Mark Cavendish (HTC-Columbia) puts his arms up in victory(Image credit: Fotoreporter Sirotti)
Mark Cavendish (HTC-Columbia) celebrates with a spray of champagne(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
Mark Cavendish (HTC-Columbia) salutes the crowd(Image credit: Fotoreporter Sirotti)
Mark Cavendish (HTC-Columbia) has accused his Vuelta a España sprint rivals of collaborating against him. The Manxman took his second consecutive stage win of the race at Burgos on Friday and afterwards revealed that he believes that Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Transitions) and Wouter Weylandt (Quick Step) are working together in the race.
“Wouter’s helping Farrar and that’s going to make it more difficult for us to control the points competition,” Cavendish told Reuters. “If you’ve got two guys from different teams working together that’s always going to be harder.”
Cavendish was particular aggrieved about an incident during an intermediate sprint early on stage 13. “One went left, the other went right and they deliberately closed the door on me,” he said. “I’ve never made a protest about this sort of sprint before but I feel I was put at a disadvantage.”
However, Garmin-Transitions sports director Bingen Fernandez denied any collusion between his rider and Weylandt. “I don’t believe the two are working together,” he said. “I haven’t actually seen the sprint in question, but I don’t think it would happen. From what I heard, each rider did his own sprint and that was that.”
Cavendish currently leads the points classification with an advantage of 21 points over Farrar.
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Barry Ryan is Head of Features at Cyclingnews. He has covered professional cycling since 2010, reporting from the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and events from Argentina to Japan. His writing has appeared in The Independent, Procycling and Cycling Plus. He is the author of The Ascent: Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling’s Golden Generation, published by Gill Books.
