Wheel of fortune
Cavendish’s battle to prove critics wrong
It did not take long for the doubters to surface. No sooner had Colombia’s rising sprint star Fernando Gaviria pipped triple world champion Peter Sagan to the finish line in Sarzeau yesterday, claiming his second stage win in four days, with Mark Cavendish long since having sat up, than they were out in force on Twitter.
“Cav talks about ‘next year’,” wrote Scott Mercier, the former US Postal rider. “There is no next year for him. He’s done.”
It is a sentiment which has been expressed many times already in Cavendish’s much-garlanded career, most famously when the German sprinter Marcel Kittel first came on the scene five or six years ago, looking like Dolph Lundgren from the Rocky franchise, and proceeded to beat everyone up for a couple of seasons. Cavendish came back and won four Tour stages in 2016, not to mention silver on the track at the Olympics and on the road at the world championships.
Cavendish has undoubtedly had a difficult start to this Tour, which is hardly surprising as he is battling back not only from the broken shoulder he sustained at last year’s Tour, when he was controversially shunted into the barriers by Sagan, but also major crashes he suffered during the spring. The 33-year-old has barely raced, and admits his shoulder is “going to give me problems for the rest of my life now”.
But is he finished? It is far too early to say that. Cavendish’s leadout failed to deliver him to the finish in the first two stages, won by Gaviria (Quickstep-floors) and Sagan (Bora-hansgrohe).
Yesterday they did better on that score, hitting the front with four kilometres of the stage remaining to ensure their man was in the mix.
Cavendish – holding his fiveweek old baby Casper in his arms at the Dimension Data bus after the stage – acknowledged that contribution, describing their work as “brilliant”. But he admitted he made some mistakes on the run-in, getting pushed off Mark Renshaw’s wheel and then moving to the right just as a gap opened on the left.
Eventually he had a slight brush with Dutch rider Dylan Groenewegen and sat up, gesticulating.
“Yeah,” he concluded ruefully. “[Quickstep] have got another stage win. And I’m left holding the baby.”
But Doug Ryder, his team principal, said: “He’s a champion, And you don’t write off a champion. You never kick a dog when it’s down or it will bite you.”
The stage was otherwise fairly uneventful. The day’s breakaway of four riders thought they might be rewarded as a pile-up five kilometres from the finish held up the bunch. But they were caught with a kilometre remaining.
It was another day full of niggle off the bike, with the sledging continuing apace between Sky’s principal Sir Dave Brailsford and the UCI president, David Lappartient, who doubles as the mayor of Sarzeau.
After Brailsford accused Lappartient of having “the mentality of a small-town French mayor”, and criticised his handling of Chris Froome’s salbutamol case, Lappartient hit back.
“The last person who called me a ‘Breton mayor’ didn’t have much luck. It was Brian Cookson,” he said, referring to the former UCI president he ousted last autumn.