Frenchman says Renshaw’s disqualification was justified
Former Tour de France Maillot Jaune Jean Francois Bernard has said that he doesn’t believe that Mark Cavendish can win the green jersey this year, believing that the Briton will find it harder to take stages without Mark Renshaw, disqualified yesterday, and might not even make it to Paris.
“Mark Cavendish is back in the race for the green jersey but I can not believe his chances,” he said in his daily expert analysis piece in l’Equipe. “The crossing of the Pyrenees will be very difficult and I am not so sure he will arrive on the Champs-Elysees this year. Thor Hushovd is still my favourite, even ahead of Alessandro Petacchi.”
Renshaw was excluded from the race yesterday after thrice headbutting Julian Dean in the finishing sprint, a move he said afterwards was intended to stop the Kiwi squeezing him towards the barriers. He might have got away with that, but when he veered left to impede Dean’s team-mate Tyler Farrar, thus preventing him from chasing Cavendish, it made the combined offences very difficult for the race judges to ignore.
The final outcome saw Cavendish win ahead of Petacchi and Farrar, and Renshaw be thrown out of the race.
“To exclude Mark Renshaw is a legitimate sanction,” Bernard asserted. “In the last kilometre, the most reprehensible misconduct for me was not the series of hits of his helmet to Julian Dean, but the way he tried to interfere with Tyler Farrar by wedging him against the railings. Indeed, elbowing often happens in this type of finish to get the best position but to deliberately change course after a quick glance, to block Farrar is even more dangerous. We could have had 25 riders on the ground.”
Losing Cavendish’s main leadout man is a big blow, and he feels it will make things difficult for the team. “HTC-Columbia will now run seven riders since Adam Hansen dropped out after the first stage,” he said. “As Mark Cavendish said, two very probable sprints remain, Bordeaux and Paris, and possibly a third, in Revel. His team will lose a valuable rider in the preparation of sprints and Austrian Bernhard Eisel should get back the role of pilot fish to launch Cavendish before the final 200 meters.”
Sprinting aside, there’s plenty of action ahead in the race, not least the battle for the most important classification of all. Andy Schleck currently holds a 41 second advantage over Alberto Contador, but Bernard believes that the lead is not sufficient and that the Saxo Bank rider must be worried.
“Andy Schleck is the first to know that [the advantage is not enough] and he is ready to use every opportunity to snatch seconds from Alberto Contador,” he said. “We saw Saxo Bank ride very strongly in front of the peloton 20km from the finish on an open area with a side wind. They attempted a ‘stab in the gutter’ [echelon] to stretch the bunch, causing its splitting and to trap some leaders.
“At that time, Alberto Contador was badly placed in the middle of the peloton and not sheltered from the wind. If a split had happened ahead of him at that point, he could have lost several tens of seconds, as what happened last year at La Grande Motte.
“Fortunately, he was assisted by Alexandre Vinokourov, who put him back in the slipstream of Andy Schleck. This episode confirms the one of the weaknesses of Contador, that he is not always well placed during the race.”