Tour de France: Mark Cavendish survives time cut with less than a minute to spare
18 July 2018 06:35
Mark Cavendish (Dimension Data) got through the first mountain test at this year's Tour de France on Tuesday. But the 30-time stage winner almost missed the time cut, coming over the finish line of stage 10 at Le Grand-Bornand with just 33 seconds to spare. Cavendish, like a number of other sprinters, struggled on the first Alpine test at this year's Tour, and was dropped from the main field. He made it into the gruppetto alongside fellow fast-men Marcel Kittel (Katusha-Alpecin) and Dylan Groenewegen (LottoNL-Jumbo) but finished 34:02 down on stage winner Julian Alaphilippe (Quick-Step).ADVERTISEMENT This was Cavendish's first mountain test at the Tour de France since 2016, after he crashed out in the opening week in 2017, and he was asked if he had forgotten how tough the Tour mountains were. "Yeah, I really had. It's been a long time, but it's even rarer to have such a hard day as the first mountain stage. Usually you have one with a couple of mountains at the end, but we had them straight away," Cavendish said after a short warm-down. "Actually, we had those little climbs out of Annecy, and I was in the front group then. Then we had that long one, and I was way over my limits, or I felt it. I had Julien Vermote with me, and we were chasing and chasing and got to the gruppetto, and I finally came around. In the gruppetto, you stay together, so if one person is suffering, then everyone waits. That's how it works. We had a good group of people."
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