Mark Cavendish ends Tour with a cough and splutter about sprint stages

With speculation over Mark Cavendish’s future employment quietly bubbling, the rider was unable to add to his solitary stage win as the Tour de France reached its conclusion on the Champs Elysées. Cavendish’s German rival André Greipel was the unsurprising winner of a final stage neutralised a mite too hastily by organisers, coming from behind to outsprint Bryan Coquard and Alexander Kristoff and secure his fourth victory of this year’s race. Cavendish was up there in the shake-up, finishing in sixth, but had earlier complained of illness and suggested he would be content merely to finish the stage.

Waterproof jackets were de rigueur as the riders set off from the Paris suburb of Sèvres for what was, for Chris Froome and his Sky team-mates at least, a victory procession along the banks of the Seine and on to the Champs Elysées, where the Tour has concluded for each of the past 40 years. The poor weather prompted organisers to act and it was the time of each rider as they crossed the line in Paris for the first of eight circuits of the famous old boulevard that counted towards their overall classification. It meant Froome got to win his second Tour in three years 41km early, before the fast men got down to business on a course that had dried in warm early-evening sunshine.

The early rain on Froome’s parade failed to dampen his spirits and, as the peloton meandered towards the official start at Ville-d’Avray, he received congratulatory handshakes from demob-happy rivals and the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme, before the signal to begin racing was semaphored. It was a flag the riders chose to ignore, preferring to dawdle along chatting among themselves as pockets of spectators cheered – a rolling photoshoot in which Sky’s smiling riders, wearing pimped-up kit with yellow stripes, was followed by a mobile champagne reception. The relaxed bonhomie was in stark contrast to much of the hostility they have recently endured, when cups of urine rather than celebratory fizz were aimed at their leader’s face.

Back in the bunch Britain’s main hope of securing the stage win was reportedly under the weather, with Cavendish having revealed that he had woken up suffering from a cough that was likely to preclude him from mounting any sort of meaningful challenge for his fifth win on the Champs-Elysées. His chances of adding a second stage win at this year’s Tour had already been significantly compromised by the earlier abandonment of his team-mates Tony Martin and Mark Renshaw, arguably the two most important carriages in his Etixx-Quick-Step lead-out train.

In an interview that appeared in Sunday’s edition of the French sports daily L’Equipe, Cavendish lamented the dwindling number of opportunities available to sprinters, after a Tour that featured only three out of 21 stages tailored to the pell-mell of bunch finishes. “If they go on like that, there won’t be many sprinters coming,” he said. “All year I thought there would be seven sprint stages, Zeeland wasn’t a sprint, even the one I won wasn’t a proper sprint stage. It could become hard to focus your season on the Tour if there are only three sprints in 21 stages.”

With his Etixx-Quick-Step contract soon to expire and his future with the Belgian team far from assured, MTN-Qhubeka have made inquiries about securing Cavendish’s services for next year. The first Africa-based team to compete in the Tour de France, MTN enjoyed a successful debut, with the English rider Steve Cummings taking a stage and the Eritrean climber Daniel Teklehaimanot becoming the first black African to spend time in a major tour jersey. Currently a second-tier team, MTN hope to earn World Tour status for next year and are among several outfits, including Trek Factory Racing, making overtures towards Cavendish. “We had some discussions with Mark’s manager but it’s all about funding and there are a whole lot of things that go with it,” the team principal, Doug Ryder, said.

The French veteran Sylvain Chavanel, on what may well be his final Tour, was the first of several opportunist riders to mount a challenge after one lone banner-waving protester was lucky to avoid causing serious injury to himself and others by wandering out in front of the peloton as they approached the stage’s sharp end. Chavanel opened a gap in a bid to take a stage win on what was already a proud day for his family; his younger brother Sébastien’s last place on general classification earned the dubious but potentially lucrative honour of being the race’s Lanterne Rouge.

Chavanel the elder’s efforts were in vain. With Team Sky in the unaccustomed position of bringing up the rear riding eight abreast, it was Greipel’s Lotto-Soudal team who wrestled for control of the bunch in a bid to reel-in the impertinent and put their man in front. Ultimately he was forced to come from behind under his own steam but under a French airforce fly over, the popular German took his fourth stage victory of a memorable Tour.