Mark Cavendish: Back to the Future
Richard Abraham and Lionel Birnie reflect on Tour de France win No.35 and history being made
by Richard Abraham
Châteauroux, Toulouse, Narbonne, Nîmes, Brignoles, La Grande-Motte, Issoudun, Saint-Fargeau, Aubenas, Paris, Montargis, Gueugnon, Bourg-lès-Valence, Bordeaux, Paris (again), Cap Fréhel, Châteauroux (again), Lavaur, Montpellier, Paris (a third time), Tournai, Brive-la-Gaillarde, Paris (a fourth), Marseille, Saint-Amand-Montrond, Fougères, Utah Beach, Angers, Montauban, Villars-les-Dombes, Fougères (again), Châteauroux (again), Valence, Carcassonne.
Pick a town in France and chances are, Mark Cavendish has won a Tour de France stage there. But the thing about this list – Paris, Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux excepted – is how the big cities are largely missing.
What I’m saying is, it wasn’t meant to be in Turin on stage three. Mark Cavendish needed a Saint-Vulbas.
It’s a funny old place. Population: less than 1,500. It has a huge nuclear power station, dozens of distribution warehouses, the HQ of the international boules federation and, as has been pointed out in at least one eyewitness report from the day, a dead fox compressed into the road just outside where the Astana team bus was parked (to be fair, we were there for ages and the poor thing stank).
Notwithstanding Cavendish’s compilation of small-town France, Saint-Vulbas was an inauspicious place for sporting history to be made. When it happened – as I was walking past the Soudal-Quickstep team bus and heard a cheer from inside – there was none of the usual spectacle that accompanies the match winning goal, the winning run, the championship point. It was wheat fields, empty roads, clouds drifting lazily through the afternoon sky. In a way it was pure Tour de France.
We’ve seen this day coming for years. When Cavendish was in his HTC-Highroad pomp it was barrelling towards us like a comet, but the torrent of wins slowed to a trickle and time crept on. The inevitable became questionable. The idea built up in our minds, hanging over the peloton, the sport, and of course over Mark Cavendish himself. So when this huge hypothetical finally became definitive, the usual order of the Tour de France just sort of downed tools for the afternoon.
Riders who would normally bash their bars in frustration instead smiled when they lost. Cavendish was the poster-boy for half the peloton; Tadej Pogačar was nine-years-old in 2008, the Tour’s youngest rider Johannes Kulset was only four. The span of Cavendish’s career has meant that Erik Zabel, who came third on the day that the Manx Missile first hit home in Châteauroux, has retired, then watched his son compete in the same sport, and then watched his son retire. Never has a Tour rider put so much time – 16 years – between victories.
Everybody in the Tour has a story that is in some way tied up with Mark Cavendish. His story is all of our stories. Riders, sports directors, organisers, soigneurs, roadies, commentators. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool hacks couldn’t help but feel something, and if I think about why this is, I think it’s because he belongs to another era. Cavendish notched up 19 of those 35 wins before 2012 and watching Cavendish pop up once again in the run-in to Saint-Vulbas was like travelling back in time.
Following the little guy in the white helmet as he surfed the wheels, rode the current like a leaf gliding between rocks in a mountain stream, exuding that state of grace that opens gaps and parts the crowd; either I had gone back in time or Cavendish had popped out of a wormhole.
In some ways he might as well have been Eddy Merckx or Bernard Hinault, a beautiful and bewildering anachronism. And who doesn’t want to go back in time, relive some of the fun experiences of their past, even just for a split second, and just enjoy one last taste of something we thought might have been gone for ever.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, before the month is out, we’ll get to do it again.
by Lionel Birnie
If you missed it in an edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino before the Tour, back in 2021, after win number 34 to tie Eddy Merckx in Carcassonne, I wrote and recorded an episode of KM0 called Don’t Mention The Record.
Covid restrictions delayed my arrival at the Tour and, having been there to witness the first 30 of Cavendish’s wins, I missed numbers 31 and 32 in Fougères and Châteauroux. I took the TGV to Valence on the afternoon of stage 10, hoping to arrive in time for the finish. There were delays on the line and I missed my connection from the TGV station into the town centre so I sat in the waiting room watching the race on my phone as he clinched number 33, before Richard Moore and François Thomazeau came to pick me up. I can still remember Richard’s introduction to that night’s episode – he joked about both Cavendish and I arriving in Valence by train. I was the only one who was late.
During my brief stint on that year’s Tour, we started reminiscing about the highs and lows of Cavendish’s career and I recounted a few tales, which prompted Richard to suggest I write and record my memories for an episode of KM0. I thought back to some of our more unusual interactions over the years – my first major interview with Cavendish, for The Sunday Times, conducted in a budget hotel foyer on uncomfortable chairs after the third victory of his debut Tour in 2008; a precarious photoshoot in Chartres a week or so after he’d won the World Championships; the time my Cycle Sport magazine colleague Edward Pickering challenged him to a game of chess; and the time I got cramp and involuntarily leapt out of my seat, almost knocking over all the drinks on the table between us, when I was interviewing him about the art of sprinting for The Cycling Anthology.
In Carcassonne I headed to the Zone Technique adjacent to the finish line and had a front row view as Cavendish equalled Merckx’s record. I recorded the moment and my thoughts but when I listened back to the audio, the noise from the speakers was too loud and distorted, rendering it unusable. But we had loads of material to call on and our producer Tom Whalley wove together archive material with my anecdotes brilliantly.
It was already an astonishing story. Cavendish had missed the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Tour, he’d been more or less dropped by Bahrain-McLaren before finding a place, and a Tour spot that had looked unlikely at one stage, with Deceuninck-Quickstep. Richard had been at the Three Days of De Panne at the tail end of October the previous season as the season tied up loose ends after the Covid lockdown. There was a sense it could have been Cavendish’s last race and that a glorious career would merely fade out in the gloom.
So to roar back and win three stages in 2021 to tie Merckx was already remarkable, even if, publicly, he was tiring of people asking him about the record, hence the title of my KM0 episode. We had anticipated he’d win on the Champs-Élysées to take the record outright. Patrick Lefevere, his boss at Deceuninck-Quickstep, even suggested that if he did so he should bow out at the very top. Of course, victory slipped away in Paris and the record stood tied for almost three more years.
In 2022, having won a stage of the Giro d’Italia in Hungary, he was overlooked for the Tour when QuickStep opted to take Fabio Jakobsen instead. Last year he was on the start line with Astana – having announced during the Giro that it would be his final season as a professional rider – and came agonisingly close in Bordeaux when his chain slipped at a crucial moment and Jasper Philipsen nudged him into second place.
The following day, Mitch and I arrived in the press room, put our bags down on the desk and glanced at the television screen just in time to see Cavendish on the floor, his Tour ended by a crash. We speculated about whether we’d see him back at the Tour again. It seemed likely he’d want one more go, but increasingly unlikely he’d be able to win against riders five, ten, 15 years younger. After all, he’d be 39 by the time of the grand départ in Florence.
At dinner that night, Mitch got a text from Mark Renshaw, previously Cavendish’s right-hand man on the road, now part of Astana’s support staff, asking for the phone number of ace leadout rider Michael Mørkøv. It was the clearest indication that Cavendish would have a place with Astana if he wanted to carry on for one last season.
Back in April 2021, when Cavendish won three stages of the Tour of Turkey, I said that it was not quite the Hollywood ending his glittering career deserved. A film producer would look at the script and demand the writer punch up the ending a bit. ‘Turkey? What’s Turkey? He’s gotta win at the Tour de France,’ you can imagine the studio boss saying through stereotypical clouds of cigar smoke.
Well, Cavendish delivered the grandstand ending not once, but twice. There’s been enough material for a bunch of sequels. Heck, the story of Mark Cavendish and the Tour de France is a franchise of Marvel universe proportions. The astonishing thing is that the same actor has played the lead role for 18 seasons.
Toast the Tour with DVine Cellars
There’s still time to get the case of wines Greg Andrews and the team at DVine Cellars have put together to match the route of the Tour.
The DVine Cellars 2024 Tour case
• Domaine Dupraz En Route Pour l'Apero Jacquère, Savoie, France
or Domaine Bruno Lupin Roussette Frangy, Savoie, France
• Domaine Corsin, Macon-Villages, Burgundy, France
• Domaine du Salvard, Cheverny Rouge, Gamay & Pinot, Loire Valley, France
• Chateau Paillas 2016 Cahors, France
• Bergerie de L'Hortus Blanc Pic St Loup, Languedoc, France
• Chateau de L'Escarelle, Les Deux Anges, Provence, France
Join us for a ride in Richard’s memory
Richard Moore’s dad Brian, and Richard’s two brothers Robin and Peter, would like our listeners – and especially Friends of The Cycling Podcast – to join them at West Lothian cycle circuit in Linlithgow, Scotland, on Saturday, July 20, when Mark Beaumont will unveil a plaque, created by Stacy Snyder, in Richard’s memory.
Bring a bike and join us on a few laps of the circuit, wear your Cycling Podcast jersey or casquette, if you have one. If you can’t bring a bike but just want to say hello and have a cup of tea, refreshments will be available. Brian has even promised the sun will be shining!
Saturday, July 20
West Lothian Cycle Circuit
McGinley Way, Linlithgow EH49 6SQ
Circuit open: 10.00 to 13.00
The plaque will be unveiled at 11.00.
The Cycling Podcast is supported by MAAP
A big thank you to MAAP for supporting The Cycling Podcast. Check out the full range of clothing to make you look the part on, and off, the bike at maap.cc