The curtain has not quite fallen. The drama is still continuing, but it seems likely that Mark Cavendish has spoken his final lines in the greatest play of them all, the Tour de France.
It was not on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, as has happened every other time the Astana-Qazaqstan rider has ridden the Tour, but on a nondescript arterial road outside Nîmes where the Manxman slunk off into the shadows of stage left. There are still five more stages remaining at this race, but it is unlikely that the 39-year-old will challenge again. This was it, outside one of the 1,564 McDonald's restaurants in France.
