Wounded Cavendish ready for Tour trial
The flying Manxman tells Tom Cary he is glad to be back in the saddle again after his injury lay-off
When the route for this year’s OVO Energy Tour of Britain was announced in April, Mark Cavendish rang Roger Hammond, his sporting director at Dimension Data, and made a bold prediction: “I’ll win the general classification this year.”
The Manxman was not being cocky. Well, maybe just a little. But in a good way. The 32-year-old is as he says “a realist”, not a fantasist. And with up to seven of the eight stages at this edition – which begins in Edinburgh today and concludes in Cardiff next weekend – potentially ending in a bunch sprint, it was entirely reasonable for Cavendish to expect that he might add to his 10 career stage wins on his home Tour. When you then factor in that the only non-sprint stage (at least on paper) is a 10-mile pan-flat time trial, it is blindingly obvious he would fancy his chances.
“I’m not a brilliant time triallist but I can go OK over that distance,” Cavendish says. “So, yeah, I was really optimistic [back in April]. As soon as the route came out I rang Roger and said ‘I’ll win this’… As it happens, I can’t win a stage now.”
We shall see about that. There may be an element of Cavendish wanting to play down his chances, given the massive weight of expectation on his shoulders from a home crowd who have grown accustomed to seeing him win down the years. The fact is Cavendish has entered the race and is therefore a threat.
There is no denying his chances have not been helped by the scapula he fractured back in July at the Tour de France, when he was catapulted into the barriers at high-speed by the double world champion, Peter Sagan.
The Slovakian was disqualified from the Tour as a result of the hugely controversial incident. Cavendish was left to recover from yet another setback, having only just battled back from a bout of glandular fever to make the start-line of that race.
“I’ve only been back on my bike for just over three weeks,” he says of his preparations for his home tour. “And I’m basically starting again from zero. I didn’t really have a base [level of fitness] to work from as I didn’t have a proper build-up to the Tour either, due to the glandular fever. Then I crashed out of the Tour after just four days.
“You can kind of blag it sometimes,” he adds, “but ultimately if you don’t have the base…” As if that is not frustrating enough, Cavendish reckons he will almost certainly be forced to give the World Championships in Bergen later this month a swerve as well.
“It’s looking highly unlikely,” he says. “Again, it’s a course I felt I could have done well on given the right preparations. But I can’t do it now, given my lack of training. I may as well focus on next year.”
Is that him officially ruling himself out? “No. If by some miracle I manage to do well [at the Tour of Britain] then I would speak with Rod [Ellingworth, the men’s road coach]. But at the moment it would be a massive surprise if I went. I don’t want to just go for the sake of going and use up someone else’s place. We have a lot of good riders in Britain now.
“I think it’s highly unlikely. I’m not a machine. I know my body and I know exactly why I was going OK at the Tour. I went away from my family for two months and really worked hard to get in shape. To have another setback has been hard to deal with, mentally even more than physically.”
It has been a hugely frustrating year for Cavendish. But he is not looking for pity. “The last thing I want to do is to say ‘poor old me’,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s bike racing. Accidents happen. I got glandular fever and there was nothing I could do about that, either. That’s life. There’s no point being bitter. The best thing I can do is to focus on coming back in the best shape possible next year – show what I’m all about.”
Assuming he does not go to the World Championships – and, intriguingly, Cavendish says he would be prepared to work for someone else “if I felt I could help them” – then this race will effectively be it for the season.
Cavendish is signed up for the London Six Day event in late October. But that is all he has on the horizon. Other than that it is just rehab.
“My body is twisted like a helix at the moment,” he says. “I’m not in too much pain. The hole in the scapula, over which the suprascapular nerve passes, has more or less closed now. The shoulder gets tired if I do a long climb, more than 10-15min, maybe. But I’ve done a couple of 200km rides. It’s just the lack of time which is going to cost me.”
Cavendish insists he is still looking forward to it. While the Tour of Britain is always a notoriously difficult race to call, given the six-man teams, the heavy roads and the British weather, he still reckons it will be a sprinter – or at least a hard fast man – who finishes top of the pile. He cites his Dimension Data team-mate Edvald Boasson Hagen, twice a winner, as one to watch. “It’s not often you get to race on home roads in front of home fans,” he says. “I had to miss Ride London [in late July] because of the injury and I didn’t want to miss out again. It’s a big market for our sponsors Deloitte, for Dimension Data.
“It’s frustrating I won’t be at my best but I’m a massive supporter of the race so it will be great, as always, to get out there.”
‘The last thing I want to do is say: poor old me. It’s bike racing. Accidents happen’