In his new book At Speed, Mark Cavendish has detailed how he felt isolated at Team Sky, giving a detailed description of a fallout he had with sports director Sean Yates. He also gives his opinion on the Wiggins-Froome debate, claiming that Froome didn't attack his teammate deliberately.

All was set for a glorious relationship when Mark Cavendish - the biggest British star and reigning world champion - announced that he had signed a contract with his big home team Sky for the 2012 season. However, his time at the British team became a short-lived one as he left the squad after just one season, instead signing a contract with Omega Pharma-Quick Step.

Cavendish has done nothing to hide that the main reason for his decision to leave the team was a lack of support and personal opportunity in an environment that was more focused on GC aims than on success in the sprints. In his book At Speed, he elaborates further on the subject, giving a detailed description of the episode that made him realize that he was in the wrong team.

Sky had entered the Tour de France with the ambition of winning the yellow jersey with Bradley Wiggins and the green jersey with Cavendish but the latter quickly realized that sports director Sean Yates was solely focused on the GC. Their relationship broke down following an episode on the flat and dramatic sixth stage of Metz where Cavendish was looking for revenge after having been beaten by archrival Andre Greipel twice in a row.

In an excerpt from the book published by The Telegraph, Cavendish describes the episode.

“The staff at Team Sky were there to execute their designated task and think of nothing else. It was efficient, it was professional, it put other teams to shame – but it also wasn’t a lot of fun,” he explained, painting a somewhat bleak picture. 

“Our head directeur at the Tour was Sean Yates. One of only four British riders up to that point to have worn the yellow jersey at the Tour, Sean was revered as a legend of the sport in the UK.

“Before the Tour I had done only one race with Sean, the Tour of Romandy, and quickly got the sense that he didn’t particularly rate or admire me. I assumed that it wasn’t personal and that he was one of those former bike riders with preconceptions about sprinters, that they were lazy and prima donnas.

“I found him cold, uninspiring and miserly in praise. I didn’t count on getting much support from Sean at the Tour, but even these low expectations were dashed.”
 

Cavendish explains that he had a puncture on his rear wheel during that sixth stage of the race.

“I reached for my radio and announced that I’d punctured. I heard nothing so I repeated what I’d just said, all the time trying to cling on to the back of the lead group while riding on a flat,” he stated. 

“For a few hundred metres I was hanging in there, until the road began to descend and I could no longer stand the pace with no air in my tyre. Finally, having remained silent in the radio the whole time, Yates arrived in our first team car, waited while the mechanic swapped my wheel, then drove immediately off without even giving me a push.

“I had never been left stranded like that after a mechanical, not even as a 22-year-old neo-pro in a tiny one-day race in France. Here we were at the Tour de France, on a stage that I was the favourite to win, and I was the world champion. I was heartbroken.

“It was July 6. This was the date when I realised this could be my first and last Tour de France with Team Sky. It was also the date of my last conversation with Sean Yates.”
 

While Cavendish managed to win three stages in the race and Wiggins won two stages and the overall, the main talking point was often the internal rivalry between Chris Froome and Wiggins. Froome rode away from his team captain on the big Alpine stage to La Toussuire before being asked to slow down to wait for the race leader.

The episode led to a fallout between the two Brits but Cavendish sees it more as a result of Froome being clumsy than a deliberate attempt to win the race.

“Chris had been selected for the Tour as Brad’s domestique de luxe in the mountains, yet had briefly accelerated away from his leader on the climb to La Toussuire, embarrassing and briefly isolating Brad, and also sparking debate about who should be leading Team Sky," Cavendish writes

“My own view from inside the team was that Chris had acted in good faith, just a little clumsily. If he’d wanted to betray Brad, he would have attacked on the penultimate climb that day, not the final one, and he wouldn’t have waited when he got the order to stop his effort over the radio.

“It was easy to see it as evidence of Chris’s naivety, which could make you either laugh or wince at times, both on and off the bike.”
 

Froome got his revenge this year when he won the world's biggest bike race.