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

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But first, he has to settle on which stage win is his ‘greatest’. He thinks aloud. There are some contenders. Stage eighteen in 2012, from Blagnac to Brive-la-Gaillarde, three days from Paris, is one. ‘It was a fucking hard day. Block headwind, 230k, and it wasn’t flat, it was heavy roads.’ It was doubly – or triply, or quadruply – hard because he felt he was going against the orders of his team, Team Sky, who led the race with Bradley Wiggins. The team meeting that morning had been confused: Sean Yates, the director, told them to take it easy, at which point Cavendish, who had been led to believe they would set it up for him, raised his hand: ‘What about me?’

Wiggins piped up: ‘I’m in favour of riding for Cav,’ and the plan was changed. But Cavendish did not have the support of old; he was feeding off scraps. In the end, in the final kilometres into Brive, it was Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen who helped him, but Cavendish still had an awful lot to do: there were riders up the road in a break, strong riders, and going into the final kilometre it seemed that they would hang on.