The Director of the Tour de France, Christian Prudhomme, says the tour was obliged to change the points competition to suit 'great sprinters' - like Mark Cavendish - and that he's delighted with the new structure of the green jersey race.
Prudhomme made the comments after Cavendish won Stage 15 of this year's Tour to go 37 points ahead of Jose Joaquin Rojas in the fight for the green jersey.
He said: "The starting point was Mark Cavendish a rider who's won 15 stages in three years but never the green jersey. We said to ourselves that if Cavendish ends his career without ever winning it, despite making his mark on the history sprinting, that we need to do something.
"The two or three intermediate sprints which we used to have were almost never contested. So our team, led by Jean-Francois Pescheux, came up with a system, only one sprint but with lots of points available to 14 riders. So even if there is a breakaway there'll be a sprint.
"And now we can actually see that we'd get a different race, an interesting race, a sprint. Perhaps it would allow the best sprinter in the world, who has fewer potential wins, with all the uphill finishes to go looking for points elsewhere.
"We haven't done it for Mark Cavendish, we did it for an exceptional sprinter."
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