This feature first appeared in Procycling magazine. To subscribe, click here.
Procycling’s Daniel Friebe, who knows Cavendish well, thinks it will tell us what’s left to gain for the Manx Missile.
After the breakthrough, beyond the rise and over the peak – but just before the point where twilight begins to cast its shade – there comes a moment in a sportsman’s life where thoughts begin to turn to the closing remarks.
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Mark Cavendish turned 30 last May. For most professional bike riders, these are the salad days but, ever the realist, Cavendish is fully aware that the shadows on his monumental achievements have started to lengthen. When he said two years ago that the second half of his career may well be less successful than the first, it seemed an unduly bold statement. Today the same prophecy is an unfolding body of evidence, as it is for most precocious sports stars. Cavendish hasn’t needed blondes or knee injuries to fall victim to what might henceforth be known as “Tiger Woods Syndrome”; like Woods, he won too much, too young, to tee up anything other than an inevitable anticlimax in the end.
The truth is that crashing out of the 2014 Tour de France on the first day in Harrogate may have been the watershed and epiphany that Cavendish suggested at the time, though not necessarily in the way that he had hoped or expected. One of his oldest allies and mentors, the Danish directeur sportif, Brian Holm, said at the time, without malice, that it would serve him well to realise that, “this bike race and professional cycling can carry on without him, that he is not the centre of the world.” The previous January, coincidentally, Tony Martin had foretold the same kind of serendipity, if not the unfortunate way that it came about. When Cavendish turned to Martin on a training ride and admitted that he was tired – of the yearly grind, the relentless pressure, the travel, of having to win five Tour stages just to persuade the world he wasn’t washed up – his German team-mate suggested that perhaps he needed to sit out a Tour just to appreciate how much that race, and his job in general, meant to him.
When fate duly conspired to take him out of the Grande Boucle in sight of the first finishing line, Cavendish waited for a lightbulb to flicker. He thought this bitter experience would make him more hungry and, in a way, he was right; proof could be seen in the way that he defied initial prognoses to race again that season and even win twice at the Tour du Poitou Charentes. But it wasn’t his appetite for victories that had been revived; what had rebounded with a vengeance, as Tony Martin had suspected it would, was the pure love of being a professional cyclist, and his desire to stay in that trade for as long as his legs would allow. This is what Cavendish now tells friends, family and peers: he only wants to train, race and be part of a successful team. Ask him now whether he is mainly chasing records, recognition or the dreams that his long-time coach, Rod Ellingworth, always told him to follow, and he responds with a blank look: he simply doesn’t know, or hasn’t dwelled on the matter enough to formulate a reply.
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