2023-07-08 19:32:59
Can a legend of the Grande Boucle leave the event like anyone else, with a bouquet and a nice souvenir photo as a goodbye? Somehow, 38-year-old Mark Cavendish couldn’t calmly go away. His destiny was either a smile as wide as the tunnel under the channel with a 35th stage victory to overtake, at least, by one digit, the legend Eddy Merckx. Or an ugly grimace.
And fate, which has shaken him so much since 2007 on the Tour, decided for him. It will be the grin of a collarbone bruised by an idiotic fall, even if we rarely go down to earth with intelligence. 60 km from the finish, the Englishman from Astana was the only one not to get up at the end of the peloton. He immediately held his right shoulder. Deep down, he had understood that his story with the Tour had just ended there, on a piece of hot asphalt.
“It’s a legend who stops cycling, immediately confided on arrival the winner of the day Mads Pedersen. Cycling we do not know yet because Cavendish, who will hang up the bike at the end of the year, should only have a few weeks of absence. But, basically, what would a possible new stage victory in the Vuelta add? Nothing. His obsession was to overtake Eddy Merckx in the number of stage victories on the Tour. So it won’t happen.
Pogacar pays tribute to one of his “youth idols”
Supreme cruelty, less than 24 hours earlier, he only needed a little audacity to win on the quays of Bordeaux. Not his own but that of the commissioners who did not dare to disqualify Jasper Philipsen and his sprint at the limit of regularity. Otherwise Cavendish, 2nd, would have been declared the winner when two chain breaks had also disrupted his effort. In the absence of red carpet fame steps, a green carpet victory would still have done the trick. And the history of cycling would have quickly forgotten the way. As the French public learned to love him when Cavendish was, at the start of his career, a pair of super-powerful legs topped with a slapping head.
Because Cavendish is first and foremost the story of a kid, hiding his sensitivity with excessive aggressiveness. Between 2008 and 2011, he slipped the stages of the Tour de France in handfuls of 4, 5 or even 6 per edition. But at the same time he flaunted a tiresome arrogance, mocking the “French cretins”, for example. And then as time passed, he earned a little less while lasting. Unemployed at the end of 2020, he signed a last-minute contract with Quick-Step, left for the Tour without being scheduled at the start and finally increased his score from 30 to 34 stages.
At the same time, he splits the armor and reveals his great class. As in 2018 during the 11th stage. That day, there is still the Col de la Rosière to climb. Cavendish knows he will arrive out of time. But he insists on climbing for 45 minutes, alone and exhausted. The learner, Christian Prudhomme, the boss of the Tour, rushes to welcome him on the line. “A Tour, it does not give up like that,” retorted Cavendish. Another nice gesture. In 2021, passing on the Ventoux in front of the stele in homage to his compatriot Tom Simpson who died there in 1967, Cavendish takes off his helmet and bows with infinite elegance.
“When I heard that Mark had fallen, I was really very sad,” said Tadej Pogacar on arrival. Everyone wanted him to win a stage. He was one of my childhood idols. I still remember when I watched him sprint on television in his HTC jersey on the Champs-Élysées. I wanted to have the same style. “Mark Renshaw, one of his sporting directors at Astana, sums up his feelings with one sentence:” “I’m not going to lie to you, I cried in the car when I realized he wasn’t going to leave”.
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