Cavendish sprints to the top

CYCLING:AFTER A day in the high mountains in which his suffering was there for all to see, Mark Cavendish came back yesterday to win his fourth stage in the 2011 Tour de France. The 19th of his career, it came as a result of a piece of teamwork that unfolded over the entire race distance and would have had any coach in any sport purring with satisfaction.

“What gets you through the mountains is the smell of success on a day like this,” Cavendish said afterwards. “The guys know that it doesn’t matter how much I suffer in the mountains. If I get a smell of the finish line, I’ll try and win.”

But he has eight HTC-Highroad team-mates in this race, and he would not like you to forget it. “I crossed the finish line first, and I’ve done that 19 times now,” he said, “but that’s because there’s only one person who can cross the finish line first. I did 200 metres today in a 200-kilometre stage. Two of my team-mates rode for 190 of those kilometres and the rest took over and delivered me to the line. So although it’s my name on the list, it’s for the team.”

The day began under grey skies and in blustery winds just north of the eastern Pyrenees in Limoux. Five men – Niki Terpstra of Quick Step, Mickael Delage of Francaise des Jeux, Samuel Dumoulin of Cofidis, Mikhail Ignatyev of Katusha and Anthony Delaplace of Saur-Sojasun – formed a breakaway as soon as the field had left the town behind, but HTC’s two workhorses, Danny Pate and Lars Bak, responded by assembling their colleagues into a disciplined line that would sit on the front of the main bunch for the next four and a quarter hours.

Even in less than idyllic weather, a lovelier Tour stage could hardly have been imagined. The opening kilometres, winding through the vineyards and wooded slopes, with no buildings and few onlookers, presented the riders with the sort of narrow, undulating, imperfectly surfaced, soft-verged roads that provide an echo of the Tour’s earliest years. Soon the field was snaking through the little streets of small towns, each one filled with cheering from spectators of all generations, the smell of Sunday lunch and the sound of brass bands.

This was a transitional stage, and as the race moved north-east, leaving the Pyrenees behind, the scenery changed abruptly. But still HTC’s nine men commanded the front of the peloton, their relentless tempo never allowing the breakaway riders to open a gap of much more than four minutes.

Pate and Bak held station with only a brief interruption for the intermediate sprint in the town of Montagnac. The escapees had taken the first five positions, but Cavendish outran Jose Joaquin Rojas and Philippe Gilbert, his closest rivals in the race for the green jersey, to claim the extra bounty. Then Pate and Bak returned to the front, their team-mates resuming the line-astern formation.

Terpstra, the last of the breakaway riders to hold out and the winner of the day’s combativity prize, was swallowed up with five kilometres to go as the field charged along the broad, featureless boulevards around the outskirts of Montpellier, towards the finish outside the rugby stadium: a much more demanding run-in, Cavendish said, than it looked.

Pate and Bak had finally given way to fresher pace-setters, among them Bernie Eisel and Tony Martin, but the remaining members of the HTC train faced a challenge when Gilbert attacked and went clear 3km from home.

“Gilbert was after the stage win, and it was an up-and-down finish, the kind he could do that on,” Cavendish said. “It would have been easy for the guys to panic and try to bring him back too quickly, which would have exploded the train and taken the edge off our sprint. But they kept their cool and showed incredible patience and brought him back slowly.”

After that it was Mark Renshaw’s task to launch the green jersey into the final assault, during which Cavendish fended off the desperate efforts of Tyler Farrar and Alessandro Petacchi.

The stiff wind, he said, had made the riders nervous throughout the day, particularly the contenders for the general classification, who were remembering the stage to La Grande Motte in 2009, when crosswinds had created a split in the bunch, leaving Alberto Contador adrift.

“Since then, every single day there’s been even a little bluster of wind, every GC rider is trying to be up the front,” Cavendish said. “It’s not normal that with 3k to go I’m fighting with Cadel (Evans), I’m fighting with the Schlecks, I’m fighting with (Ivan) Basso. It’s pretty stressful and frustrating and it takes a lot of energy just to move through little gaps the whole day for 200 kilometres.

“The thing that gets you most about the Tour is the mental stress. It’s different from any other race on the planet, just the amount of concentrating you have to do. It drains you.

“A day like today, you expect it to be an easy transitional stage, but there’s as much fatigue goes into this as there was in the mountains.”

Cavendish is now the only man in history to have won four road stages – in other words, not including individual or team time trials – in four consecutive Tours. Not even Eddy Merckx did that. The records keep tumbling