Etape

Road racing was memorably described by the American journalist Owen Mulholland as ‘chess at 150 heartbeats a minute’. In the bunch sprints, it is chess at 200 heartbeats a minute. Coincidentally, chess is something Cavendish plays. But speed chess. ‘Ten seconds a move. You can’t think, you just have to move.’

The 2008 Tour offered a glimpse of Cavendish’s other weapon, besides his lightning speed, his bike-handling and analytical and positioning skills. His team, Columbia-High Road, formed a lead-out the likes of which the sport had seldom seen. It was a team of strong riders but built around their young sprinter. Few teams are so assured in their focus. Their confidence in him could be seen in the way they rode. The cockiness, the swagger: it seemed that his team bought into this, and fed off it, reflecting their leader’s confidence, and reinforcing it.

* * *

I meet Cavendish in the deserted coastal town of Calpe in southern Spain, in the bar of an out-of-season hotel. It’s early January. It is a pretty bleak setting. And Cavendish is cagey and monosyllabic when asked about recent controversies – there are always recent controversies with Cavendish – and immediate plans. But ask him to discuss his best ever stage win in the Tour de France and he is tranformed. He sits upright. His eyes – framed by long, cow-like eyelashes – widen and sparkle. He uses his hands to speak. And he recites what happened as though he was reading from the road book, recalling every corner, every hill, every pothole.

But first, he has to settle on which stage win is his ‘greatest’. He thinks aloud. There are some contenders. Stage eighteen in 2012, from Blagnac to Brive-la-Gaillarde, three days from Paris, is one. ‘It was a fucking hard day. Block headwind, 230k, and it wasn’t flat, it was heavy roads.’ It was doubly – or triply, or quadruply – hard because he felt he was going against the orders of his team, Team Sky, who led the race with Bradley Wiggins. The team meeting that morning had been confused: Sean Yates, the director, told them to take it easy, at which point Cavendish, who had been led to believe they would set it up for him, raised his hand: ‘What about me?’

Wiggins piped up: ‘I’m in favour of riding for Cav,’ and the plan was changed. But Cavendish did not have the support of old; he was feeding off scraps. In the end, in the final kilometres into Brive, it was Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen who helped him, but Cavendish still had an awful lot to do: there were riders up the road in a break, strong riders, and going into the final kilometre it seemed that they would hang on.

‘At 750 metres to go, I did this calculation,’ says Cavendish. ‘I used Edvald to slingshot to the break; I did it in a split second. I knew, if I go now … I timed it perfectly. I didn’t sprint; I got my speed up; into the slipstream; slingshot off. Then [Luca] Paolini was there; I slingshotted off him; then there were three more. Then I started sprinting. I was sprinting for a good while, 350 metres, but I had that much energy to spare, because, contrary to popular belief, sprinters aren’t lazy until 200 metres [to go]. The amount of muscle damage you do in a bunch sprint is … You can’t recover from that muscle damage, you know. I hadn’t done much sprinting that Tour. I had fire in my eyes. I saw it and I just went.’

He has fire in his eyes now, as he relives it. His heart might be racing, as it was when he caught and passed the Spaniard, Luis León Sánchez, in the finishing straight in Brive. He settles back in his chair. He lifts a hand to his mouth. His brow furrows: not an unfamiliar sight. It’s difficult to tell if he is still thinking or if he is allowing himself to become pissed off, again, as he reflects on his 2012 Tour with Team Sky, when he was made to feel like a bit-part player: a luxury in a team built around Wiggins.

Then he leans forward again and the furrow vanishes: ‘Nah. That wasn’t the best one. I would say Aubenas.

‘Yeah, Aubenas.’

* * *

‘I wouldn’t even have gone for it, if Bjarne hadn’t come over and said that,’ Cavendish says.

Even after his conversation with Riis, he didn’t feel confident when he went back to the road book and studied the profile for stage nineteen. Yet he also concluded that he might never have such a good chance of winning such a tough stage. He was in the midst of his greatest season. He won thirteen times before the Tour even started, including his first ‘Monument’, the Milan–San Remo classic, in late March. That, too, had included two tough climbs towards the end, the Cipressa and Poggio. Then he had won three stages of the Tour of Italy. When it came to the Tour, he won stages two, three, ten and eleven.

Stage three to La Grande-Motte had, in some ways, been the most impressive. It was a different kind of Cavendish win. In the Camargue, where the huge plains south of Arles stretch to the Mediterranean, his team had a plan. This desert-flat but marshy expanse, where white horses gallop through the long reeds, is notorious for the strong wind that blows off the sea. When it comes from the side, as it usually does, it wreaks havoc, causing the peloton to split into echelons – especially if a team is driving at the front.

Cavendish’s team had two people, sprint coach Erik Zabel and team owner Bob Stapleton, riding the course ahead of the race. From the Camargue they reported that when the road turned sharply, with 31km to go, they would suddenly be hit by a crosswind. Just before that turn, Cavendish and his team-mates massed at the front; then they rode hard, in formation, as they came out of the bend. With the wind coming from the left, they hugged the right gutter: the other riders, each one scrabbling for shelter behind the rider in front, stretched in a line behind them, and snapped. Twenty-nine riders raced clear, including six of Cavendish’s team-mates. The sprint victory in the hideous, garish Mediterranean resort was a formality.

Two weeks later, after the Pyrenees and the Alps, and stage nineteen presents Cavendish with a chance – a slim chance – of a fifth win. But he knows that the climb at the end, the 787-metre Col d’Escrinet, is a potentially insurmountable obstacle. The Cipressa and Poggio were pimples in comparison: the Escrinet was 14km long, averaging a gradient of 4.1 per cent, but, as Riis warned, much steeper at the bottom.

The stage gets off to a tough start: the 2.6km Côte de Culin after 6.5km, the first of two category-four ranked climbs. An obvious platform for an early break. Several riders attack, and a group of ten goes clear up the climb, with two more riders joining over the top. Five more try to get across, including perennial contender Cadel Evans, but when the dust settles, just 16km into the stage, the group is eleven-strong. Nine more bridge the gap over the following fifteen, rolling kilometres. The break includes some big hitters: Evans, David Millar, David Arroyo, Luis León Sánchez, Carlos Barredo. And Kim Kirchen.

Kim Kirchen’s presence is strange. Sitting in the peloton, Cavendish wonders why Kirchen, his team-mate, has joined the break. Cavendish had said in the morning, in front of everybody in the team meeting in the bus, that he fancied this stage, and thought he could win it. ‘But I need you guys,’ he told them. ‘I need you to help me just like you helped me over the Cipressa and Poggio.’

Most had written off Cavendish. In the Astana team bus, as a Eurosport on-board camera crew will reveal, that team’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel, was apparently telling his riders: ‘Cavendish will be dropped on the Escrinet.’

Cavendish recalls: ‘We went over these two climbs early in the stage, cat. 4s. On the first one, the peloton split. There were Bouygues Telecom [the French team of Thomas Voeckler] on the front and it was all over the place. Little groups of three riders, all over the shop. There was another climb after that first one.’ La Côte de la forêt de Chambaran, 40km into the stage. ‘And it settled down on the descent, at least in the peloton. But the break had gone. And we had Kim Kirchen in it. I had said I wanted to go for it, but I don’t think Kim believed me. That’s why he went in the break. It meant we couldn’t chase.’

The gap, as they went over the second climb, was still only 40 seconds. The peloton had yet to decide whether to allow the break a ‘pass’ for the day. But as Cavendish says, the pressure went off on the descent; the gap went up to one minute thirty. Though the front group was big, six teams had failed to place any men in it. One of the teams that had missed out was Rabobank, who had Oscar Freire, their Spanish sprinter who was more than a sprinter. He was a better all-rounder than Cavendish; he specialised in sprints that followed tough little climbs. With the gap creeping towards three minutes, and 100km still to race, Rabobank went to the front and began chasing. This was a sign, too, that they didn’t expect Cavendish to survive that last climb.

‘When the break went and the bunch settled down, I thought we were going to be in for quite an easy day,’ Cavendish says. ‘Then we hit the crosswinds.’ Rabobank, a Dutch team, are past masters of riding in crosswinds; they anticipate them. ‘Freire fancied it,’ says Cavendish, ‘so he got his team to ride, and when they did, it was one line. Crosswinds, crosswinds. A couple of guys ended up being eliminated because of the crosswinds. It was brutal.’

For 60km, the road was undulating, twisty, through Montelier, Beaumont-lès-Valence, Beauvallon and into the Ardèche, the geographically diverse pocket in the south-east of France, famous for its forests and rivers, gorges and plateaux. The type of terrain that doesn’t lend itself to straight, flat roads: the kind of place that is beautiful to look at, punishing to ride in.

Cavendish did as little as possible as Rabobank, with help from Milram, working for their sprinter, Gerald Ciolek, led the chase. So Milram didn’t think Cavendish would survive the final climb, either.

Up front, the size of the break was proving unwieldy. It is difficult to get twenty riders to co-operate, or to continue to co-operate once the lead starts to fall; and with 65km to go, it dipped below two minutes. Then it began to break up; Millar, Popovych, Arrieta, Gutierrez and Duque go clear. They work well, building a 45-second lead; the bunch is just under two minutes behind them. But the peloton piles it on, racing towards an intermediate sprint in Saint-Julien-en-Saint-Alban with 37km remaining, at the foot of the Escrinet.

The break is swept up, but the five leaders hang on, just. Still Rabobank lead into the base of the climb. Then they are swamped by Cervélo, working for Thor Hushovd. The panic at the front is because so many are trying to be there for the steep early part of the climb: the all-round sprinters like Freire and Hushovd, who both fancy that they can hold on and profit when the inevitable happens and Cavendish is dropped; and the overall contenders, who cannot risk any surprise attacks, or being caught among the bodies further down the peloton. So Astana are near the front – Contador, Lance Armstrong; and Andy and Fränk Schleck are marking them; and Bradley Wiggins is there, guarding his fourth place overall.

The helicopter shots show the town of Aubenas – perched on a rocky outcrop, as the brochure described, surrounded by verdant slopes. The village looks cramped, old, the roofs of the buildings forming a terracotta patchwork. The cameras switch to an alternative angle on the race, at the rear of the peloton, the business end; it shows riders being spat out the back, including a few Rabobanks, their work done.

The bunch snakes up the climb. Fabian Cancellara is another big name dropped. Wiggins moves up the outside. Armstrong is lurking there, ominous. Off the back go his team-mate, Popovych, then Stuart O’Grady, then the King of the Mountains, Franco Pellizotti. Where’s Cavendish?

‘Bernie Eisel got me up to second in the bunch coming into the climb,’ says Cavendish. ‘I just sat there and counted; counted down the kilometres. It was Tony Martin at the front; he sat in front of me and rode me up. The first three and a half, four kilometres, I was riding as though that was the summit there. I remembered what Riis had told me: that if I could get past the first 4k I could hang on up the rest of the climb. And we came to this town, and I could hear on the radio there were guys getting dropped. I heard that [Heinrich] Haussler [another strong sprinter, second to Cavendish at Milan–San Remo] was dropped.

‘I just kept my rhythm. But I stayed in the top fifteen up there. I could see Rabobank go to the front, with [Denis] Menchov up there, and I remember just feeling comfortable. Then it kicked up again, the last couple of ks. And that did hurt.’

At this point, Laurent Lefèvre attacks, and he’s joined by the world champion, Alessandro Ballan. With the increase in pace behind them, Cavendish drops to fourteenth wheel, still with Martin in front, shepherding him. He has his hands on his brake hoods, perched on the nose of his saddle, and he is frowning. But additional support arrives in the shape of his Belgian team-mate, Maxime Monfort. He sits behind Martin; Cavendish sits behind both as riders pass him and he slides down the peloton. ‘I went halfway down the peloton. Luis León Sánchez attacked over the top, and he was getting behind the [TV and photographers’] motorbikes. The motorbikes that year, they were notorious for coming close to the peloton; they came really close to breaks and that.’ And riders could profit: tucking in behind them, getting shelter from the wind: even a brief moment would help.

Ballan and Lefèvre persevere – they have thirteen seconds’ advantage going over the top – but Cavendish is still there. ‘I recovered in about 300 metres of the descent, and went straight back to the front. I can descend better than the others, and the peloton was small.’

Monfort, George Hincapie and Tony Martin now mass at the front, Cavendish behind them. They reel in Sánchez, while Ballan and Lefèvre hang on. They tear down the descent. Cavendish takes one last drink before, with 2.2km remaining, and a little uphill kick, they catch the last two escapees.

‘It was wet on the descent,’ says Cavendish. ‘It had been a dry day, but it was wet – that was strange. I didn’t understand that. We could see the two guys up the road, behind the motorbikes – again. Maxime was riding. Tony was riding. And Milram were riding for Ciolek.

‘And we caught them with a couple of ks to go. George was still there for me, and he went first. Then Tony.’ Cavendish screws up his face as he recalls the effort made by Martin. ‘Tony did, uphill, about a 1,600m lead out. And it was uphill; he was slowing down, slowing down, but hanging on at the front. I knew it was a kind of uphill finish; but it still looked like a sprint. You could see the finish. It was coming. I just whacked it in my 14[-tooth sprocket: a relatively low gear for a sprint]. Because Tony was slowing, slowing, slowing. So it was your acceleration that was the most important part of the sprint.’

There was a sharp right just before the slight uphill. The burly figure of Hushovd lurked behind Cavendish. They go into a tight roundabout; Freire misjudges it and goes straight across the grass in the middle, but doesn’t fall. He bunnyhops down the other side and ends up back where he was: eighth in line. At the kite, with a kilometre to go, Martin leads, Cavendish is second, Hushovd third.

Over a bridge, high above a river, and it’s clear that Hushovd fancies it. He glances around; he knows there’s a climb coming; he can out-power Cavendish on this kind of finish. Watching Martin is painful: he swerves from one side of the road to the other, and, with 500 metres remaining, gets out of the saddle: one last effort.

Cavendish flicks his head to the left, glancing over his shoulder, as Martin fades away and Ciolek starts to sprint. Hushovd begins his effort at exactly the same moment as Cavendish. ‘I’m in the 14,’ says Cavendish, ‘sitting there, waiting for Tony to swing over; I leave it, leave it, leave it, then I go.’ He nods, like a football manager mimicking a header by one of his players.

Cavendish’s eyes blaze as he replays the sprint. ‘And because I’m in a smaller gear than the others, who are in the 11, I get that gap. It was slow. But I got the gap. Nobody could get near me.’

Now he sits back, satisfied. More than that: vindicated. In Aubenas, he crossed the line a full length clear, five fingers held up, one for each stage win. And in Paris, two days later, he would make it six.

Classement

1 Mark Cavendish, Great Britain, Team Columbia-HTC, 3 hours, 50 minutes, 35 secs

2 Thor Hushovd, Norway, Cervélo, same time

3 Gerald Ciolek, Germany, Milram, s.t.

4 Greg Van Avermaet, Belgium, Silence-Lotto, s.t.

5 Óscar Freire, Spain, Rabobank, s.t.

6 Jérôme Pineau, France, Quick-Step, s.t.

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