Mark Cavendish

Can the Manx Missile finally knock Eddy Merckx off the top spot for Tour de France wins this year?

It’s not too long ago that once an athlete in a highly physical sport such as professional cycling, football or tennis turned 30, they were considered past their prime. Advances in sport science, nutrition and training, improved recovery prospects from serious injury and a shift in beliefs about what ageing sportsmen and women can achieve, has changed all that. Forty isn’t quite the new 30, but in recent years several athletes have continued to compete at the top of their sport into their fifth decade, such as Roger Federer and Serena Williams (tennis), Annemiek van Vleuten (cycling) and Tom Brady (American football).

Close to being added to this list is Mark Cavendish (39 this May), who’s currently in his 20th year as a pro cyclist. The Manx Missile, with 162 career wins to his name (the third most in history behind Eddy Merckx and Mario Cipollini), would have been forgiven for calling it quits several times already. Perhaps following battles with the Epstein-Barr virus and resulting depression through 2018 and 2019, or his non-selection for the Tour de France through 2019 and 2020. Maybe after his remarkable comeback at the Tour in 2021 when, from nowhere, he won four stages and the green jersey. Or even after announcing his actual retirement, which he did at the end of the 2023 Giro d’Italia, when he said he’d bow out at the end of that season.

Yet here he is, on the verge of another appearance at the race he treasures most, the Tour de France. A big part of that, clearly, is about objectives. Objectives are what gets an athlete out of bed on a cold, wet morning to do the training prescribed to them by their coach. Cavendish is still sustained by a rather sizeable one: becoming the most prolific Tour de France stage winner, a stat in which he’s tied with The GOAT, Eddy Merckx, on 34.

Following a crash at the Tour last summer that prematurely put him out of the race when on the cusp of the record, he abandoned those retirement plans to continue for another season at Astana Qazaqstan. Chasing records, however, isn’t always enough and for Cavendish, as he admitted at his team’s pre-season training camp in December, he’s simply happy racing his bike again, just like he was when he came into the sport all those years ago. In the world of highperformance sport, happiness is an underrated commodity.