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You knew it was grave when Mark Cavendish, a man with such a freakishly high pain threshold that he once refused to tell his children that he had punctured a lung, lay prone across the tarmac in agony.
While his tumble had looked innocuous, on a flat stretch of rural road 40 miles outside Limoges, he felt a ghastly certainty that his collarbone, the problem area for all cyclists who hit the ground at speed, was fractured. And yet it was not the acute discomfort that most distressed him, but the timing.
In all probability, this was Cavendish’s last chance to achieve the 35th Tour de France stage win that would break a tie with Eddy Merckx and furnish the outright record. Even at 38, Cavendish had given every indication he could do so, having only been pipped to victory the previous evening due to a gear failure.
The margins between joy and desolation in this sport are gossamer-thin. And the finest sprinter of the age, perhaps of any age, was reacquainted with this brutal truth as he climbed into the race ambulance with his right arm in a sling and his face a diagram of anguish.
It was not the end he deserved at his farewell grand tour. The term “farewell” is used advisedly, after Cavendish had billed it as such during a tearful press conference alongside his family. But it would take a brave soul to call this a definitive conclusion, given Cavendish’s history of hauling himself out of deep career potholes.
There was an intense emotional investment in his quest for No 35, to the point that Christian Vande Velde, his long-time friend, had a quaver in his voice as he dwelt on the ramifications of the crash.
“It’s horrible to think of any sport where it’s so fragile that you can have something taken away from you so quickly,” he said. “To see this after the form he has shown, as the best in the world aged 38? The record’s going to be tied for a while. I’m glad I was able to give him a hug this morning, because I’m not sure when I’ll see him next.”
En route to Limoges, Cavendish had been riding defensively, wary of the hilly terrain that lay ahead. He was still absorbing the bitter frustration of losing out to Belgium’s Jasper Philipsen in Bordeaux, a stage he had carefully targeted in his tilt at the record-breaking feat.
But there were sufficient grounds for confidence that he could yet steer fortune in his favour. He was generating the highest speeds of anyone in the peloton, and he was scrupulous in not succumbing to sentimentality, insisting that he still had a job to fulfil. Only the most unfortunate bump of wheels derailed him. Neither he nor the Netflix film crew shadowing his every move across France have the denouement they had craved.
It fell to Christian Prudhomme, the race director, to express the magnitude of Cavendish’s withdrawal. “He was so sad after the fall,” he said. “He’s the best sprinter in the history of the Tour. He wanted to try to win a 35th stage, and he had been second the day before. For two or three seconds we had thought he would succeed in his goal, and today it’s over. So he is sad, we are sad, Le Tour is sad.
“Mark deserves the respect of everyone. He will always be welcome here, with or without his bike.”
You could detect the despair among Cavendish’s Astana Qazaqstan team-mates.
“I stayed with him to see how he was, but he was really suffering,” Gianni Moscon said. “There really wasn’t much to say. I tried to see if I could help him get back to the race, but he had to abandon.”
And so, on one of the least remarkable stretches of this year’s route, one of the most consequential bodies of work in all cycling was, in all likelihood, wrapped up for good.
Cavendish has acquired the gift for theatre at these moments, as he proved by securing a final Giro d’Italia stage win in front of the Colosseum in May. But he is also old enough and battered enough to appreciate that final chapters in his sport do not come neatly tied up with ribbons. While in Rome, he scripted a magnificently poetic send-off, his expression in the French ambulance spoke volumes about his sense of anticlimax.
Not that the manner of his departure dilutes to any degree the scale of his cumulative achievement. At his peak, Cavendish was among the most dominant athletes on the planet, winning a staggering 23 stages between 2008 and 2012. The swaying style with which he produced his decisive bursts of acceleration will forever be iconic.
And it is this image, far more than the flashing blue lights with which he was borne away in bucolic southwest France, that will endure in the public mind.
Mark Cavendish, cycling’s greatest sprinter, did not deserve agonising Tour exit
Briton suffered a heavy crash that probably means he will never make the Tour de France stage record his own