When success is deemed a failure

THE best years of Mark Cavendish's career as a professional cyclist may be behind him. He is only 28 years old, but his career may already have peaked.

Mark Cavendish

THE best years of Mark Cavendish's career as a professional cyclist may be behind him. He is only 28 years old, but his career may already have peaked.

This is his view, by the way. It is not someone attempting to wind him up or demean him or cast him in a negative light. No, it is the debate that he leads himself in a fascinating wave of self-analysis that floods the back end of his new book,

At Speed. He comes over like Samson, staring at his reflection in the mirror to check that his hair is not falling out.

The paranoia starts in the penultimate chapter. Cavendish has had a habit of collecting Tour de France stage wins in large numbers: four in 2008, then, in the following years in succession, six, five, five and three. Yet when he describes this year's Tour, he wins just two.

"That Tour was about to leave me wondering whether, at 28, my best days might already have come and gone," he writes.

After failing, for the first time in five years, to win the final stages of the Tour, which finishes on the Champs d'Elysees, he concludes: "I'm not kidding myself either: my best years as a sprinter are more likely to be behind than in front."

He even quotes a headline from L'Equipe, mid-Tour, "Cavendish no longer reigns" and reflects upon it: "Deep down, without even really admitting it myself, and maybe for the first time in my career, I'd started to wonder whether they might be right."

The waning of an athlete's powers is a notoriously hard event to deal with. Cavendish sees this moment in the arrival of Marcel Kittel, the young German superstar, and, in that penultimate chapter, he searches for reasons to reject the evidence before his eyes.

First, he details the health issues he was dealing with when, at the start of the Tour, he was on a debilitating course of antibiotics. Second, he notes how he felt "twisted" on the bike and that, in the third week of the Tour, he established, to his astonishment, that one of his pedal cranks was longer than the other. Boy, you would have hated to be the team mechanic when that little revelation dropped.

The antibiotics and the cranks are not presented as excuses. They are merely exhibits of evidence he cites as he ponders his faded invincibility.

This confrontation, admitting that you may be beyond your best, is not easy. Cavendish does it in print, but feels horribly awkward discussing it verbally. "I put my thoughts about it down in the book," he says in this interview, which has been arranged as part of the publicity for the book, "but I don't sit and wallow in it".

I say to him: "But it clearly preyed on your mind."

He replies, clipped: "No, it didn't."

I then mention the "disappointment" of this year's Tour, and he cuts me off. "What do you mean, disappointment?" he says. "I won two stages of the Tour de France."

"It doesn't sound like you have won two stages," I tell him. "It sounds like you lost four."

"No," he says. "It sounds like I have been beaten in the Tour de France for the first time without me making a mistake, which is a big landmark in my career."

This is reference to the twelfth stage, another won by Kittel, which Cavendish describes in the book as "unprecedented". He says that he knew this day would come, when he would get genuinely outclassed, but "not for a few years". He writes: "I was racking my brains for a reason, an alibi, but this time I could find none."

As Cavendish says, history may show one day that the 2013 Tour was the turning point in his career. Maybe, then, its next few chapters will be all the more fascinating as he sets about proving otherwise. "It just means I need to change a few things," he says, almost too casually.

Such as? "I've never been in the gym in my life and I've just started strength and conditioning."

Really? Did Team Sky, the marginal-gains obsessives, never suggest it? "No," he says. "I'd won the World Championships. I must have been doing something right. They didn't need to suggest it; I was winning."

So there is a delicious little nugget: the best sprinter of a generation does not have a marginal gain yet to reap, he has a significant one. It certainly makes the forthcoming rivalry with Kittel ever more intriguing. The German is bigger and more powerful.

"Dolph Lundgren on a bike," according to Cavendish, who will not reveal what he will be attempting to achieve in the gym in order to beat Kittel, although strength is clearly a part of it.

He has only praise for his rival. "It's the biggest challenge I've had in my career," he says. Cavendish describes him as "a really nice guy who really loves the sport, who's always been smiley, always says hello. You can always tell a lot by a rider when they say 'congratulations' when you win. Very few riders do that, but he was someone who always did when I won."

I ask when he registered that Kittel was a genuine threat and Cavendish says: "The middle of this Tour." In other words, only when he had lost the twelfth stage. And really, this hasn't all preyed on his mind?

I tell him that the 2013 Tour "sounds like the worst three weeks of your life".

He tells me to reread that penultimate chapter. "Read it with a smile on your face and a bounce in your step," he says.

Maybe, I tell him, he should do an audio book, but with some jolly backing music to brighten the picture. I don't believe that Cavendish is really happy to have won only two Tour stages. And because of that, I don't believe his best years are past, either.

The Times