Nothing is going right for Mark Cavendish at Astana-Qazaqstan yet – Rouleur

It’s just not happening for Mark Cavendish at Astana-Qazaqstan. Four months into his journey with the Kazakh team, the greatest sprinter in the history of cycling looks as miserable and as out-of-form as he perhaps ever has before.

On stage five of the Giro d’Italia, a wet, horrible day that the entire peloton will want to wash from their memory – including probably even the leader Andreas Leknessund – Cavendish reached a new nadir, spectacularly, acrobatically, perplexedly crashing 30 metres from the finish, crossing the line with his back scraping across the soaked asphalt at over 50kph.

It says everything you need to know about Cavendish’s time at Astana that fourth place in Salerno is his third-best result in 36 race days for them – and he achieved that by sliding on his backside with his legs in the air like an upside down tortoise gasping for air.

Thirty-six days of racing. Just let that sink in a moment. It is May 10. Most riders now don’t ride more than 65 race days in a season, but Cavendish, who turns 38 in less than a fortnight’s time, has almost raced two-third of a season’s calendar. Only nine riders in the entire world have raced more than the Manx Missile since the turn of the year.

So just what is going wrong? When he joined the team in January, he only did so following the demise of the team that was supposed to take the licence of B&B Hotels. If Astana felt like a very weird fit at the time – this is a team, remember, who have built their entire 18-year career around GC riders and climbers – then it’s looking incompatible right now.

He began his year at the Tour of Oman and UAE Tour. In front of the press he was tetchy, grumpy. Nothing new there. He rode to third on the opening stage of the latter. Since coming back to Europe, the best he’s managed is a very respectful and admirable third-place at Scheldeprijs, effectively the sprinter’s classic. But there were withdrawals at other Classics, abandonment on stage one of the Tour de Romandie after failing to keep up with the peloton, and a very frustrating start to the Giro.