Mark Cavendish was one of the favourites to win this rather flat 13th stage of the Tour de France, but the way in which he won was quite different from his normal victories: His Omega Pharma-Quick Step team started to ride with 110 km still to go in order to split the bunch in the crosswinds. Triple stage winner Marcel Kittel (Argos-Shimano) had some mechanical trouble at that very moment and was soon out of the first group, and from that moment on the speed never went down again.

“It was a difficult stage,” Cavendish recalled. “I'm so excited, so happy to win. It's been a difficult few days and it's nice to be on the podium again. We didn’t really have a master plan. We just felt the wind was in the right position so we started to ride a bit harder. We did it more to kind of make the peloton tired and finally it broke and we were racing.”

When Team Saxo-Tinkoff put the pressure on in the crosswinds 30 km from the finish, a select group of only 14 riders got away. Cavendish almost missed the split: “When echelons form it's similar to falling through ice: you know you've got, like five seconds to rectify and get in the right position to save yourself or it's finished – it's over,” he explained. “The group went, I was sitting in Kwiatkowski’s wheel, and he just missed it, leaving a little gap. I told him to move over and sprinted up to the group, and I actually did more watts in the sprint to the front group than I did in the sprint at the finish. I just managed to get on as the last man and we were away.”

While Team Saxo-Tinkoff and Belkin Pro Cycling were driving the break to distance Chris Froome and the other GC contenders, Cavendish and the green jersey Peter Sagan were the only sprinters in the group. With his teammates Niki Terpstra and Sylvain Chavanel also present, Cavendish knew exactly what to do in the final: “I just had to stay on Sagan’s wheel. There were three of us there and he had only one teammate, so we could attack in the final and force his lead-out guy to chase.”

“Niki attacked in the last kilometre and Bodnar had to chase the move down. That meant that if I just stayed on Sagan, he’d have to hit out in the headwind finish so he was left on the front a bit too early. He knew I was going to come around him. I think he was happy to save his legs for another day.”

“It was me on the podium but it should have been all of Omega Pharma-Quick Step today. They were all just incredible. I’m so happy, so proud of the guys who just rode out of their skin today, every one of them. They gave everything yesterday and I let them down in the final; today they put even more into it from even further out. It’s incredible to be able to win that.”