The winner of the sprinters points classification and green jersey in the 2011 Tour de France will be returning to defend his jersey as well as adding to his 20 stage wins. In his four Tour appearances, Mark Cavendish has amazingly won an average of five stages a year. In the last three editions of the race he has won the final sprint on the Champs-Élysées and become the first person to ever have done so. The success of Cavendish was built upon his previous team which was last known as HTC-Highroad after undergoing numerous name changes. A sight which became a defining feature of the Tour’s flat stages from 2008 till last year would be his team moving to the front of the peloton is the final 10kms or so and take complete control of the race. Quite often this would involve all nine team members as they rode in a solitary line, a train, one behind another with Cavendish in 9th wheel. The riders at the front would all give 100% and peel away once they had given their all. The 8th rider in the HTC train was the Australian Mark Renshaw who time after time was the man to deliver Cavendish to the finish line, arms aloft. Renshaw became known as the best lead out man in the peloton, so successful was he in navigating and negotiating the final kilometre before dropping Cavendish off anywhere between 500m and 50m to the finish line that Renshaw’s decision to race the 2012 season as a sprinter led some to suggest Cavendish would no longer be such a convincing stage winner.
In 2012 the complexion of the sprints will be an entirely new phenomenon. Cavendish will be riding in the rainbow stripes of the world champion with his new team, Team Sky. Sky cannot offer the same services that Cavendish has grown accustomed to as Bradley Wiggins leads the Sky team in 2012 as he prepares an assault on the yellow jersey. So not only does Cavendish find himself at a new team but on one in which the aspirations for success are shared between the yellow and green, with yellow the more highly coveted of the two for Sky. As HTC-Highroad was disbanded following the conclusion of the 2011 season, the team has been spread across the peloton in 2012. Renshaw has decided that at 28 this would be the last opportunity he would have to peruse his own glory as a protected sprinter. Renshaw moved to the Dutch team Rabobank with promises of being provided the opportunity to match it with Cavendish at the Tour. This adds another level of intrigue to the race for the green jersey in 2012 with the defending jersey holder racing on a new team against his old lead-out man with no guarantee of being offered the protection and support that has been crucial in winning 20 stages in only four appearances.
The final standings in the sprinters classification in 2011 had only six recognised sprinters in the top ten. The calibre and class of the sprinters who will compete in this year’s edition of the Tour is astonishing. In 2011 Cavendish was up against his old team mate André Greipel who took a maiden Tour stage win. Another rival, the American Tyler Farrar, also took a stage win and Jose Joaquin Rojas proved to be a continual thorn in his side. Along with Mat Goss, they were the big sprinters of 2011. In the first seven stages Rojas took the green jersey on two occasions. The Belgian Philippe Gilbert also wrested the jersey off Cavendish, leading the classification on three occasions. In 2012 Cavendish will find himself up against the cream of the crop with world class sprinters left right and centre. The completion in 2012 will be of a calibre that is echelons above the class of 2011. Farrar and Greipel will again look to antagonise the Sky rider but will also find themselves fighting off new rivals. Marcel Kittel and Peter Sagan are both prolific winners who are set to make their Tour debut in Liege. Add to this mix of fast men, Matt Goss, the silver medallist from the Copenhagen worlds last year, three time world champion Óscar Freire, Mark Renshaw, Tony Gallopin, Robbie Hunter and the endless opportunists in the peloton. 2012 is shaping up as a battle royal for the maillot vert.
In 2012 the complexion of the sprints will be an entirely new phenomenon. Cavendish will be riding in the rainbow stripes of the world champion with his new team, Team Sky. Sky cannot offer the same services that Cavendish has grown accustomed to as Bradley Wiggins leads the Sky team in 2012 as he prepares an assault on the yellow jersey. So not only does Cavendish find himself at a new team but on one in which the aspirations for success are shared between the yellow and green, with yellow the more highly coveted of the two for Sky. As HTC-Highroad was disbanded following the conclusion of the 2011 season, the team has been spread across the peloton in 2012. Renshaw has decided that at 28 this would be the last opportunity he would have to peruse his own glory as a protected sprinter. Renshaw moved to the Dutch team Rabobank with promises of being provided the opportunity to match it with Cavendish at the Tour. This adds another level of intrigue to the race for the green jersey in 2012 with the defending jersey holder racing on a new team against his old lead-out man with no guarantee of being offered the protection and support that has been crucial in winning 20 stages in only four appearances.
The final standings in the sprinters classification in 2011 had only six recognised sprinters in the top ten. The calibre and class of the sprinters who will compete in this year’s edition of the Tour is astonishing. In 2011 Cavendish was up against his old team mate André Greipel who took a maiden Tour stage win. Another rival, the American Tyler Farrar, also took a stage win and Jose Joaquin Rojas proved to be a continual thorn in his side. Along with Mat Goss, they were the big sprinters of 2011. In the first seven stages Rojas took the green jersey on two occasions. The Belgian Philippe Gilbert also wrested the jersey off Cavendish, leading the classification on three occasions. In 2012 Cavendish will find himself up against the cream of the crop with world class sprinters left right and centre. The completion in 2012 will be of a calibre that is echelons above the class of 2011. Farrar and Greipel will again look to antagonise the Sky rider but will also find themselves fighting off new rivals. Marcel Kittel and Peter Sagan are both prolific winners who are set to make their Tour debut in Liege. Add to this mix of fast men, Matt Goss, the silver medallist from the Copenhagen worlds last year, three time world champion Óscar Freire, Mark Renshaw, Tony Gallopin, Robbie Hunter and the endless opportunists in the peloton. 2012 is shaping up as a battle royal for the maillot vert.
The teams of Matt Goss and Marcel Kittel have primarily been assembled to deliver stage wins for their respective teams, Orica-GreenEdge and Argos Shimano. Several teams will need to balance the ambitions of their sprinters with a team that has been organised primarily around a strong GC performance of one or two riders on the team. Orica-GreenEdge and Argos Shimano will be focused on the sprints with no concern of the GC positions that there riders place in. They will however look for breakaway opportunities and any chance at a stage win will not go begging for these hungry debut teams. Peter Sagan won three stages in his debut Grand Tour appearance at the 2011 Vuelta proving all the hype was well and truly justified that surrounds the 22 year old. In 2012 Sagan has been unstoppable. In May at the Tour of California he won five stages which included the first four stages of the race. As well as the stages, Sagan won the sprinters classification and continued his good form in June at the Tour de Suisse. Broadening his repertoire, Sagan won the opening ITT prologue, three stages, as well as another sprinters classification. Coming off a successful defence of his Slovakian national championship road race win, Sagan will be a real force in the sprints even with his team mate Vincenzo Nibali attempting to achieve a high GC position.
The first week of the 2011 Tour was remarked by the riders as highly stressful and dangerous as an increasingly swelling number of teams not only looked to contest the sprints but also wanted to move their GC men up to the front, away from potential crashes. This created an anxious Pelton that suffered several crashes leading to high profile injures and subsequent withdrawals from the race. With five teams having genuine chances at snaring the points jersey, sprints could become carnage. The first real opportunity to contest a bunch sprint will be the 207.5km Stage Two from Visé to Tournai. The sprinters who find themselves on teams split over yellow and green may be squeezed out by the trains of Orica-GreenEdge and Argos Shimano among others in the race to the finish line. Hopefully the sprints will only be scenes of the world’s fastest sprinters battling each other in clean and upright sprints.
The intermediate sprint points will again animate the flat stages and they will be challenged for all the way to Paris as one or two points may decide the winner of the classification. The sprints of the 2012 edition of the Tour look to be electric but with so many star sprinters and their lead-out’s vying for less and less space on the road, hopefully this is a classification that is won on the road and not by the last man standing after all his rivals have crashed out.
The fight for green in 2011 was one of the more intriguing sub plots of the Tour. With some many prolific winners fighting out the sprints, a big haul of multiple stage wins looks like it may not occur this year. The dominance of Cavendish may finally be broken. If broken by Goss or Greipel, it will merely be a continuation of the old HTC team but Kittel and Sagan represent new approaches to sprints and new styles. The points classification in 2012 will surely be a major talking point throughout the race with such a high level calibre of sprinters also fine tuning their approach before the Olympic gold medal race in August and the world championships in September.
The first week of the 2011 Tour was remarked by the riders as highly stressful and dangerous as an increasingly swelling number of teams not only looked to contest the sprints but also wanted to move their GC men up to the front, away from potential crashes. This created an anxious Pelton that suffered several crashes leading to high profile injures and subsequent withdrawals from the race. With five teams having genuine chances at snaring the points jersey, sprints could become carnage. The first real opportunity to contest a bunch sprint will be the 207.5km Stage Two from Visé to Tournai. The sprinters who find themselves on teams split over yellow and green may be squeezed out by the trains of Orica-GreenEdge and Argos Shimano among others in the race to the finish line. Hopefully the sprints will only be scenes of the world’s fastest sprinters battling each other in clean and upright sprints.
The intermediate sprint points will again animate the flat stages and they will be challenged for all the way to Paris as one or two points may decide the winner of the classification. The sprints of the 2012 edition of the Tour look to be electric but with so many star sprinters and their lead-out’s vying for less and less space on the road, hopefully this is a classification that is won on the road and not by the last man standing after all his rivals have crashed out.
The fight for green in 2011 was one of the more intriguing sub plots of the Tour. With some many prolific winners fighting out the sprints, a big haul of multiple stage wins looks like it may not occur this year. The dominance of Cavendish may finally be broken. If broken by Goss or Greipel, it will merely be a continuation of the old HTC team but Kittel and Sagan represent new approaches to sprints and new styles. The points classification in 2012 will surely be a major talking point throughout the race with such a high level calibre of sprinters also fine tuning their approach before the Olympic gold medal race in August and the world championships in September.
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Green Jersey Standings in 2011
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Points
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Mark Cavendish
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334
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Jose Joaquin Rojas
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272
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Philippe Gilbert
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236
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Cadel Evans
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208
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Thor Hushovd
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195
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