Demonstrators make a stressful day in Paris-Nice

"Whoever thought that we would have a stress-free stage today, thought wrong," says Gerolsteiner's Ronny Scholz of Thursday's fourth stage of Paris-Nice.

"The race was stopped for the first time before the first mountain top. Demonstrators had chained themselves to the barriers and forced us to stop. They tried to take bikes away from riders and tried to push their lit cigarettes into our thighs. That has nothing to do with a demonstration!" he wrote on his website, www.ronnyscholz.de.