Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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There was something else. His ability to analyse what happened in the frenetic closing kilometres and metres of a stage of the Tour de France was uncanny, even a little spooky. It was as though Cavendish had been watching the action unfold not from ground level, but from the air; as if he had access to the TV camera in the helicopter hovering overhead. Call it spatial awareness, or peripheral vision; whatever it was, Cavendish seemed able, invariably, not only to be in the right place, but to know what was happening around and behind him: where riders or teams were moving up fast, or slowing down, or switching; and adjusting his position accordingly to emerge from the mêlée and throw his arms in the air in victory. (The peloton might look organised and fluid, even serene at times. It’s not. And in the final kilometres, it’s chaos. A neo-pro, Joe Dombrowski, sums it up best: ‘People don’t realise how argy-bargy it is. When you watch it on TV, it looks like everybody just nicely rides together and occasionally there’s a crash. But it’s a constant fight for position.’)