutchman Leon Van Bon squeezed ahead of him on the line after a long break, and just last year another long-range bid for glory with another Dutchman, Erik Dekker, was sucked in by the peloton within sight of the finish in Vitre. Dekker went on to win three stages, while Voigt quietly disappeared from sight.

This year, though, he has finally struck lucky: his consistent ability on the flat was instrumental for Crédit Agricole's victory in the team time-trial in the first week, and he followed that up with a day in yellow close to his native Germany. His first ever Tour stage yesterday was the icing on a fairly large cake.

Voigt had complained of being tired on Tuesday because of guests wandering around the hotel on the rest day, but he was all smiles 24 hours later.

His only doubts, it emerged, arose after forming a two-man bridgehead from the seven-man leading break alongside the Australian Bradley McGee with some 25km to go.

"I could see he was suffering badly on his face, but after what Lance Armstrong did on the Alpe D'Huez, pretending to be going badly when he wasn't, then I decided to watch him very closely."

This was no bluff, however, and when Voigt stormed past him on the final ascent, McGee was helpless. The German even had time for a practice raise of his arms before crossing the line, while the poor Australian all but collapsed on the line, exhausted.

"Vide, completemente vide [empty, completely empty]," McGee half-whispered to the journalists who clustered round him as a team masseur shepherded him to the comfort of the team bus.

He was not the only rider running on empty on a course that seemed to take a malicious delight in sticking to narrow, twisting lanes poking their way doubtfully through the thick green bracken and high hedges of the Corrèze region.

Ironically enough, on one of the few occasions when the bunch actually tackled some well-surfaced, wide stretches of tarmac, on a fast descent in the final hour, a major pile-up ensued. Four riders were taken to hospital, one – the Swiss rider Sven Montgomery – with a serious head wound, and two with fractured collarbones.

With 15km to go, the peloton passed through the village of Corrèze, where in 1998 the nine Festina riders who had been ejected from the Tour for systematic doping held a desperate last press conference in the back room of a tobacconist's shop before admitting defeat.

Another reminder of cycling's murky past had cropped up earlier in the day. French newspaper L'Equipe republished leaked police statements by the cyclist Filippo Simeoni claiming he had been supplied with the illegal drug EPO during the 1990s by Dr Michele Ferrari – now one of Lance Armstrong's personal trainers.Ferrari will answer charges of drug-supplying in October.

Alasdair Fotheringham writes for Cycling Weekly