No back-pedalling from the man I am

Back after a torrid year, Mark Cavendish has Tour history in his sights.

Cycling great Mark Cavendish. Picture: AFP

Part way into our conversation, Mark Cavendish suddenly stops himself. “I’m doing it again,” he ­interjects. “I’m justifying my ­career to you.”

At 37, with unique palmares among the greatest sprint cyclists, including an unsurpassed 34 stage wins at the Tour de France among an incredible total of 161 career victories, there really is no need to prove anything. But here he is, a fierce competitor and winner who sits down to explain why, heading into 2023, he is not done yet.

Cavendish laughs when I ­remind him that he compared himself to the lead character in Rocky the last time we spoke at length. It had seemed apt given one of sport’s most sensational comebacks.

He had returned from a horrendously debilitating illness, clinical depression, years without a notable victory. He had been written off even by some of those who knew him best. In 2021, he had proved them wrong by ­winning four more Tour stages to draw level with Eddy Merckx, ­becoming the joint holder of one of those rare sporting records that few can imagine ever being matched.

Well, what is Rocky without a sequel? Without another improbable climb off the canvas? In the past 12 months, Cavendish has been left out of the 2022 Tour, told he was surplus to requirements by one team and committed to ­another which then collapsed when the backers pulled out.

There was the horrific robbery in November 2021 at knifepoint and the recent trial which brought back all that trauma.

Sitting next to his wife, Peta, with their five-month-old daughter, Astrid, gurgling along, Cavendish could be putting his feet up after a career that seems to have been lived as fast as he rides that bike. At his age, he could be the ­father of some of those he now races. Yet here he is, back again for another season, racing for Astana Qazaqstan, and sounding, well, different. “I am definitely a different person,” he says.

How? “I don’t know, it’s a lot of things. I am 38 this year, I’ve got five kids.”

“He’s tired is what he’s trying to say,” Peta interjects with a laugh.

Over the next hour or so, Cavendish tries to explain what has changed, not least the sense that he really does have nothing to prove or justify – but also why he may yet add another remarkable triumph just in case.

Cavendish breaks down after a stage win in 2021. Picture: Getty

There is a lot to catch up on, and much of it will be set out in a Netflix film about Cavendish’s life which is in production. We talk about the opening scene. Could it be winning a historic 35th stage this northern summer?

“The goal is winning. Not one particular win, it’s winning. The Tour de France is what I’ve always set my career around, and from outside I’m well aware [what people will say]. We are at that point I can stand alone [from Merckx]. Another win at the Tour is everything to people but, for me, it’s not one win, it’s two or three, whatever I can do.

“For me it is quite simple. I can continue riding my bike, I can continue winning, so why not do it? I love it. I love racing. It’s changed. The racing is not as enjoyable but I still love it.”

It is remarkable that Cavendish still holds that love given all he has been through, far beyond the non-negotiable demands of training, to compete among the fastest bike riders on the planet, battling wheel to wheel and shoulder to shoulder with the next generation of sprinters at 70km/h.

Cavendish has endured the dark depths of his struggles with Epstein-Barr virus, which took him from someone who could win four stages at the 2016 Tour to barely walking up the stairs. Worse still was a team, Dimension Data, which treated him as a ­malingerer.

After four deeply fractious years he joined Team Bahrain, linking up with his old mentor Rod Ellingworth in 2020, but he was released after one season. It was another scalding experience. “I am less trusting, very aware that people aren’t loyal to you, they are loyal to their need for you,” he says.

By then he was battling clinical depression. He talks very openly these days about the humility that came through his own struggles. “That’s the biggest way you get empathy, to go through something that you’d have laughed at before, the idea of it happening to you.”

How is he now? “You never get better. You just learn the tell-tale signs if you are having an episode. You learn to catch them earlier so it affects you less.”

Cavendish was in a better place when he rejoined the Quick-Step team but even then he felt that he was having to convince people that he was not a has-been.

He had to fight for a place at the 2021 Tour and was granted it only days before the Grand Depart. ­Remarkably, he won those four stages but then was left out last year. Some assumed he was done, especially when his move to a new team fell through.

There were talks with a number of teams when a call came out of the blue from Alexander Vinokourov, the general manager of the Astana team.

“We talked about the benefits but also what happens if I’m not successful, how it goes the other way, and he just said, ‘It doesn’t matter. If we don’t win, we don’t win, but we go in trying.’ Nobody had spoken to me like that in a long time, a really long time.

“I have been in teams where I have been idolised and that’s hard. You feel isolated. You feel that pressure. I’ve been in teams where I have been kicked, not physically, but that’s also not nice. Here I just feel respected for what I have achieved, what I can achieve, and as a person.

“Talking now, I feel like I have to justify myself to you as a bike racer. That’s why I don’t really do interviews any more. It’s why it was nice talking to Vino. I felt I didn’t have to justify myself, my career, my age.”

They had something in common. Vinokourov was almost 40 when he won the London 2012 Olympic road race on a day that was meant to be set up for Cavendish’s glory. The Manxman says the pair talked more about motivation than money.

“It’s ‘Can I win? Will I be happy?’ There is pressure that comes with my name, and commercial aspects, but I just wanted fair compensation.”

Vinokourov comes with his own baggage as a rider from cycling’s darkest era but Cavendish is interested only in what he detects of the team culture now. “All I’ve seen is respect, not as in holding you high up but seeing that you are a person, not a commodity,” he says.

In a team that struggled last year, Cavendish offers Astana a rare opportunity to achieve something special. He already knows that he can build for the Tour, with Cees Bol added to the roster to help with his sprint-train. At long last, Cavendish knows where he stands.

“I feel I’ve been jumping through hoops for years. First, the Dimension Data years when it was the team’s fault I was sick but I got thrown under the bus for it. That hurt. Bahrain, even Quick-Step, I couldn’t prepare, set a target. This is the first time I can set a goal and work towards it rather than feel I have to prove myself just to get the opportunity.”

He says that Vinokourov was brilliant around the recent trial at Chelmsford Crown Court which was retraumatising for the whole family.

Cavendish and his wife had to go into the witness box to recount the terrifying night when masked intruders broke into their home in Essex, southern England, in November 2021. Cavendish was physically assaulted in front of his family, with a knife held to his throat by robbers looking for two watches, worth 700,000, given to him as part of his work for the Richard Mille brand.

“The team were super supportive, incredible. [Joining them] was delayed because they gave me time. Vino said, ‘Take your time, be with your family if you need to be.’ It was a scary time. Even during the trial, a really scary time. It took a huge pressure off that we can deal with that.”

Cavendish has a family of five children, spanning from a 17-year-old stepson to baby Astrid, but the road beckons once more for the man who rode his first Tour in 2007. He has seen how the sport has changed, and not all for the better. “Less racing, as opposed to drawn out watt-munching,” he says. “It’s a lot more physical than tactical. It’s a lot more based on your physical make-up and output. The breadth of body types has narrowed.”

He talks of Jonas Vingegaard as a pure skinny climber but says that the 2022 Tour winner almost seems an anomaly as teams scour for the power of the next Wout van Aert. “I’ve been able to adapt through 15 years but without that I don’t think I’d be turning pro now. It’s all on your numbers. In my day, you won as an under-23 and got a contract. Now it is all on physical potential, not what you’ve won.”

For Cavendish, there is gratitude that he has managed to have this long sporting career but also, it seems, a wider contentment. After our chat, he is off to an art gallery. He draws, figuratively mostly, for relaxation.

He has given plenty of spiky ­interviews in his time, and is a man not inclined to suffer fools, but I point out that he sounds reflective, almost mellow. He nods.­

“It sounds a bit extreme, melodramatic, to say it is like being in and out of character but that’s how it has felt sometimes. Like an actor. You can still need that character on the bike, that energy. But I don’t feel the same need to portray it off the bike now. I am a more mature person now. Less emotional, I think.

“I never understood why some people perceived me a certain way. But I know now that I can’t change that opinion.”

Or as Peta puts it: “Mark has ­always been this divisive character. But now it feels like everyone has said all the bad things they are going to say, they have written you off as many times as they can and it’s like, ‘Carry on if you want but I am going to get on with life over here’. That comes with experience and age, allowing you to settle in yourself.”

The Times