London 2012 Olympics, Day 1: dethroning of Mark Cavendish in road race leaves British nerves frayed By the time the riders reached Box Hill, it was clear that quite a lot could. Starved of information by a systems failure in the broadcast commentary, the watching thousands could only guess at what was happening through titbits picked up via mobile phones. But this much was obvious: the rest of the field were in no mood to accommodate the Brits and had ganged up to ensure the home race train could not operate as planned. A breakaway had been quickly organised which few teams other than the Britons were minded to counter. What soon became evident for the crowds, as they watched the riders circle the hill, as they exchanged high-fives with passing motor cycle cops, as they sympathetically acknowledged the rider from Syria, falling ever further off the back of the field, was that Cav was out of it. As they spotted him minutes behind the leaders, an edge of desperation began to creep into the watching hordes. "Pull your finger out, Wiggo," yelled one man as the British team climbed the hill for the ninth and final time, now well detached from the front of the pack. What the crowd knew, as the riders headed back into London, was that only a miracle would now restore Cavendish's prospects. "Nobody could have worked harder than the boys did for me, I was so proud of them," the Manxman recalls. But sometimes you have to say, that's cycling. On the Mall, hoping to associate themselves with British success, half the political establishment waited for the riders to cross the finish line. But for David Cameron and Ed Miliband there was to be no golden moment in which to bask. A shattered, hollow-eyed Cavendish came in 29th. The victor was Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, who was never alone for a second of the 5 hours, 45 minutes and 57 seconds it took him to complete the race. Wherever he looked he would have seen someone watching him: this was the biggest crowd ever seen at the Olympics, a harbinger of how the nation would gather over the next fortnight. "Some memories stay with you forever," says Cavendish. And I'll never ever forget the crowd. He would probably sooner forget his interview on the finish line with the BBC's David Bond. Asking what many wondered - whether exhausting triumph in the Tour had drained British resolve - Bond provoked the first hissy fit of the Games. "Stop asking stupid questions," spat Cavendish, as he was led away by more diplomatic colleagues. Do you actually know anything about cycling? Later he apologised, but the message was clear: this was a man hurting. He was not alone. It was not just on the road that expectation was unfulfilled. Michael Phelps, the overwhelming favourite to hoover up most of the gold available in the swimming pool, failed to even make the podium in his first final of the Games. In the 400 metre medley the gold was scooped instead by his compatriot Ryan Lochte. And, in a hint of the shifting centre of sporting power, China's Ye Shiwen set a new world record in winning the women's 400m medley. More than an eyebrow was raised by her performance: at seven seconds faster than her effort in the 2011 World Championships, for some this seemed an improvement beyond the miraculous. For Britain the day was to end without a medal, though hope was engendered by a world record breaking effort in the rowing heats by the women's pair Helen Glover and Heather Stanning. And it meant for the second Olympics on the bounce, the country's leading sprint cyclist found himself nowhere near the podium. "I had this awful feeling that I'd let everyone down," he says. You know it's not like that, that you did everything in your power to win and in the end it didn't work out. But you wanted to start the Games with a bang and when you didn't you can't help feeling guilty about it. With no role remaining on the road or the velodrome, for Cavendish that was it. His Games were over almost as soon as they had begun. It seems like most teams are happy not to win as long as we don't win. Mark Cavendish after other teams in the road race refused to help Team GB to chase down the breakaway. None