CYCLING TOUR DE FRANCE:FOR MARK Cavendish, revenge is a dish best eaten piping hot. Almost exactly 24 hours earlier, he had looked to his left and seen former team-mate Andre Greipel come rocketing past as they neared the finish line in Carmaux. Yesterday, he took the earliest possible opportunity to ensure there would be no repeat.
In fact, just to ram the message home, he beat Greipel, with whom he has waged many verbal battles, twice yesterday on his way to securing the green jersey.
The intermediate sprint, offering much greater value this year in terms of points, came in Gaillac, exactly halfway into a 167km stage that had begun in the tiny former coal town of Blaye-les-Mines. Two of Cavendish’s HTC-Highroad team-mates, Bernie Eisel and Mark Renshaw, played their usual lead-out roles, but he seemed to ignore them as they peeled away in the final stages, preferring to sit on Greipel’s wheel before choosing his moment to accelerate past the German.
He was doing to Greipel exactly what Greipel had done to him.
Knowing Cavendish, that may have been his intention, as a way of reaffirming his supremacy with the maximum emphasis.
In the final sprint, 80km later, he chose a more conventional approach. After his lead-out train had ridden him into position, he sat on Renshaw’s wheel before making the decisive jump. This time, Geraint Thomas of Team Sky played a role, knowingly or otherwise, by providing the wheel that Renshaw followed in a repeat of the combination that took Cavendish to his first victory of the 2011 Tour, in Cap Frehel last week.
If Blaye-les-Mines was not the most spectacular of environments in which to start a stage of the Tour, particularly under a blanket of grey skies and thick drizzle, the riders soon found themselves amid a more graceful landscape studded with the medieval hill towns of the Tarn. The most breathtakingly beautiful of them, Cordes-sur-Ciel, added the “heaven” to its name as recently as 1993, through a referendum among its inhabitants, who remember that Albert Camus once said: “In Cordes, everything is beautiful, even regret.”
The weather improved a little and then worsened again as the riders neared the finish in Lavaur, a one-time Cathar stronghold and centre of woad-making whose 10,900 inhabitants were rewarded for standing out in a cloudburst with a fine finish and the sight of a Frenchman, Thomas Voeckler, making another spirited defence of the yellow jersey.
Voeckler knows he will almost certainly lose the lead today, when the riders head into the Pyrenees and ascend the 2,115m Col du Tourmalet on the way to a mountain-top finish at Luz-Ardiden.
But he will wear it on Bastille Day, which makes him a hero.
Guardian Service
