Mark Cavendish will complete his final Tour de France after surviving the last mountain stage safely inside the time limit, but nobody was taking any chances when the peloton assembled in the port in Nice on Saturday morning.
Although Astana Qazaqstan hoped Cavendish would enjoy one more outing on the roads of the Tour in Sunday's time trial from Monaco to Nice, the team elected to mark his final haul of 35 stages here, lest it prove to be the Manxman's final act on the race.
On Saturday, the team lined up in commemorative jerseys bearing the number 35, while staff were also dressed in t-shirts heralding the record Cavendish established in Saint Vulbas in the opening week of this race. The mission was accomplished on stage 5, but the challenge still had two and a half weeks to run.
The last opportunity for the sprinters came and went in Nîmes on Tuesday. With the Tour finale shifting from Paris to Nice this year due to the Olympic Games, they had to battle grimly through the final days in the mountains without the promise of a final gallop on the Champs-Elysées. Several of their number fell by the wayside, including Arnaud Démare, who finished outside the time limit at Isola 2000 on stage 19.
Cavendish made it home with five minutes to spare there, but his coach Vasilis Anastopoulos had always warned that Saturday's penultimate stage to the Col de la Couillole would be the most arduous and anxious of the lot, with four tough climbs crammed into just 132.8km of racing.
A shorter stage makes for a tighter time limit. Even though the organisation gave a helping hand to the sprinters by extending the limit by 3%, Anastopoulos was expecting a close-run thing.
"By my calculations, we can finish roughly a minute inside the time limit," Anastopoulos said. "Half a minute to one minute… It will be really, really close if everything goes to my calculation."
When Cavendish went to sign on, he was given a special acclamation by the speaker, who reminded the spectators gathered along Port Lympia that this would be his final road stage as a Tour rider. The unspoken subtext was that it might be his last altogether.
"He has written the history of cycling, he has written the history of the Tour de France…" the speaker began. After rattling off an almost Homeric synopsis of Cavendish's palmarès, of his victorious campaigns in France, Italy, Spain and beyond, he handed the microphone to the rider himself.
"Excusez-moi, je comprends un petit peu de Francais mais pour parler c'est difficile… so I'll say it in English," Cavendish began. "It seems a long time ago since we won and got our objective, and now it's about making it to this beautiful Ville de Nice. We have one hard day and then a lovely time trial.
"Hopefully, I'll arrive at the end of my last Tour de France, the race that's given me everything. It's something special. There's all these people here, and I've had a brilliant group of boys with me. Thank you."
Cavendish and his brilliant group of boys were at the back of the race once the road started to climb on the Col de Braus, but at that point they still had company in a sizeable gruppetto that included green jersey Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty). All the while, Anastopoulos was beside Mark Renshaw in the team car, revising his calculations of what Cavendish needed to do in accordance with the speed at the head of the race.
The road didn't get any easier, with the Col du Turini and the Col de la Colmiane preceding the 10-mile haul to the finish atop the Col de la Couillole, where Soudal-QuickStep pushed on the pace for Remco Evenepoel before Tadej Pogačar mopped up another victory.
By then, Cavendish and his Astana retinue of Cees Bol, Davide Ballerini and Harold Tejada had lost contact with the gruppetto, but they would have been encouraged by the news that the time limit had been set at 48:52. As it turned out, Cavendish had more breathing room than Anastopoulos' calculations had anticipated, and he reached the summit well inside the time limit, 42:03 down on Pogačar.
Cavendish crossed the line flanked by Ballerini, Bol and Tejada, and he raised his arms to the crowd as he passed beneath the arrivée banner before wiping a tear from his eye. Ballerini was the first to embrace him, chanting his leader's name as he did so. Cavendish moved on to thank Bol and Tejada, before leaning over his handlebars to wipe away more tears.
UCI president David Lappartient and Tour director Christian Prudhomme had waited by the finish line to welcome Cavendish home, and they now approached to offer their congratulations. In the background, the crowds in the finishing straight started to hammer the hoardings in appreciation, and a chant broke out: "Cav! Cav! Cav!"
The show continues for one more day between Monaco and Nice. Cavendish will finish what he started at the Tour de France.
