Teammates "sad" over Mark Cavendish Tour de France exclusion

Veteran British rider Steve Cummings was the first to say it, speaking at Thursday's team presentation, while Edvald Boasson Hagen and Reinardt Janse van Rensburg echoed him a day later.

"It's just sad," Cummings said. "I've known him a long time as a friend and he's a legend of the Tour de France.

"It's a big call to leave him out."

Legend was also the word used by Janse van Rensburg.

"It is pretty sad for everybody," the South African said. "Cav is a legend of the sport. He worked hard to be here but unfortunately, in all sports, there are decisions that have to be made and the team made the decision."

Cavendish said he was "heartbroken" to miss the Tour after spending all year fighting to prove his fitness due to him suffering from the Epstein-Barr virus.

The 34-year-old insisted he had found that form but it was not enough to convince his boss.

Boasson Hagen said he believed Cavendish would have been picked if his numbers backed that up.

"It's really sad he's not here," the Norwegian said. "But we are here and we need to perform as well as we can. We don't pick the team.

"It's sad that last year and this year he hasn't had the form he used to have. It would have been nice if he was in good form and shape. He would have been here.

"I'm a good friend of his and he's a really good guy. It would be nice to have him. But he's not been performing as well as I would like him to do, and the team, and everyone, and of course, himself as well."

Instead of going for a training ride around Brussels with his teammates on Friday, Cavendish was instead surprising a young fan, whose mother had posted a video of him in tears after the Dimension Data squad was announced.

Cavendish drove to the home of five-year-old fan Evan Llewellyn in Ravenshead, Nottinghamshire, and took him out for a ride.

Cavendish's omission was not the only surprise in Dimension Data's squad, with Cummings conceding his own selection was unexpected.

Though the 38-year-old began the season targeting the Tour, a string of setbacks left him fearing the worst.

After racing Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-Sanremo in April, Cummings suffered a broken collarbone in a crash at the Tour of the Basque Country in April, while illness then hampered him before and during the Criterium du Dauphine last month.

"(After the crash) I came back in the Tour of Norway and felt really good, the numbers were really good," he said.

"Then I got sick, went to the Dauphine and got sick again, so I stopped. If you're bad in the Dauphine normally they pick the team after that, so I put two and two together and thought I was out of the team."

Cummings has two Tour stage wins to his name, delivering a memorable first for his South African-based team, then called MTN-Qhubeka, when he won on Mandela Day in 2015 before delivering again a year later.

Riding without a general classification hopeful, Dimension Data will stage-hunt in this year's Tour, and Cummings has his eye on a few potential breakaway days already.

"There are quite a few (opportunities)," he said. "In the end, it comes down to the legs for me."

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