Mark Cavendish lost a good opportunity to add another Tour de France win in a stage that was perfectly designed for the British sprinter and in a stage without any breakaway.
“I don’t know why the boys went [so early] as I get there they went, we weren’t supposed to go til later,” Cavendish said. “We’ll have to speak about it and see what happens. It’s a bit unlike Morky really.
“Things are never going to be as exactly how you want them to go,” he added. “Somebody got to win, a lot of people have to not win, that’s bike racing.”
Mørkøv explained what went wrong in the finale.
“We had a tactic to move up with Cav towards that last chicane – we wanted to enter as one of the first. We thought that was the way to win the stage. But unfortunately, Cees [Bol] and I, we lost Cav on that last two km, and I don’t think he came around in that good of a position.”
“It’s hard because you can’t really look much back in the bunch sprint,” Mørkøv added. “You have to always keep your eyes forward because so many things are going on.
“So it’s basically whenever you have the chance you check if he’s there, then you kind of believe he’s there for a while until you check again – it’s always a bad sign if you look and he’s not there anymore.”
“There’s so many strong lead-out men, there’s so many strong sprinters, so sprints turned out to be a lot of a mess, where, I would say, some years back, there was a more dominating team who could line it out and take it from the front. And that’s that’s very hard nowadays.”
