Most days in the Tour de France, the focus of the media is on the front of the race. That wasn’t the case on Saturday when Mark Cavendish, who is hoping to break the all-time record for Tour de France stage wins this year, went out the back of the peloton on the first climb, more than 160 kilometres from the finish.
Cavendish could be seen vomiting while riding through his sufferfest, but was surrounded by teammates as he fought to make it to Rimini inside the time limit. He finally came through well within the 48-minute time cut.
He wasn’t sick or having heat exhaustion, he was just suffering from the parcours, according to his team manager Alexandre Vinokourov.
“The stage was just very difficult for us. It was a difficult day for everyone,” Vinokourov said of the 206-kilometre stage run through the baking heat of Tuscany with seven significant climbs.
The Manxman himself was blunt in his assessment of the stage when asked by Eurosport what was going on.
“If you’ve got my body type now, don’t start cycling, because them days are gone,” Cavendish said. “But we know what we’re doing – it doesn’t mean it’s easy. We’re not riding around talking. It was so hard – that was so hard, but we had a plan and we stuck to it. I would have liked to stay one more climb with the peloton, but I was seeing stars it was so hard.”
Cavendish wasn’t alone out the back of the stage, he was joined by his entire team, minus Harold Tejada and Alexey Lutsenko, along with Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Jonas Rickaert, Fabio Jakobsen and Bram Welten (DSM-Firmenich-PostNl). They came to the finish 39:12 behind stage winner Romain Bardet, well within the time limit of more than 48 minutes.
“We don’t go easy to do that. You can work out what the front guys are going to do and then you work out what you need to do to make the time limit.”
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