Anticipation was high that Mark Cavendish could extend his Tour de France record for stage wins on Tuesday's flat 187.3km route from Orléans to Saint-Amand-Montrond, but the Astana Qazaqstan rider was unable to contest the sprint after losing contact with his lead-out men in the technical final kilometre.
Cavendish drew congratulations from all of his fellow competitors and cycling fans around the world after breaking Eddy Merckx's record, winning his 35th Tour de France stage in Saint Vulbas on stage 5, but could not claim his 36th stage as Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) dominated the bunch sprint.
Following the stage, Cavendish told the media assembled outside the team bus that he was caught behind Elmar Reinders in a corner with 3km to go and lost contact with Astana lead-out men Cees Bol and Michael Mørkøv, who had already started to accelerate before he could get back on their wheels.
"I don't know why the boys went - as I get there they went, we weren't supposed to go til later," Cavendish said. "We'll have to speak about it and see what happens. It's a bit unlike Morky really.
"Things are never going to be as exactly how you want them to go," he added. "Somebody's got to win, a lot of people have to not win, that's bike racing."
Mørkøv, one of the most experienced final lead-out men in the peloton, explained to NBC Sports what went wrong in the finale.
"We had a tactic to move up with Cav towards that last chicane - we wanted to enter as one of the first. We thought that was the way to win the stage. But unfortunately, Cees [Bol] and I, we lost Cav on that last two k's, and I don't think he came around in that good of a position."
The duo could be seen accelerating up the right side of the peloton before sitting up and looking around for Cavendish just inside 2km to go.
"It's hard because you can't really look much back in the bunch sprint," Mørkøv explained why they didn't know Cavendish had lost them. "You have to always keep your eyes forward because so many things are going on.
"So it's basically whenever you have the chance you check if he's there, then you kind of believe he's there for a while until you check again - it's always a bad sign if you look and he's not there anymore."
Astana brought Mørkøv on board as part of 'Project 35' but so far in the Tour de France sprints, he has not delivered the same kind of final lead-out as he has in the past. He explained that the peloton's level has risen so much in the past few years that the dynamic has changed.
"There's so many strong lead-out men, there's so many strong sprinters, so sprints turned out to be a lot of a mess, where, I would say, some years back, there was a more dominating team who could line it out and take it from the front. And that's that's very hard nowadays."
Mark Renshaw, Astana's sprint director and Cavendish's former lead-out man, explained that the team changed the order of the lead-out.
"Today we kind of all got unraveled at 2.8 kilometers to go. We had Cees following Mørkøv to mix it up a little bit, and Cav just lost him in the turn to the left. From there, it was very difficult to get back together, and could see Cav had to had to close the gap, kind of in the wheel of a Lotto rider there. So, he used a lot of energy.
"From that point, it's game over. At this level, there was no chance to get back on the wheel of Cees or Mørkøv."
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