END OF THE STAGE; END OF THE RACE
The clock is ticking on Mark Cavendish’s Tour de France. At some point on the road between Albertville and La Rosière, probably as early as the irst climb, the Montée de Bisanne, it became a realistic impossibility for the British rider to make the time cut, 31 and a half minutes. He’d only just made it the previous day, when the longer valley roads and relative truce among the favourites at least made the challenge of making the limit attainable. He won’t make it today, but he’s got a thing about packing. He will be beaten, but he won’t give in. So the clock ticks, the Tour waits, and Mark Cavendish steadily rides on.
Thirty-one minutes and 32 seconds after Thomas won, Rick Zabel logs himself over the line. Four seconds outside the limit; he’d be reinstated by sympathetic o icials that evening. At 36:30, Peter Sagan is presented with the green jersey. Forty-three minutes and forty seconds: Marcel Kittel struggles in, and almost immediately does a U-turn, turning away from the Tour, out of the race.
The hour ticks over. Geraint Thomas, done with the yellow jersey presentation, rides up the steep ramp to the press tent. At 1:05, Cavendish slowly crosses the line. “Merci de saluer Mark Cavendish,” the speaker says. Give him your support.
And then, as the poignancy sinks in of two former house-mates inishing irst and last on the stage, the career trajectory of one heading into the stratosphere, that of the other coming back down to Earth, it all turns to slapstick. Cavendish bumps a cameraman, and swears at him. Horsdélai he may be, but he’s still Mark Cavendish. The Brit is not minded to speak to the press, and he pedals on up the hill, with dozens of journalists and camera operators running after him, in the style of the Keystone Cops. 200 metres up the road he stops, realises that there is no team car, and does an abrupt 180-degree turn, pedalling back through the panting pack of journalists, for whose itness two weeks on the Tour has done nothing and who part like the sea as Cavendish barrels back down the hill. It will be his last act on the Tour this year. Perhaps ever.