Waiting and waiting and waiting. He left the space open on the left for me but I just needed a second longer in the wheel, so I chose to jump onto Alpecin and come around there. His top speed, Another little nugget: look closely at the photos as he crossed the line and his chain had come off. Pan up on those pictures and you'll see the hands-on-head celebration was a perfect reincarnation of the photo across the line when he won his first Tour stage in Chateauroux 13 years ago.
Asked whether this was planned, he gives a mischievous wink and a grin, leaving you unsure as to whether he's seen an opportunity to toy with those who've not written a good article since his last appearance at the Tour in , or if quietly informing us he's the Isle of Man's greatest showman. It's just another sprint and use it as an advantage that I knew the finish rather than looking at it romantically. Now, 54 is standard, some people go The speed is ridiculously high. The lead-out trains are a lot more efficient, the power the guys have.
Then, time for the human side of the race. The fastest man on the original start sheet, Caleb Ewan, is now sitting at home, and he and Cavendish get on well.
The Brit has already offered words of support, the Brit has of course been sat at home in his position before, watching the race on television like everyone else. Neither is it a carefree tow in the peloton until the critical kilometres. The other teams will leave it to us to chase down a breakaway, and we can't allow a big group to go up the road - anything more than four riders is trouble.
We're not robots. You have to have the physical strength to react to things. You don't necessarily want to take control, and the speed will be dictated by how many surges you get from the other teams.
You don't want to go so fast they can't come, but you want to be just ahead so you're in control. The strongest cyclist in the world isn't as strong as two guys, let alone nine. Seldom has the pace dropped below 30mph. It is hot, midsummer in the south of France.
You are tired, thirsty and being bumped on all sides. And the brutal stuff is yet to start. If you're grabbing your brakes with one hand in those conditions, it's not going to end well. It leaves the race open to counter-attacks and chances for small breaks to form that you can't control, because they've been sheltering in the wheels all day.
There will be odd riders who attack in that, but you'll never get a full breakaway forming unless it's a difficult last 10km, in which case it probably won't be a sprint anyway. It used to be that one team controlled it and other teams were fighting behind for that sprinter's wheel. Nowadays you've probably got five or six sprint teams, all vying for control of the peloton. So whereas before I had eight guys ahead of me, all controlling it with me in ninth, now you've got six teams on the front row.
That doesn't just make you seventh; you've got six lots of nine which is 54 riders ahead or around you. This is both your job and your greatest skill, the few minutes of the greatest stress you can experience. How to control the adrenaline, hold your nerve with wheels an inch in front of yours and an inch behind, keep a grip on the endless calculations?
The weather, the terrain, the other riders - it's not just me against another rider, it's my team against 20 other teams. So it's 20 things to the power of 20 that can happen. There are infinite things that can happen.
I get quite the opposite - I get quite clear-headed. I know what I have to do. It's like a procedure. That's what it's like for most of the guys, but they rely on raw power. I rely on - and always had to - on my road craft and instinct. So it's ingrained in me. Going through a set of patterns to get the best possible result.
Sometimes it doesn't work, because although you get the tactics right you physically can't do what you need. But most of the time, it happens. The peloton has gone from band of brothers to angry swarm. Everyone is fighting for space, everyone is fighting for a wheel. Forget any notions of solidarity. This is elbows-out war.
You couldn't even hear the man in front. So we have a system where I call to my lead-out man Renshaw, he calls to the rider in front and so on. We have five words we say in our team. It has to be 'stop' and not 'whoah', because 'whoah' could be confused with 'go'. With Mark Renshaw , the only thing I have to say is his name. Because he knows he will never be so close to the pavement that I can't get on his wheel.
If we're trying to move up the outside and I get cut off by another team, I'll shout 'Mark! It's the only thing it can mean. Can Cavendish, not renowned for stepping back from confrontation, swear in four major European languages? These intervals are great on the road with a power meter but also done at home on a smart trainer. The aim is to sustain the highest possible power for three minutes, without starting too slowly or fading too much.
Repeat this three to six times, with a three-minute recovery in between. Pure sprint efforts last from just a few seconds to a maximum of around 30 seconds. Therefore, your immediate or short-term energy generation systems play a big role. After that, stored ATP runs out.
For sprints peaking at around 10 seconds, your body switches to another compound, creatine phosphate CP , to produce more ATP. All of this is done without the need for oxygen —in other words, anaerobically. Beyond 10 seconds of sprinting, ATP is produced by the breakdown of carbohydrates in a process called glycolysis. This in turn produces pyruvate.
In normal endurance riding, the oxygen you take in helps convert pyruvate into even more ATP. The world champion Julian Alaphilippe then came to the fore to put out any fires — just as Kasper Asgreen had done earlier in the stage when breakaway attempts came thick and fast in a hectic opening half-hour.
Dries Devenyns and Mattia Cattaneo both played their roles superbly in the stressful approach to Carcassonne before Asgreen led the blue train coming under the flamme rouge with Davide Ballerini, Morkov and Cavendish in his wake. But the Dane did his duty and let Cavendish through ahead of a string of rapturous expletives from the man of the moment. Speaking moments later to Seb Piquet, the voice of Radio Tour, however, Cavendish did his best to underplay his accomplishment and avoid bringing Merckx into the conversation.
Instead he went off on a strange, rambling but not altogether unwelcome tirade about how having such small shoulders earned him the scorn of the race jury for perceived headbutts on riders while exiting roundabouts. It was all quite strange and subdued, but quite eye-opening all the same. But later on, once the dust had settled and the achievement had set in, Cavendish did open up in a press conference about his feelings on drawing level with Merckx.
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