At his final appearance before his 10th Tour de France startson Saturday at Mont-Saint-Michel, Mark Cavendish was keen to dispel the assumption that winning the yellow jersey might be a career target, arguing that it is “just something I haven’t done”. Of the opening 188km to Utah Beach he said: “It’s a stage win, how else would you look at it? If it was the seventh stage I’d be going in with the same kind of strategy.”
Cavendish’s approach will not vary, but why would it, given that it has won him 26 stages in the Tour? But this could be the one day in this Tour when the maillot jaune is on offer. By stage seven – probably as early as the end of stage two – it will be out of reach. However you couch it, in the recent past the Manxman has spoken lovingly of his desire to win the yellow jersey and has pointed out that it remains one of the gaps on his amply filled palmarès.
“I’d like to win the yellow jersey,” Cavendish said last week when his Olympic team selection was confirmed. “I’ve never said I’m confident of doing it. I’ve said I’d like to do it, but I’d like to win up Mont Ventoux and that’s less likely. I’ll go into the opening stage of the Tour de France with the goal of winning, whether it’s as easy as other years is debatable, but the team and I will definitely go in with the goal of getting the yellow jersey after stage one.”
Win on Saturday and Cavendish will complete the full house of wearing all three leader’s jerseys and winning the points jerseys in the major Tours: Italy, France and Spain. Target or not, wearing yellow would be seen as a major milestone. He may well be right to play it down as the world of sprinting has moved on significantly since he was in his pomp between 2008 and 2012. The Germans Marcel Kittel and André Greipel have dominated in the past three years and new talents have emerged in Caleb Ewan, Fernando Gaviria, Bryan Coquard. Plus, in the nine Tours he has ridden, Cavendish has tended to hit winning form a few days in.
Sprinters do not seem to age in the same way as other cyclists. The range of factors in play in a mass finish mean that decline is not always linear, not solely physical and not always a simple matter of advancing years. Cavendish’s speed and desire may be undiminished, but he has won only two straight-up sprint stages in the past three Tours, plus one from a superbly managed breakaway marshalled by the Quick-Step team in 2013. Greipel and Kittel have won six and seven respectively. That makes them the obvious favourites for Saturday.
On Thursday, Cavendish was not taking questions about the Olympic Games, where he has been selected to ride the omnium and probably at least one round of the team pursuit for Great Britain. He has made it clear that there is no plan at present to leave the Tour early to save his strength, although he has also underlined that he will not compromise Rio by riding on too long. He is adamant that staying deep into the Tour will not mean he misses significant training for the team pursuit. “The lads are going to Livigno for two weeks, they’re doing long days,” he said. “I’m just doing it around France instead of at altitude in the Dolomites.”
Cavendish has admitted that juggling road racing for Dimension Data and track preparation with Great Britain in recent months has been harder than he imagined and that it would have been simpler to have sidelined the road to concentrate solely on the track. As a rider who tends to thrive on racing, he is also uncertain how the track training he has been doing will affect his sprinting.
The run-in to the Tour has been “completely different; I’ve had a track buildup. I’ve used a lot of racing to build my endurance so I don’t know how it’s going to be. It could be the best thing I’ve ever done. It could be the worst thing I’ve ever done. I’ve definitely made every single minute of every single day count this year and I’m not coming to the Tour to just mess about. I’m not coming to the Tour de France to stop. I know my eight team-mates are going to do their best to get to Paris, so I’m going to do my best.”
The weekend’s stages both run from south to north into the Cotentin peninsula. The first goes from Mont‑Saint-Michel to the very edge of the most westerly of the five Normandy landing zones, established with the aim of putting troops in place to cut off the peninsula and give the Allies access to Cherbourg. Normandy remains deeply proud of its links with the landings. It is not so long ago that English visitors could bank on being welcomed with warm, first-hand memories of the liberation and that history is to be seen everywhere, most notably in the museums and memorials, and more subtly in stage two’s start town, Saint-Lô, where barely a building in the centre is more than 70 years old.
A dead flat run-in and barely a corner in the final five kilometres to a finish line outside the landings museum above the beach speaks for itself. Saturday is for the flat-road sprinters, led by Kittel and Greipel, and this is the sort of straightforward run-in that increases Cavendish’s chances. Sunday’s finish on a steep hill high above Cherbourg is another story: one for the fast men who can climb. The world champion, Peter Sagan, will figure, so, too, Simon Gerrans of Australia. Splits in the peloton are inevitable meaning that Chris Froome and his fellow overall contenders will be desperate to avoid any loss of time.
The gaps that open on Sunday will dictate whether the flat-road sprinters can hope to fight for the yellow jersey on Monday and Tuesday. With only 10-second time bonuses available per stage win, the chances are that whoever wears yellow on Sunday will keep it until Wednesday’s hilltop finish in the Massif Central and possibly beyond.
In the bigger picture of the next three weeks, the challenge Cavendish has set himself is a single subplot, but there is romance in it nonetheless, because his fortunes could go several ways between now and mid-August. The dream scenario is easily written: a Tour that goes to script – at least one stage win, perhaps the yellow jersey, career target or not – followed by one Olympic medal, perhaps even two.
If the Tour goes off-kilter, there remains the chance of redemption in Rio, although the team pursuit is unknown territory as Cavendish’s selection means in the event of illness or injury to a team-mate he would have to step up for all three rounds. However, if there is one characteristic that has shone through his career since he applied to join the British Cycling academy as a teenager, it is his constant willingness to put his head above the parapet. This summer, the stakes are particularly high.
