CAV: FROM GENT TO SCHOTEN
HOW BELGIUM GAVE MARK CAVENDISH HIS START ON THE TRACK AND ROAD
In Belgium, Mark Cavendish is considered one of the living legends of international cycling. Over the years, I have had the privilege of getting to know Mark a little better in his capacity as ambassador of the Dubai Tour. When our paths cross, nobody in the peloton calls out my Twitter alias as charmingly as the Manx Express: “Hey Wielerman!” It has only increased my respect for the man behind the champion.
I would like to take you to the Six Days of Gent, back in 2005. As usual, I was commentating on the final day for Sporza. On the start line were the reigning madison world champions, Cavendish and Rob Hayles. Any cycling fan knows that the Gent Six is not a six-day race like any other. You can’t appear at the start with impunity and without good form. Cavendish and Hayles seemed to have forgotten that. In Dutch, there is this expression, tussen je kader hangen. The literal translation is to hang between your frame and it means you are nowhere in a cycling race. That’s exactly what Cavendish and Hayles did: they hung more between their frames than they sat on their bikes. It’s how they were ingloriously blasted away and finished 12th and last, 34 laps behind the winning couple. Iljo Keisse and Matthew Gilmore.
Fortunately, 11 years later, there was a chance to clear that memory, when Cavendish teamed up with Bradley Wiggins and created a truly royal couple. It was perhaps the best Gent Six ever. Again, Cavendish and Wiggins came in as the Madison world champions and took the race into their hands in an unparalleled way. The impact of those six days was so great that when the tickets for the next year were put on sale, they sold out in no time. That’s how we know Cavendish in Belgium. There’s always an account open somewhere, even if it takes 11 years to settle the bill. It would not surprise me if Cavendish aimed for gold at the revived madison in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
The track is one thing, the road is, as we say in Dutch, another pair of sleeves. The nice thing for us Belgians is that the great success story of Cavendish on the road started in our country. At the start of Scheldeprijs in 2007 the Manx Express was in the jersey of T-Mobile as a rather noble unknown. I placed him with the dangerous outsiders. His fame in Belgium at the time was low, but that changed after he flew into an imperial sprint on the Winston Churchill Avenue in Schoten, beating Australia’s Robbie McEwen and Belgium’s Gert Steegmans. It was his first major professional victory.
His Milan-San Remo victory in 2009 put Cav on a higher footing, and after winning Scheldeprijs for the third time in 2011, he became world champion in Copenhagen that same year. For Belgians, a world title on the road is always an entry ticket into the gallery of the greatest of all. In 2012, L’Equipe declared Cav the best Tour sprinter of all time, despite the fact that he has only managed to win one green jersey so far. Yet with all his stage wins, Cavendish belongs in the category, alongside such legends as André Darrigade, Freddy Maertens, Mario Cipollini, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov and Erik Zabel. We really are talking about the übersprinters.
Cavendish still has an account that he wants to settle at any cost: our Eddy Merckx’s record for the largest number of stage victories. It stands at 34. Everyone knows Cavendish currently has 30. Few believe that he will break that unassailable record in the autumn of his career - but then that is exactly the motivation Cavendish needs to strike with his usual deadly efficiency. It may cost him two or even three more Tour starts, but one thing’s for sure... Sorry Eddy, your record will be broken. Because Mark Cavendish is every inch a fast man, possibly the fastest man ever in cycling history.