Sprinter very likely to need surgery after injuring collar boneHe will be out of action for at least six weeks

On the day Mark Cavendish hoped to ride out of York in the brightest yellow, his attire instead matched his mood: grey. A damaged collar bone and torn ligaments, self-inflicted in a crash during the desperate final metres of stage one, had ended his Tour de France and left him “absolutely devastated”. Worse still, an Omega Pharma-Quick-Step doctor later revealed that his injuries were “very likely” to need surgery, which would keep him off the bike for six weeks and rule him out of the Commonwealth Games.

Cavendish will know for sure after a further MRI scan but for now the unwelcome title of being the first man out of the 2014 Tour hurts enough. “I held a bit of optimism that it was maybe just swelling and would go down overnight but it’s actually worse,” he told the scrum of reporters gathered outside his team bus. “It’s not possible to start from a medical point of view.”

His words were pained but philosophical. “We kind of knew on Saturday night,” he said. “I normally bounce back from some crashes quite well. I assessed my body and for the first time in my career I knew something was wrong.”

Cavendish admitted he was at fault for leaning into the Australian rider Simon Gerrans as they charged for the line and he later apologised. “I tried to find a gap that wasn’t there,” he said. Gerrans was able to start the second stage and finished 1min 45sec behind Vincenzo Nibali but said he was struggling too. “You know those double-decker buses they have here in the UK? I woke up feeling like one of them drove on me during the night,” he said.

At least Chris Froome, one of only three Britons left in the race alongside Geraint Thomas and Simon Yates, warmed locals’ hearts as he briefly surged into the lead up Jenkin Road in Sheffield, shortly before the finish.

But there was no disguising the loss Cavendish’s swift departure means for the Tour. Everyone was relishing his head-to-head contest with the German Marcel Kittel, yet it ended before battle was ever truly joined. In last year’s race Kittel won four stages to Cavendish’s two – including victory along the Champs-Élysées, the Manxman’s domain. This was supposed to be the rematch.

That the pair had barely raced against each other since only heightened the intrigue. In February Kittel beat Cavendish in a sprint finish in the one-day Dubai Tour and, though Cavendish won two stages at the Tirreno-Adriactico in April, Kittel was not overly exerting himself.

Now the dynamic changes and the path clears for Kittel to win the Tour’s flattest stages. As the Irish sprinter Sean Kelly, the British Eurosport commentator who won five stages of the Tour and four green jerseys in the 1980s, put it: “It is a huge disappointment for the race. I can’t see who can now challenge Kittel on the flat stages in these early days.”

Who else is there? André Greipel is a very talented sprinter whose legs, like Kittel’s, need time to wind up to full speed- but Kittel is faster than him. Peter Sagan is a brilliant all-rounder, who can climb mountains and contest sprints, but he is not a thrash-metal merchant.

Cavendish offered something different: a sudden burst of power that when perfectly timed earned him victory so many times in this race. Without him around, Kittel will fancy his chances of winning Monday’s flattish 155km third stage from Cambridge to London and Tuesday’s almost replica 163.5km fourth stage from Le Touquet to Lille.

Stage 15 from Tallard to Nîmes, stage 19 from Maubourguet to Bergerac and the final stage into Paris will also be on the German’s wish list. The five tour wins he has could soon be pushing double figures.

Next time Cavendish and Kittel meet at the Tour the Manxman will have turned 30. Once that might have been seen as a death sentence for a top-level sportsman but no longer. The Australian Robbie McEwen – a small and nippy sprinter, not unlike Cavendish – won 10 of his 12 Tour de France stage victories after he turned 30. Mario Cippolini won eight of his 12 victories after that, including four in a row in 1999, when he was 32. Thor Hushovd won half his 10 victories after his 30th birthday.

There is one difference, of course. They never had a young Kittel in their slipstream scenting blood and venting thunder. Cavendish knows what awaits when he returns.