"I hope for a nice sprint" - Mark Cavendish quietly confident of ending final Giro d'Italia with stage win

With stage 17 seemingly ideal for the sprinters, Mark Cavendish has his first chance of a stage win since his retirement announcement and he is determined to give it his all.

“It could go either way today. Or we get a kind of rest day, or a tough leg to calculate the breakaway again. I hope for a nice sprint,” the Astana Qazaqstan Team sprinter revealed to Eurosport prior to the start of the seventeenth day of racing at this year's Giro d'Italia. 

After surviving the mountains of stage 16 and coming home inside the time cut, Cavendish was extremely grateful for his teammates' help. “I was able to count on the support of two 'soldiers' yesterday, with Gianni Moscon and Joe Dombrowski. They stayed with me and managed to get me through the stage," he recalls. "It was okay. Of course you suffer, but you just think of days when you can sprint again."

The question now is though, could today be Cavendish's final chance at getting another Giro stage win? “No idea, I don't really think about that. It's just another sprint. Last time I was third. That's not bad, but of course it's about profit. We keep trying.”