Tour de France 2024, Cavendish in history: "I worked hard to experience this emotion"

Saint-Vulbas (France), 3 July 2024 - Given his profession, the metaphor is more appropriate than ever: the sprint towards history was thrown at him by almost everyone, perhaps unconsciously even by his adversaries themselves, who not surprisingly immediately after the finish line they congratulated the rider who has won the most stages since today Tour de France, Well 35. He did the rest, beating the other sprinters on the road but even before beating the fate that a year ago, in these times and with the decision to retire soon already made official, took him out of the race. Great Boucle due to a fall: Mark Cavendish he doesn't fit, he gets back on the bike and over the finish line of stage 5 of the Tour de France 2024 goes to overcome Eddy Merckx in counting the fractions won.

Cavendish's statements

Naturally, some purists of cycling (and of sport in general) may turn up their noses when comparing the quality, rather than the quantity, of the successes in question, but the mere count, beyond any disquisition, from today rewards the sprinter ofIsle of Man, which in the feast of Saint-Vulbas he didn't hide his emotion. "Together withAstana Qazaqstan Team we worked hard to get here today, in the stage that we had circled as the good one". In short, evidently the previous sprint proposed by this Great Boucle, the one of Turin then won by Biniam Girmay, the Eritrean who in turn wrote a page of history, did not whet the appetite of the British, who returns to leverage the team button with pleasure, also throwing an implicit, and perhaps involuntary, jab at the International Federation and some other teams with a very aggressive racing style to climb the points rankings on the eve of the end-of-season update. "We are interested in days like this and not the UCI rankings. We had almost made an internal bet that today would be the good day to write this page of history, which I am still in disbelief about." Yet, the beginning of Tour de France 2024 dell 'Astana Qazaqstan Team has been anything but lucky: just think that one of the few withdrawn players on the scoresheet so far, Michele Gazzoli, plays in the Kazakh team, which sacrificed itself for its captain in the first stages, escorting him when he seemed on the verge of a terrible crisis. "I am 16 years that I prepare for this race and know how to handle it, but losing so much time in the beginning is something I wasn't used to either. I don't like having bad days - he admits Cavendish - but inside me I knew that after that effort the opportunities to win at least one stage would come." What happened today, a 16 years from the day I was a very young man Cannonball a Chateauroux won the first half at Tour de France: ran the July 9th, 2008 and since then a lot, if not everything, has changed in cycling. But not the hunger and determination of Cavendish, the man capable of 'beating' Merckx as no one had ever succeeded before.

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