Mark Cavendish falls in the Tour and retires. Mads Pedersen wins in Limoges.
Mark Cavendish falls in the Tour and retires. Mads Pedersen wins in Limoges.
Denmark’s Mads Pedersen of Lidl-Trek won the eighth stage of the Tour de France, the 201-kilometer Libourne-Limoges, beating Alpecin’s Belgian Jasper Philipsen, who was denied a poker of victories in this Tour, and Jumbo-Visma’s other Belgian Wout Van Aert in a beautiful sprint.
But the news of the day is the crash and subsequent retirement of Mark Cavendish when there were about 60 km to go. The 38-year-old Briton of Astana was unable to continue and was carried off in an ambulance, for him it was almost certainly a fractured collarbone.
Cavendish himself made it known that this was his last Tour, and thus vanishes his dream of breaking the record for all-time stage wins in the world’s most prestigious stage race: he currently holds this record at 34 but in cohabitation with Eddy Merckx.
The general classification is of course unchanged with Dane Jonas Vingegaard still in the yellow jersey, but tomorrow, after 35 years of absence, the Tour returns to one of its most legendary mountains, the Puy de Dôme, where the finish is set, after 182.5 km, of the ninth stage, which will start from Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.
