Never more dangerous than when he's being written off, Cavendish tells us how he rebounded so emphatically this season

In 2016 Mark Cavendish rode one of his best ever seasons with a world track title, four Tour de France stage wins and a yellow jersey just some of the highlights. Yet the year will be remembered, by him and by others, for the silver medals in Rio and Doha

Missing out on a world title can make a man lose all sense of himself. When Floyd Patterson surrendered his world heavyweight boxing belt to Sonny Liston in 1962, having suffered a first-round knockout, he left Comiskey Park wearing a false beard and dark glasses, and set off by car from Chicago to New York city that same night. He then boarded a flight to Madrid under an assumed name and, still disguised, hid there for a week.

Mark Cavendish can allow himself no such anonymity and no such mourning period after being outsprinted by Peter Sagan at the Worlds in Doha. The morning after the race, the Manxman is booked in for a round of media interviews in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel before travelling onwards to the Abu Dhabi Tour to complete his road season. Six-day races on the track in London and Ghent await before he can finally put his 2016 campaign to bed. In the immediate aftermath of the race the previous afternoon, silver medal around his neck, Cavendish absorbed his initial disappointment well enough to speak magnanimously in praise of Sagan before the television cameras. Digesting the defeat, however, is surely a lengthier process, and one that can scarcely have begun by the time he sinks into a couch in a quiet alcove, one fitful night of sleep later.

“I haven’t watched the sprint and I don’t think I want to watch it,” Cavendish admits softly. There is hardly any need, not when those frantic final 250 metres have been playing on continuous loop in his mind’s eye. Perched on Sagan’s wheel, Cavendish opted to break to the left when the Slovak dived for the right-hand side of the road. Sagan found just enough space to beat a path to the rainbow jersey, and Cavendish, forced to take the long way around Michael Matthews, was beaten by a bike length.

“In every other race this week – all of them: under-23, the juniors, the women – the right-hand side got closed and the lefthand side opened. In every race. It should have been the same, and I planned to do it,” Cavendish says. “I just didn’t think that someone sprinting for the win like [Michael] Matthews would be coming backwards so quickly at the finish.”

So it goes. The geography of a finishing straight is never stable but Cavendish can at least draw consolation from the fact that, on the whole, 2016 saw him restored as the most important landmark on the sprinting landscape. Ahead of the Tour de France, the consensus was that Marcel Kittel would be the man to beat in mass finishes, and even when Cavendish won the opening leg of the Tour de France at Utah Beach to take the first maillot jaune of his career, it was still

“But honestly, and no disrespect, what journalists think is irrelevant so long as my team- mates believe in me”

hard to tell whether it was a lifetime achievement award or an augury of a more lasting return to form. Three more stage wins soon confirmed that it was the latter.

“The yellow jersey will still stick with me more than anything, really,” Cavendish says of a campaign which began with more doubts than certainties. The move from Etixx-Quick Step to Dimension Data gave Cavendish the opportunity to combine road duties with a tilt at an Olympic track medal but when he outlined his lofty aims at a press conference at the Manchester velodrome in January, it was hard to dispel the sense that the man who wanted it all risked ending the year with nothing.

Cavendish’s flood of Tour stage wins had slowed to a relative trickle since his annus mirabilis of 2011 and conventional wisdom suggested that he would need to devote all his energies to the road if he were to beat Kittel, Greipel et al in July and again at a flat Worlds in Doha. Meanwhile, a few exploratory efforts on the track in the winter of 2014 aside, Cavendish had scarcely raced on the boards since his disappointment at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His ambitions seemed fanciful but, then again, proving a point – the same point repeatedly, in fact – has been a motif throughout Cavendish’s career.

Half an hour after winning Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne in 2015, Cavendish sat down at a desk in the old schoolroom near the finish line that houses the press and summed up his talents with deliberate understatement. “I’m not a bad bike rider, to be fair,” he said, to nods from the Flemish media corps. It was hard to quibble with that assessment, especially given the ease with which Cavendish had made the front group that afternoon when the peloton was rent asunder on the Oude Kwaremont’s uneven sea of cobbles with some 70km still to race.

Even though nobody appeared to be arguing to the contrary, the expression developed into something of a motto for Cavendish in 2016. “I’m not a bad bike rider, you know,” he told reporters after claiming silver in the omnium at the Rio Olympics. “Hopefully I’ve reminded people that I’m not a bad bike rider,” he said on arriving in Doha ahead of the Worlds. After the race, Cavendish repeated the mantra: “People forget, I’m not a bad bike rider, you know what I mean?”

You’d think that a man whose palmarès includes 30 Tour stages, a Monument, road and track world titles, and points jerseys in each Grand Tour would require no such affirmation of his talents. Is this a self-motivational ploy or does Cavendish really believe there are people who do not accept he is, in fact, a rather good bike rider?

“I don’t know. I think the majority do think it, yeah,” Cavendish concedes. “But I think the likes of Wilfried Peeters at Quick Step, he didn’t think it, even though I was winning the Tour of Qatar and always up there. If it makes my job harder, if I can’t ride in certain races in Belgium that I’m actually quite good at because he doesn’t think I can do them, then that’s hard, because it affects my life. But honestly, and no disrespect, what journalists think is irrelevant so long as my team-mates and the people around me believe in me.”

While Peeters’ misgivings arguably contributed to ensuring that Cavendish’s three-year spell at Quick Step didn’t deliver the Gent-Wevelgem victory he may have

“I’ve got the most incredible family and they give my life so much more substance now. Like, I like winning, but it’s not the be-all and end-all any more”

anticipated, he has no complaints about the level of support he received from the team, even though the period yielded ‘only’ three Tour stage wins. In the end, it was Cavendish’s desire to ride on the track – and, no doubt, the commercial implications of doing so aboard a different brand of bike – that triggered his move to Dimension Data during the off-season.

“I left on really good terms. It was just business,” he says. “I had a wicked time at Quick Step. At the end of the day, I was paid a lot of money to win races in the sprint. Patrick [Lefevere] didn’t want me doing the track and I can understand that. But when Wilfried Peeters didn’t think I was any good at stuff, that was a bit frustrating, really.”

If Cavendish can accept that he was one winner among many at Etixx-Quick Step – the team claimed more races than any other WorldTour outfit in each of his three years there, after all – he still feels a degree of annoyance at having been a mere adornment at Team Sky during his lone season at Dave Brailsford’s squad in 2012. In the rainbow bands of world champion, Cavendish won a hat-trick of stages at the Tour but effectively as an accoutrement to Bradley Wiggins’ overall victory.

“Dave B got me as a trophy. He got me so he had the world champion on his team,” Cavendish says bluntly. “But at Quick Step I never felt like that. I never felt like I was a lesser rider by any means.” Part of the attraction of Dimension Data was that, for the first time since Highroad disbanded at the end of 2011, Cavendish would be the undisputed team leader. For Dimension Data, newly-promoted to the World Tour, the success or failure of the season would, with respect to Edvald Boasson Hagen and Steve Cummings, depend largely on the dividend from the Cavendish investment.

In his younger and more vulnerable years, Cavendish occasionally threatened to waver under such pressure, most notably during a tormented 2010 when he burst into tears of relief on the podium in Montargis as the stage 5 winner following three defeats. Yet there was a sense, too, that Cavendish thrived precisely because he was performing such a high-wire act, where defeats were more newsworthy than victories. Now 31 years old, Cavendish looks at the pressure heaped upon him neither as a stimulus nor as an impediment, but as a simple fact of life.

“I don’t like it. I deal with it. I have strong shoulders, especially now they’re both artificial from the crashes. No one likes it, but I just deal with it better than other people, I guess,” Cavendish says. A lot has changed in the intervening period, of course. “I’ve got the most incredible family and they give my life so much more substance now. Like, I like winning, but it’s not the be-all and end-all anymore.”

Sprinters, said Mario Cipollini in the week leading up to the Worlds, have a few universal traits that define their breed: “They all think they’re the strongest and always find an excuse when they lose.” A tour of the team buses after any bunch sprint proves the point. Every finisher from second to 10th can invariably detail the litany of hypotheticals that would have seen him win.

The crucial difference in Cavendish’s case, however, is that, for the bulk of his career, the explanations for his defeats have tended to ring true. Only rarely has Cavendish arrived at the finish well placed and then lost to a rival’s raw speed, though it was less rare in recent seasons.

Yet even in 2013, when he went headto-head with Marcel Kittel at the Tour and came away with two stage wins to the German’s four, or a year ago, when he won just once in July, Cavendish railed against the idea that his status as the fastest man in the peloton was slipping away.

“I won two stages in 2013 and I’d started that Tour on antibiotics, so I had a reason then, I knew why I wasn’t as punchy. One

“I can see the end [of my career]. I don’t know when that is but I can see the end now. It’s just how it is, you know?”

stage, I rode with odd cranks and I was only beaten in a photo finish. So for me, there was always an explanation,” Cavendish says. “If I didn’t think I was better, I’d have given up by now.”

Asked how many times over the course of his career he has been beaten for speed in a sprint, Cavendish is succinct. “Not many,” he says, though he confesses that it had never happened with such regularity as during the early part of this season. “The beginning of this year, when Kittel was beating me in Dubai and Scheldeprijs and that, I just couldn’t really match him.”

A winless Dubai Tour wasn’t the most auspicious start to Cavendish’s season and even though he claimed a stage and the GC at the following Tour of Qatar, the success was primarily due to his ability to negotiate echelons – that week he lost three sprints to Alexander Kristoff.

Fast men have always been expected to win early and often, and then maintain their win rate as best as possible over the course of the season but Cavendish had already broken from that paradigm in 2011, when he started the year slowly with an eye to building to a fortissimo at the Worlds in September. The principle underpinning 2016 was similar and even the Track Worlds in London in March, yielding a madison title with Wiggins, was deemed a waypoint rather than a destination. The Tour, Rio and Doha superseded all else.

“I’ve known my whole life how to target a certain event. And I’ve not failed many times on the day,” Cavendish says. “That’s why I’ve lasted so long. The only Tour since 2008 I haven’t won a stage in is the one I crashed out of. There’s a reason I’ve been consistently so good there.

“This year was all about being good in July and August. I knew exactly what had to be done, I’ve done it for 10 years now. It’s actually quite sweet and satisfying when it does pay off. You might be getting beaten earlier in the season but that kind of adds to the drama, it adds to the story.”

Someway, somehow, Cavendish struck upon the rare alchemy that produced yellow at the Tour and then a silver medal in a completely different discipline at the Olympic Games mere weeks later. Speaking during the Tour, Dimension Data’s head of performance Rolf Aldag maintained that Cavendish’s track work had borne fruit on the road because it had helped his decision-making in chaotic finales. By a similar token, having so exceeded expectations in July, Cavendish could travel to Rio safe in the knowledge that, whatever the outcome, he would finish the year in credit.

Cavendish being Cavendish, his Games were not without melodrama. He was an unused reserve for Britain’s winning team pursuit effort and in the omnium itself he accidentally brought down South Korean rider Sanghoon Park in the final points race. He then reportedly threatened to sue a reporter for asking if he should have been disqualified for the manoeuvre.

Given that Cavendish had already described the omnium as “a silly event”, one wondered if he drew much pleasure from the Brazilian expedition at all beyond the coveted line it added to his palmarès. Perhaps as pertinently, did he feel he needed an Olympic medal to match the mainstream acclaim accorded to Wiggins?

“Not really. I’m proud to represent Great Britain. It wasn’t about becoming a knight or anything,” he says. “It’s not about the medal or getting on TV. Others might, but for me it’s not about that. I’m proud to represent my country at the Olympics because it’s the highest level, and I hadn’t yet won a medal at the highest level.”

Wiggins received much less welcome attention in September, when the Fancy Bears cyber hacking group revealed that he had received a Therapeutic Use Exemption for the corticosteroid triamcinolone acetonide ahead of his 2012 Tour victory. Cavendish skirts around the issue. “It may be tainted or it may be completely above board, legitimate,” he says. “I’m not trying to bat it away but I really don’t have an opinion that I’m prepared to talk about.”

Meanwhile, spending 12 nights this winter as the supporting act for Wiggins’s seemingly interminable farewell tour inevitably gives a man reason to consider the finite nature of his own career. “I can see the end. I don’t know when that is but I can see the end now,” Cavendish says. The concept is not an altogether unsettling one. “It’s just how it is, you know?”

Of course, there are still promises to keep and miles to go before that final curtain. Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 Tour stage wins draws nearer, for instance, and there’s Paris-Roubaix – “to see what I could do.”

Perhaps it’s the latest way to show that he isn’t a bad bike rider, though deep down, even he must realise by now that the point is long since made. “I’ve got no plans to retire but I don’t think I’ve got any burning aspirations left,” Cavendish says. “I’ve done everything I can do, really.”