CRUSHED CAVENDISH HAS LOST SPARK
THERE are so many factors involved in winning a sprint at the Tour de France, and amid the chaos of those final few hundred metres the fastest guy does not always cross the line first.
But Mark Cavendish no longer looks like the fastest guy in the race. He no longer looks like the rider who only three years ago was voted the finest sprinter in the history of the Tour by the French sports newspaper, L’Equipe.
It would be dangerous to suggest Cavendish has entered a period of decline from which there is no coming back. Particularly when this most brilliant bike racer could respond to losing out to Andre Greipel for the second time in four days by winning tomorrow’s stage in Fougeres. It would be typical of the man to do so.
But the evidence in Amiens yesterday suggested that could be a struggle. That, at 30, he has lost the explosive acceleration that propelled him to 25 stage wins in the world’s greatest bike race.
On Sunday, on a sprint into Zeeland, he missed out to Greipel because of a huge tactical error.
He might have blamed his leadout man, Mark Renshaw, but Cavendish went too early too, hitting the front with around 400m to go and simply ran out of gas. One of his bosses at Etixx-Quick Step claimed it to be a ‘historic f**k-up’.
The delivery was less than perfect here as well. Tony Martin, wearing the yellow jersey he retains for another day ahead of Chris Froome, surged to the front with 2.5km to go, but an Etixx train missing Matteo Trentin was unable to remain in control.
Renshaw led the leading pack out of the final bend with just 500m remaining but Cavendish was not on his wheel. He was a few riders back. Over the next 300m he did manoeuvre himself into a position to strike. He was 200m out, exactly where he likes to attack from.
Only this was not the Cavendish of old. This was Cavendish being pursued by the green-jersey wearing Greipel and then passed on the outside by a 32-year-old German he once dismissed as a hugely inferior bike racer. ‘Me on bad form is still better than him,’ Cavendish once said of Greipel when they were less than friendly team-mates at HTC Columbia.
It will make a defeat, compounded by the sight of Peter Sagan also finishing in front of him all the more painful for Cavendish.
Clearly, Cavendish is under pressure. On the eve of the Tour there was talk of him surpassing Bernard Hinault’s mark of 28 wins to become the second most prolific stage winner in history.
Now the conversation has switched to the fact that it is 726 days since he last won a Tour stage.
‘I guess I have to learn this thing they call patience,’ Cavendish tweeted last night, as if to suggest he got his tactics wrong again.
Perhaps, the Etixx director sportif Brian Holm suggested, Cavendish was still paying for the energy he expended getting Martin to the front of the peloton after the cobbles the previous day.
As excuses went, it was about the best on offer. That said Holm also suggested Cavendish was ‘paid to handle the pressure’.
Cavendish looked crushed afterwards as he acknowledged Greipel had the measure of him.
‘Today he beat me,’ he said. ‘The other day it was a mistake we made. Today I was just beaten.