Cavendish lives to fight another day in Qatar

Despite injuries all the way down his left side, Mark Cavendish (HTC-Highroad) fought hard to stay in contention on stage one of the Tour of Qatar, getting in the first echelon of the day and only losing contact when a rider ahead of him could not handle the speed of the front group.

"It was all right, I feel all right here, I just had bad luck because all it takes is one rider ahead of you to sit up," Cavendish told Cycling Weekly.

Asked about the previous day's crash in the prologue, Cavendish said "I tried to bunny hop a speed bump but it just caught my back wheel. They weren't like the rounded ones, it had a lip on it so I came down."

"My hip hurts the most because that's where I came down the hardest." And even after the stage, the wound was still oozing blood out of the bandage.

Cavendish agreed that it was very unlucky that he had fallen on the same left side as in the Tour Down Under, or as he succinctly put it, "shit happens".

"He's okay," HTC-Highroad team doctor Helge Riepenhof added, "he says his head hurts a bit but he got through, got in the early move too, and that's a big step forward. He survived."

Related links

Tour of Qatar 2011: Cycling Weekly's coverage index