Tour de France 2010: Mark Cavendish bides his time after brave climb

We won't be hearing much about Mark Cavendish for the next few days, which makes a change. The 2010 edition of the Tour de France entered the Pyrenees today and the activities that led L'Équipe to give the British sprinter the new nickname of Le Pyromane will be off the agenda. Instead of starting fires in the peloton, Cavendish will be trying to keep his flame alive in the mountains before reaching Friday's flat stage, which ends in Bordeaux and should give him the chance to add another stage win to the three he has secured this year. After performing so badly in the opening days of the Tour that his much- vaunted ambition of winning the green jersey seemed to have been tossed over a precipice, Cavendish is back with an outside shot at becoming the first British rider to end the Tour at the head of the points classification. After today's stage he is lying third in the standings with 162 points, 25 behind Alessandro Petacchi of Italy and 23 behind Thor Hushovd, the Norwegian who deprived him of the title in controversial circumstances last year. Bordeaux on Friday and Paris on Sunday represent the only opportunities left to snatch the maximum 35 points for winning a finishing sprint, but all Petacchi has to do to ensure that the margin is unbridgeable is to stay on his wheel. The 36-year-old Italian, who rides for the Lampre-Farnese team, won four stages of the Tour in 2003 and has taken two this year. Suggestions that he would leave the race before the Pyrenees were wide of the mark, and he seems intent on sticking around until Paris and adding the points leader's jersey to the parallel honours he has already picked up in the Tours of Italy and Spain. And if the remaining mountains prove too much for the Italian, Hushovd is most likely to be the immediate beneficiary. Today all three finished in the "autobus", the group of about 60 non-climbers or pedalling wounded who traipsed in almost 37 minutes behind the leaders, exhausted and sweating profusely at the end of a long, hot day in the mountains. Cavendish detests even coming second in a stage that gives him a chance, but the runner-up position in yesterday's 13th stage was almost as encouraging a result as any of the three stage wins that he added to his palmarès during the first two weeks of the race. Being Cavendish, he was by no means entirely happy with the outcome. But by winning the bunch sprint that came in 13 seconds behind Alexandre Vinokourov, at least he put an end to the speculation that he would be less of a force when deprived of the assistance of Mark Renshaw, his lead-out man in the HTC-Columbia team, who was excluded from the race on Thursday night for using illegitimate tactics in the dash for the line in Bourg-lès-Valence. In order to lead the posse of sprinters over the line in the market town of Revel, 30 miles west of Toulouse, Cavendish had to push hard on the Côte de Saint-Ferréo, the last climb of the day. Alessandro Ballan attacked and won the King of the Mountains points, but then sat back while Vinokourov secured a stage victory that made up for the previous day's alleged misunderstanding, when Alberto Contador, his leader in the Astana team, failed to collaborate in an effort to secure a stage win in Mende. "Vinokourov deserved the victory," Cavendish said. "He made an amazing attack. But I was the fastest of the group behind him and that's encouraging. I'm obviously disappointed not to win after going so hard on the final climb and I'm a fair way behind in the classification, but there are more sprint stages to come and at least now I'm minimising my losses. "The team was working so hard early in the stage but I didn't have anybody with me in the final kilometres. It's more difficult without Mark, and I miss him as my room-mate too. I've got to get through the Pyrenees first but I've got some great guys around me and I'll keep trying for wins all the way to Paris."