He has fire in his eyes now, as he relives it. His heart might be racing, as it was when he caught and passed the Spaniard, Luis León Sánchez, in the finishing straight in Brive. He settles back in his chair. He lifts a hand to his mouth. His brow furrows: not an unfamiliar sight. It’s difficult to tell if he is still thinking or if he is allowing himself to become pissed off, again, as he reflects on his 2012 Tour with Team Sky, when he was made to feel like a bit-part player: a luxury in a team built around Wiggins.
Then he leans forward again and the furrow vanishes: ‘Nah. That wasn’t the best one. I would say Aubenas.
‘Yeah, Aubenas.’
* * *
‘I wouldn’t even have gone for it, if Bjarne hadn’t come over and said that,’ Cavendish says.
Even after his conversation with Riis, he didn’t feel confident when he went back to the road book and studied the profile for stage nineteen. Yet he also concluded that he might never have such a good chance of winning such a tough stage. He was in the midst of his greatest season. He won thirteen times before the Tour even started, including his first ‘Monument’, the Milan–San Remo classic, in late March. That, too, had included two tough climbs towards the end, the Cipressa and Poggio. Then he had won three stages of the Tour of Italy. When it came to the Tour, he won stages two, three, ten and eleven.
Stage three to La Grande-Motte had, in some ways, been the most impressive. It was a different kind of Cavendish win. In the Camargue, where the huge plains south of Arles stretch to the Mediterranean, his team had a plan. This desert-flat but marshy expanse, where white horses gallop through the long reeds, is notorious for the strong wind that blows off the sea. When it comes from the side, as it usually does, it wreaks havoc, causing the peloton to split into echelons – especially if a team is driving at the front.
Cavendish’s team had two people, sprint coach Erik Zabel and team owner Bob Stapleton, riding the course ahead of the race. From the Camargue they reported that when the road turned sharply, with 31km to go, they would suddenly be hit by a crosswind. Just before that turn, Cavendish and his team-mates massed at the front; then they rode hard, in formation, as they came out of the bend. With the wind coming from the left, they hugged the right gutter: the other riders, each one scrabbling for shelter behind the rider in front, stretched in a line behind them, and snapped. Twenty-nine riders raced clear, including six of Cavendish’s team-mates. The sprint victory in the hideous, garish Mediterranean resort was a formality.
Two weeks later, after the Pyrenees and the Alps, and stage nineteen presents Cavendish with a chance – a slim chance – of a fifth win. But he knows that the climb at the end, the 787-metre Col d’Escrinet, is a potentially insurmountable obstacle. The Cipressa and Poggio were pimples in comparison: the Escrinet was 14km long, averaging a gradient of 4.1 per cent, but, as Riis warned, much steeper at the bottom.
The stage gets off to a tough start: the 2.6km Côte de Culin after 6.5km, the first of two category-four ranked climbs. An obvious platform for an early break. Several riders attack, and a group of ten goes clear up the climb, with two more riders joining over the top. Five more try to get across, including perennial contender Cadel Evans, but when the dust settles, just 16km into the stage, the group is eleven-strong. Nine more bridge the gap over the following fifteen, rolling kilometres. The break includes some big hitters: Evans, David Millar, David Arroyo, Luis León Sánchez, Carlos Barredo. And Kim Kirchen.
Kim Kirchen’s presence is strange. Sitting in the peloton, Cavendish wonders why Kirchen, his team-mate, has joined the break. Cavendish had said in the morning, in front of everybody in the team meeting in the bus, that he fancied this stage, and thought he could win it. ‘But I need you guys,’ he told them. ‘I need you to help me just like you helped me over the Cipressa and Poggio.’
Most had written off Cavendish. In the Astana team bus, as a Eurosport on-board camera crew will reveal, that team’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel, was apparently telling his riders: ‘Cavendish will be dropped on the Escrinet.’
Cavendish recalls: ‘We went over these two climbs early in the stage, cat. 4s. On the first one, the peloton split. There were Bouygues Telecom [the French team of Thomas Voeckler] on the front and it was all over the place. Little groups of three riders, all over the shop. There was another climb after that first one.’ La Côte de la forêt de Chambaran, 40km into the stage. ‘And it settled down on the descent, at least in the peloton. But the break had gone. And we had Kim Kirchen in it. I had said I wanted to go for it, but I don’t think Kim believed me. That’s why he went in the break. It meant we couldn’t chase.’
The gap, as they went over the second climb, was still only 40 seconds. The peloton had yet to decide whether to allow the break a ‘pass’ for the day. But as Cavendish says, the pressure went off on the descent; the gap went up to one minute thirty. Though the front group was big, six teams had failed to place any men in it. One of the teams that had missed out was Rabobank, who had Oscar Freire, their Spanish sprinter who was more than a sprinter. He was a better all-rounder than Cavendish; he specialised in sprints that followed tough little climbs. With the gap creeping towards three minutes, and 100km still to race, Rabobank went to the front and began chasing. This was a sign, too, that they didn’t expect Cavendish to survive that last climb.
‘When the break went and the bunch settled down, I thought we were going to be in for quite an easy day,’ Cavendish says. ‘Then we hit the crosswinds.’ Rabobank, a Dutch team, are past masters of riding in crosswinds; they anticipate them. ‘Freire fancied it,’ says Cavendish, ‘so he got his team to ride, and when they did, it was one line. Crosswinds, crosswinds. A couple of guys ended up being eliminated because of the crosswinds. It was brutal.’
For 60km, the road was undulating, twisty, through Montelier, Beaumont-lès-Valence, Beauvallon and into the Ardèche, the geographically diverse pocket in the south-east of France, famous for its forests and rivers, gorges and plateaux. The type of terrain that doesn’t lend itself to straight, flat roads: the kind of place that is beautiful to look at, punishing to ride in.
Cavendish did as little as possible as Rabobank, with help from Milram, working for their sprinter, Gerald Ciolek, led the chase. So Milram didn’t think Cavendish would survive the final climb, either.
Up front, the size of the break was proving unwieldy. It is difficult to get twenty riders to co-operate, or to continue to co-operate once the lead starts to fall; and with 65km to go, it dipped below two minutes. Then it began to break up; Millar, Popovych, Arrieta, Gutierrez and Duque go clear. They work well, building a 45-second lead; the bunch is just under two minutes behind them. But the peloton piles it on, racing towards an intermediate sprint in Saint-Julien-en-Saint-Alban with 37km remaining, at the foot of the Escrinet.
The break is swept up, but the five leaders hang on, just. Still Rabobank lead into the base of the climb. Then they are swamped by Cervélo, working for Thor Hushovd. The panic at the front is because so many are trying to be there for the steep early part of the climb: the all-round sprinters like Freire and Hushovd, who both fancy that they can hold on and profit when the inevitable happens and Cavendish is dropped; and the overall contenders, who cannot risk any surprise attacks, or being caught among the bodies further down the peloton. So Astana are near the front – Contador, Lance Armstrong; and Andy and Fränk Schleck are marking them; and Bradley Wiggins is there, guarding his fourth place overall.
The helicopter shots show the town of Aubenas – perched on a rocky outcrop, as the brochure described, surrounded by verdant slopes. The village looks cramped, old, the roofs of the buildings forming a terracotta patchwork. The cameras switch to an alternative angle on the race, at the rear of the peloton, the business end; it shows riders being spat out the back, including a few Rabobanks, their work done.
The bunch