This feature first appeared in Procycling magazine. To subscribe, click here.
Mark Cavendish was Procycling's cover star for the April edition of the magazine. At the start of the sprinter's ninth full season as a professional, Procycling's Daniel Friebe, who ghost-wrote Cavendish's two autobiographies and knows the Manxman well, went to Spain to observe and interview him. He came back with a fascinating, in-depth feature, which showed that while the days of five or six stage wins in a single Tour may be over for Cavendish, the sprinter's competitive fire burns as brightly as ever.
When he turns 30 in May, Mark Cavendish will already be, by most estimates, the finest sprinter that professional cycling has ever seen. The question on the eve of the 2015 season was whether the Manxman was also nearing the end of the road or whether a revamped Etixx-Quick Step team and rivalry with a certain German can spur him on to a whole new level of success? "I'm a much more complete rider now. I can win harder races. I can climb now, really climb," he says
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Even in a career that Mark Cavendish conducts like a religious crusade, there have been moments when both the Manxman and the cycling Gods have seemed to bow before the size of their undertaking. When Cavendish turned pro with T-Mobile in January 2007, the team's coach, Sebastian Weber, took one look at the doughboy's physique, then at his power numbers and scoffed; he told Cavendish that he would never amount to anything, in his current condition. A team-mate, the Spaniard Vicente Reynès, assumed in 2008 that he must be a friend of the sponsors.
Both Weber and Reynès were wrong – happily, spectacularly so – but the sense that Cavendish could only stick one finger up to history, logic and physiology for so long, and that sooner or later security would step in and remove the interloper, has persisted even as records and rivals have fallen.
So for Cavendish, a whiff of skepticism – even pre-emptive schadenfreude – among the reporters who have gathered to meet him at Etixx-Quick Step's January training camp in Calpe, is nothing new. He may not trawl forums or even Twitter as he once did but he knows the wolves can smell blood. Never mind that he ended the 2014 season with 12 victories. He also failed to win a Grand Tour stage for the first time since 2008 and extended an unbroken, winless run of sprints against Marcel Kittel that stretches back to 2011.
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