INTERVIEW: MARK CAVENDISH
Despite a difficult 2017, Mark Cavendish still has the determination to keep winning
Midway through Dimension Data’s second training camp of the winter in Calpe, Bernhard Eisel looked across at his roommate, team leader, partner in crime and surrogate baby brother and couldn’t wipe the grin from his chiselled chops.
It had been like this almost every January since Eisel had seen the then-22-year-old doughball roll into T-Mobile’s Mallorca billet in 2007. In 2008, one of Cavendish’s other new team-mates, Vicente Reynes, thought he must be the son of the sponsor. The team coaches later watched his pudgy legs pedal assorted polygons on an indoor trainer and despaired. The seasons have passed by, the records have tumbled and the critics have been felled in their thousands - and yet this year, once again, Eisel contemplated his friend’s voluptuous curves and tittered.
Three springs ago, the MotoGP rider Cal Crutchlow, had recalled that training with Cavendish the previous winter had been like riding with “an elephant in quicksand”. Eisel says that it wasn’t that bad on the Costa Brava this year, but the sense of déjà vu was palpable - and as deceptive as ever. “I had it, like, ten times in my career with him. I thought there’s no way we’re going to win a stage with him, and I wondered what he’d been doing in the off-season. Then you train with him for a couple of weeks or even just five days sometimes and you see the improvement. Sometimes it’s really hard to believe how much he can do with only his head. He doesn’t believe in talent, but I tell you, he’s gifted.”
We’re speaking to Eisel underneath the sign-on podium and above the din of the PA system before the final stage of the Dubai Tour, Cavendish’s first race of 2018. After a minute or two, a shadow reaches across the grass under our feet, and we turn. His ears burning in the desert heat, Cavendish has ridden over and almost literally pulled up a chair - or, in this case, the top-tube of his Cervélo.
He caught the end of Eisel’s soliloquy - and a follow-up question about whether, given what his team-mate has said about his winters, perhaps it’s fair to say that he isn’t one of cycling’s most assiduous trainers. “It’s not about training a lot, or even training hard. It’s about training smart,” Cavendish interjects.
He goes on to expound a theory given to him by another T-Mobile old boy, now his Dimension Data directeur sportif, Roger Hammond. “As Roger always says, which part of the race is hard? The hard bit. The last 10km. They’re what you have to train for. You can do the easy bit without any training.”
With that, Cavendish’s unsolicited cameo is over. He pedals away, abandoning Eisel to that familiar island between total bafflement and amusement where those who deal with Cavendish on a regular basis spend much of their time. Where were we?
“Well, yeah, anyway, like he says... I do think every sprinter should train less. It’s just the modern way that everyone believes you have to train more,” Eisel continues.
“I’ve seen Óscar Freire spend two days unpicking the stitches on his saddle when he should have been training. Or, the week after a Tour of California, instead of riding, going on a road-trip up the coast on a Harley Davidson, then back to Europe and winning stages at the Tour of Switzerland. That’s talent - but it’s also the ability not to freak out if you don’t ride your bike for a couple of days.”
“Nowadays, especially with social media, if someone posts something which shows them enjoying life, the team and everyone around the rider jumps on their back and tells them they’re not training enough. People talk about work-life balance, but it’s the same here: you can be really successful for four years or you can have a really successful career over 10 years if you give your body a break sometimes, and don’t try to get everything out in three years. Cycling is a hard sport, so there’s no need to make it any harder for yourself.
“It’s only the third of February and we are already in the crosswinds, absolutely going for it, whereas back in the day there were guys only getting their bikes out of the garage now. I think Cav has the experience and the confidence to know what’s enough and what’s important, when.”
Certainly, according to Eisel’s logic, nothing that happens in the Persian Gulf in the first week of Cavendish’s 12th season as a pro will have too much impact on the sprinter’s life or legacy - and yet, even here, Cavendish’s mere presence still carries the threat or promise of imminent dramas. This is one thing that has never changed. Rolf Aldag, his directeur sportif for all bar his unhappy one season at Team Sky in 2012, typifies the qualities of those who nowadays make up Cavendish’s cocoon: their loyalty, their phlegm, their intelligence and a bloodied resilience developed over years by his side. As Aldag says in Dubai, “The more time you spend with him, the easier it is to predict what he’s going to do. If you work closely with him, you start to understand him, whereas if you draw conclusions just watching from afar, probably 75 per cent will be wrong.”
Perhaps Aldag has tempted fate, or maybe what we see in the first three days in Dubai is the predictable unpredictability that has become a Cavendish signature. On stage 1, having found himself boxed in during the sprint, he baffles reporters at the finish-line by referring to a “UCI rule change over the winter which allows riders and teams to swing across the road”. At first Aldag is also stumped, until he climbs into Cavendish’s mind and finds a lightbulb. “Ah, that’ll be the Sagan thing.”
Ah, indeed. Cavendish has been stewing for months about the crash which sent him out of the Tour and earned Peter Sagan a disqualification, only for the UCI to, unusually, issue a retrospective pardon of the Slovak months later.
Later the same evening, Cavendish admits he was “just making excuses”. Nonetheless, the next day, he’ll reply to a question about Sagan with a coy smile. “Don’t get me into trouble,” he’ll say. That night he has in fact already landed himself in hot water with some pointed observations about the respective aerodynamic merits of his bike and that of stage 2 winner, Elia Viviani. Later, back in the palatial comfort of his team hotel, with an audience of just us, he nuances those words and even commends Cervélo’s record of research and development. Unfortunately, by then, his post-race reaction has appeared online.
“Sometimes it’s really hard to believe how much Cavendish can do with only his head. He doesn’t believe in talent, but I tell you, he is gifted” Bernhard Eisel
The perennial problem - or maybe the blessing - for Aldag, Cervélo and everyone else is that, no sooner has Cavendish lit a bonfire and fanned the flames than he has already doused them with champagne. This is exactly what happens when he beats Viviani, Dylan Groenewegen and an outof-sorts Marcel Kittel to win stage 3. It is almost as though - contrary to what he used to say about “needing sunshine blown up my arse” - where he actually thrives is in emergency, adversity, necessity.
His friend and old directeur sportif, Brian Holm, calls it Cavendish’s “Foreign Legion Look”. Before a pedal has been turned in Dubai, Holm thinks that he can see it in his eyes this year. “Even at HTC - people forget this - but sometimes we were close to not picking him for the Tour. There was always a lot of talk about him: he was too fat, he was wearing designer clothes, he was doing a lot of stuff that didn’t fit into the image of professional cycling. But he always had targets, and you really need that in cycling: getting out in the rain, risking his life, and for sure he’s been very smart in moving that target every year.”
On this, you won’t get Cavendish disagreeing. When we remind him that May and the Giro d’Italia will mark a decade since his first grand tour stage win, he looks bored and ultimately swats away the finger beckoning him into nostalgia. “I never look back at the successes,” he says. “I look back at mistakes to see what I can improve. But if you look back at successes you stop moving forward. It’s the same in life in general, not just cycling. You’ll have plenty of time in your life to look back.”
One of the questions we have for him, naturally, is where his aim is pointed in 2018. Holm and another old mentor, Max Sciandri, believe like many others that adding the four more Tour stage wins that he needs to bring him level with Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 is now
his career’s raison d’être, but good luck to anyone hoping to extract that admission.
Nowadays Cavendish is much more likely to talk about “having fun” and “going on as long as I can”, which is precisely how he phrases it to Procycling. He is no longer the underdog, the rescue-home mongrel who as a young rider would bark for attention because he never quite looked the part. Those instincts still inhabit Cavendish’s psyche - but he is also weary of the standards he has set being used as a stick to beat him. Hence, he doesn’t see the point in telling the world what they’ll expect of him anyway.
Instead, we ask what else is still to be ticked off his bucket list. “Obviously at the start of my career I had that list, but it’s changed,” Cavendish replies. “GentWevelgem’s not the same race that Mario Cipollini won, so that’s irrelevant. Even comparing me to Cipo because he’s won Gent-Wevelgem and I haven’t is ridiculous. I think I could still win it, but I’d have to train for it in a way that would affect the rest of my season and July.”
Next we prod him on Milan-San Remo. How come a race that he won so brilliantly, so nonchalantly, in 2009 on his debut has since eluded him? “It’s a better race now, without Le Manie, than when I won it, but the chips just haven’t fallen into place,” he says. “The one time I really prepared specifically for it was at Quick Step. Tom Boonen was supposed to go and do the Cape Argus for one of our sponsors, but Tom didn’t want to make the trip so I had to. I sat with [Quick Step’s team manager] Patrick Lefevere and said that I was prepared to go, that I’d be professional about it, but also that, if I flew to South Africa, something happened to me and I didn’t win San Remo, it hadn’t been my decision to go. Anyway, I came back and both Mark Renshaw and I were so sick. I ended up finishing fourth that year, but my legs just stopped in the sprint. That - being ill - had been the difference.
“Then there was the next year, when Fitte [Quick Step’s DS, Wilfried Peeters] was telling Sylvain Chavanel to keep going in the break, but we didn’t catch them. I ended up winning the bunch sprint but only finished sixth. So I’ve come close.”
We think for a second that Cavendish is teeing up a rant about Peeters, with whom he never saw eye-to-eye. But perhaps because he arrived back at the hotel tonight with a winner’s bouquet, or maybe because there’s been enough drama for a couple of days, Cavendish’s next monologue is a homage to Lefevere. We give him his cue by passing on something that Holm has said that morning - that in 10 years, Cavendish will be “the next Patrick Lefevere”.
“I’d like to have a team, definitely. I learned a lot from Patrick and still have a great relationship with him,” Cavendish says. “I think he’s the only team manager I left on absolutely brilliant terms.
“Some people might not like what Patrick says but at least he has the strength of his own convictions. It’s the same with me: people don’t like what I say because I say what I think. It’s like with Bouhanni: people don’t like what he says but I respect him because he’s true to himself. There are too many guys in cycling who… like, look at Greipel. He starts kicking off about Sagan at the Tour then goes home, looks at his Twitter feed, then changes his opinion. There’s no honour to that.
“I much prefer people like Brian Holm, who say what they think and stick by it. Patrick was so straight like that, too. I was so thankful to him even when I left, because of the opportunity he’d given me. It hurt me to leave everyone at Quick Step, except Fitte.”
The expected barb at Peeters took its time but has duly arrived. The tomato lobbed in André Greipel’s direction is more surprising but hardly unprecedented - and neither does it seem fair: surely the Lotto-Soudal sprinter had simply watched the infamous crash again and changed his opinion. Equally, though, we can understand why Cavendish is still angry about a collision in which he feels he was the victim. Above all, the injury denied him five more chances to edge closer to Merckx’s record.
The main benefactor was another German, Kittel. Their rivalry has mainly been a chivalrous Cold War over the past seven years - the pair having sprinted head-to-head, for a win, only a couple of dozen times, and usually in minor races. Any direct confrontation, like the ones in Dubai, therefore takes on added significance. This may partly explain why Cavendish positively bounces across the marbled floors of the lobby at the Dubai
“I never look back at the successes. I look back at mistakes to see what I can improve. But if you look back at successes you stop moving forward”