A switch to the points system for mid-stage sprints may assist the Manx sprinter win the green jersey for the start time
Mark Cavendish talks like he rides, in unstoppable bursts. Sometimes, however, he can be still more eloquent when saying nothing at all. On Wednesday, as he looked forward to the part of the Tour de France in 9 days' time, three such periods of silence enveloped the gathering.
The first, which was non-negotiable, came as a hindrance to any appearance of involvement in the theory that he will be joining Team Sky next season, at the end of his compact with HTC-Slipstream.
Since the rules of professional cycling forbid the teams from announcing their signings for the next season until August, that came as no surprise. But the rumours are persistent and persuasive, and such an event would delight British fansparticularly those aware that only petty misunderstandings stood in the way of him joining the team when it was launched last year.
The second silence, lasting 17 seconds, ensued when the 26-year-old Manx sprinter was asked if the peloton would be touched by the front at the Tour's Grand Depart a week on Saturday of Alberto Contador, the defending champion, who tested positive for clenbuterol during last year's race, was cleared by his national federation, and now awaits the resolution of the international governing body's appeal against the verdict, which will not be proclaimed until later the Tour.
"Whether he's innocent or guilty," Cavendish said, "I'd have liked a clear-cut decision by now on what really happened. That's probably the matter that frustrates me, that there's something still rocking on and release to cause controversy in the play that should have been dealt with."
A third silence, only slightly shorter, came as he weighed his reply to a doubt about the event on him and his fellow riders of the end of Wouter Weylandt after a ram in the Giro d'Italia last month and the head injuries suffered by Juan Mauricio Soler in last week's Tour de Suisse. Both were races in which Cavendish took part.
"I think you get to put it to one side," he said. "It's not nice, but it's the job we're paying to do. There's a lot of force on everybody now and there are a lot of risks being interpreted in the peloton. Some people get pressure from their [team] directors and it makes for a different way of racing. But that's cyclingyou've just got to conform to it. If you can have hold and stay at the front, you're going to be out of trouble anyway."
This will be Cavendish's fifth Tour de France. His 15 stage wins constitute a book for a British rider, and thither will be six opportunities for him to gain the number next month in stages likely to end with a sprint finish, plus the team time run on the 2nd day. The first sprint is probably to close the opening day, a 191km ride through the Vende ending with a long but shallow climb. It is not the most obvious setting for the raw speed with which Cavendish usually annihilates his rivals, but there are suggestions that he fancies his chances.
"I've won on harder," he said, "but I've been dropped on easier, so we don't know. We'll give everything we can to win but for sure we're not favourites on that stage."
Success would grant him the Tour leader's yellow jersey for the start time, a curiosity for a sprinter since the evacuation of time bonuses. "I've drawn the leader's jersey in the Giro d'Italia and I've worn it on the Vuelta a Espaa, and I'd care to do it on the Tour de France, but I'd be exactly as glad to see it on the shoulders of one of my team-mates."
If he does not get the run with a win, there is ever the next day's 23kmtime trial in Les Essarts. "I've done five Grand Tour team time trials and in 3 of them I've been in the winning team. The former two were the ones where I didn't take hold of the team. It's almost acquiring the best out of a nine-man unit. You don't get to take for it, as tenacious as everybody knows what they get to do. You've seen Cool Runnings, where they're in the bathroom? It's like that. So I'm going to get everyone in the bath."
His principal ambitions are to win more stages and to be wearing the points leader's green jersey in Paris, a goal denied him by Thor Hushovd in 2009, thanks to a questionable time penalty after their duel at the culture in Besanon, and by a canny performance from Alessandro Petacchi last year. A transfer to the organization of points awarded for mid-stage sprints may aid him this time.
It is a busy year. On Saturday he races in the British national championships at Stamfordham, near Newcastle. The Circuit is followed by the Olympic test case in Surrey, by the Vuelta a Espaa, in which he won the points leader's jersey last year, and by the world championships, his early major point of the year, over a favourably flat course in Copenhagen in September.
When he was young, he remembered, he ever told himself: "I wish to be world champion and I wish to win stages of the Tour de France." Now he adds: "Normally when I say I wish to do something, I do it."
There have been but four wins to see this season, including two stages of the Giro, but he claims to be more than happy with his work going into the Tour. And before this month his exploits earned him an MBE, sweet compensation for having cruelly missed out on the avalanche of gongs in the Beijing velodrome. "The biggest thing about it to me," he said, "wasn't so often the award as the fact that I got it without being an Olympic medallist." Yesterday he was glad to explicate the British honours system to a puzzled Norwegian journalist, in considerable detail. "You can call me Sir Cav," he said.
- Mark Cavendish
- Tour de France 2011
- Tour de France
- Cycling