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

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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.