Both Peter Kennaugh and Mark Cavendish have good reason to want to consign the 2014 Tour de France to history but their showings at the British championships on Sunday afternoon showed they should be in the best shape when this year’s Tour starts. Kennaugh defended his title in fine style but it was Cavendish who fought him pedal stroke for pedal stroke on the final climb up Michaelgate to take the silver medal.
Kennaugh looks set to erase the memory of last year, when Sky dropped him inexplicably from their Tour lineup – to his utter frustration – but Cavendish’s display of stamina, speed, tactical nous and sheer bloody-mindedness also spoke volumes. Up against three members of Team Sky in the finale – the bronze medallist Ian Stannard and the Welshman Luke Rowe as well as Kennaugh – he rose to the occasion, chasing bravely behind Stannard and Kennaugh for many miles before going clear with Kennaugh on the final lap.
“I’ve trained hard this year, the team’s given me a good programme to prepare for the Tour, and I’m up for it,” said Cavendish of Etixx-Quick Step and who has been training in the Isle of Man, including racing in a local time trial and handicap race. “This was a good hit out. I’m happy with how I felt, so I need a week of recovery now and I’ll be flying for the first days of the Tour de France. I just cracked the last time up Michaelgate, I’d been riding all day on my own. But I’m super happy with that.”
If there was a downside for the sprinter it was in the close attentions of the crowd, who packed the narrow one-in-four cobbled climb into Lincoln’s historic centre. Early on, a camera hit Cavendish’s right shoulder – the one he damaged in last year’s spectacular crash on stage one of the Tour – and late on he struck his left, more heavily. He may have it looked at before he travels to Utrecht for the start of the Tour on Saturday.
Sky set the pace from the off and the upshot was a viciously hard 125 miles; an initial group of 22 formed just two miles into the first 28-mile loop north of the city, two laps of which were followed by a shorter circuit with eight ascents of Michaelgate. Critically, neither of the Yates twins, Adam and Simon, were among the leaders, with the stronger of the pair, Simon, forced into a frustrating chase for 20th.
Kennaugh and Cavendish forced the decisive split on only the second climb of Michaelgate, with Stannard and Luke Rowe linking up with the Yorkshiremen Adam Blythe and Scott Thwaites. A lap later Stannard pushed the pace up again, and only Kennaugh could hold him. With over 50 miles to race that looked to be the winning move but Cavendish thought otherwise, escaping with Rowe and pegging the two leaders back gradually until the four came together on the penultimate lap with some 12 miles remaining. Earlier in the day, Lizzie Armitstead put in a dominant display to take the third road-race title of her career and show she is over the finish-line crash that put her out of the Women’s Tour with heavy bruising to her left leg.
The Yorkshirewoman controlled the moves effectively in the early phase of the race before putting in a single incisive attack as the leaders took the bell.
The defending champion, Laura Trott, made an initial attempt to hold her wheel but to no avail and Armitstead pulled rapidly away with only a single lap to cover before sealing victory. By the finish she had opened the gap to just under 2min over the first wave of chasers, with the 19-year-old Alice Barnes – one of the GB mountain-biking squad selected to support Armitstead at last year’s world championships – taking silver from Trott and Molly Weaver.
“I tested the legs a few times and I knew if I really wanted to that I could drop [the opposition]. I didn’t want to take anyone with fresh legs to the finish,” Armitstead said. “I knew I’d be able to put about 30sec into them on the climb. It was important to show well after the crash, and to be honest I didn’t feel too good at the start. The other riders had five days of racing at the Women’s Tour, and it’s never easy coming into a race just like that.”
The gap between Armitstead and the rest of the British peloton was clear to see. “She is miles above the rest of us, in a league of her own,” Trott said. Armitstead will now head for the Giro Rosa – the women’s Tour of Italy – which starts on Friday in Ljubljana, Slovenia, after which she will kick back and fix her mind on finding form for her major target, the world road race championship in Richmond, Virginia, at the end of September.
