Opinion: Mark Cavendish’s Giro d’Italia stage win may not be enough to ensure Tour de France selection – but it should

Mark Cavendish will leave the 2022 Giro d’Italia with just the one victory after the sprinters’ teams were left with eggs of their collective faces by a Dries De Bondt-inspired breakaway in the final flat finish of the race on Thursday.

One win is two fewer than Frenchman Arnaud Demare (Groupama-FDJ), who has enjoyed something of a Cavendish-style renaissance these past few weeks with a hat-trick of triumphs and the maglia ciclamino.

One win, though, is one more than both Australia’s Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal) and Colombia’s Fernando Gaviria (UAE Team Emirates) – two sprinters who, when bursting onto the scene five years ago, were expected to have consigned Cavendish to the history books by now.

Instead it’s Cavendish who is making history: a 16th Giro stage win almost a decade after the 15th, plus that levelling of Eddy Merckx’s long-standing record on the Tour. Those four stage wins on his unexpected Tour comeback for Quick-Step brought a turnaround in the career of a veteran sprinter whose best years most of us felt were long gone well before his initial mini-revival on the Tour of Turkey, let alone in the world’s biggest bike race where he had failed to shine since 2016.

It’s credit to the 37-year-old’s enduring class and ability to win sprints against whoever he comes up against that we are still discussing his performances and weighing up whether he is worthy of a place on the Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl team for the Tour. One year ago, such a discussion would be ludicrous. But here we are.

That alone is high praise for a man who recently spoke of his hunger to keep going for at least another two years at the top.

Cavendish’s victory in the first flat finish of the Giro – back in Hungary in Stage 3 at Balatonfured – provided instant proof that his Indian Summer last July was no fluke. Back on the Giro after nine years, Cavendish was also back in the wins – nudging his career haul on the Giro to one above the combined tallies of his main rivals Demare, Gaviria and Ewan.

In the next bunch sprint in Stage 6 to Scalea Cavendish looked on course to double up before Ewan and then Demare came round him. That night Cav’s leadout man Michael Morkov was struck down by illness and when the Dane left the race the next morning so too did Cavendish’s realistic chances of another win.

Morkov has been instrumental to Cavendish’s resurgence having piloted his man to those four wins in France last year; it was no huge surprise, in retrospect, to see the Manx Missile’s powers somewhat dulled in the absence of his fellow 37-year-old. Just as France’s Demare was rediscovering his mojo and the Groupama-FDJ train was clicking into action, Cavendish was deprived of the man shovelling the coal into the engine of his own locomotive.

And yet, in a way, all this is immaterial. Cavendish could have outdone Demare’s three wins on this Giro and we’d still be having the same debate as Robbie McEwen and Orla Chennaoui had on Thursday’s pre-stage edition of The Breakaway. For the biggest factor in Cavendish’s selection for the Tour isn’t anything the man does in the Giro; it’s something – someone, rather – that has nothing to do with the outcomes of the bunch sprints in Italy.

Cavendish’s biggest obstacle to drawing ahead of Merckx and becoming the Tour’s leading stage winner comes from within his team: the form of Belgian sprinter Fabio Jakobsen, the 25-year-old described by McEwen as “the dominant sprinter in the peloton this season so far” who has twice as many wins (eight) as Cavendish’s in 2022.

Asked by Chennaoui about Quick-Step’s selection dilemma ahead of the Tour, McEwen said: “If he was in another team that didn’t have a Fabio Jakobsen then, yes, they would take him to the Tour de France – and they’d be mad not to.

“But no matter what your palmares is, and how much you’ve won in the past, everybody has a use-by date and the team has their own plans. And I can understand the team’s thinking, but I can also understand a lot of people look at it and just go, ‘Wow, they wouldn’t take Cav to the Tour?’

“But it’s about who else they’ve got to use and what they feel is their most likely way of winning stages. It’s all business.”

Pressed on whether this inferred that he felt Cavendish had passed his use-by date, McEwen – a three-time green jersey winner on the Tour de France with 12 stage wins in both the Tour and Giro – clarified: “I think he’s 37 and he’s not ready to be out of the peloton – he’s just won a Giro stage in the first few days, he can still win races – but they [Quick-Step] will go, ‘It’s all about business’, and they’re just looking purely at metrics and they will go, ‘Jakobsen’s our best chance’.”

Be that as it may, should Quick-Step not just take Cavendish and Jakobsen?

Many people have raised the issue of a Belgian team not wanting to help a British rider consign the record of a Belgian legend to the scrapheap. But this is complete baloney.

Patrick Lefevere wasn’t overly concerned about Cavendish winning four stages last year. It would be a PR coup were Cavendish to break the record in the colours of Quick-Step this year – after all, a win’s a win. As McEwen said – it’s all about business and metrics now, so what does it matter that Cavendish is British and Jakobsen and Merckx are Belgian?

There are at least six sprint stages on the Tour this July – surely Jakobsen won’t mind helping his teammate make history by winning one? Alpecin-Fenix managed to accommodate both Tim Merlier and Jasper Philipsen last year, with Philipsen, the understudy, coming second and third on six occasions – mostly behind Cav. And the only top tier sprinter who you’d back beating Cavendish with a full lead-out train right now is Jakobsen – the one scenario that can not happen (at least, not until next season).

Of course, the big problem would be accommodating both sprinters plus Morkov and the rest of a train on a team that also boasts the world champion Julian Alaphilippe and the emerging superstar Remco Evenepoel.

But seeing that neither Alaphilippe nor Evenepoel would realistically be targeting the maillot jaune – and that both are free spirits who can also be big team players, too – then it would not be impossible to bring them all together under one roof. A roof that could be well and truly raised should Cavendish break the record before helping guide Jakobsen to the green jersey.

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