Mark Cavendish said on Wednesday that he is optimistic about his chances of adding to his tally of 15 Giro d’Italia stage wins as he prepares to return to the race for the first time since 2013.
“I’ve prepared for this race where I didn’t prepare for the Tour [in 2021] so I’m quite relaxed,” the British sprinter said. “I’ve had a good buildup so I’m pretty happy with where I’m at.”
This year’s Giro, uniquely, starts with three stages in Hungary, and with the finish of Friday’s stage one into Visegrad up a 5.6km drag, the 36-year-old does not expect to repeat his feat of 2009, when he pulled on the fabled pink jersey at the end of the opening leg. This is nothing to do with the lengthy fight to recover from a punctured lung sustained in the Gent six-day track race in November, but is simply because, as Cavendish said, “most of the pure sprinters won’t be in contention”.
Nor is a repeat of his points classification title from 2013 on his mind, as that will distract from his target, snaffling as many of the potential seven sprint finishes as he can in the face of strong – and far younger – opposition, headed notably by last year’s two-time stage winner Caleb Ewan of Australia.
However, if Cavendish were to get rolling as he did at last year’s Tour de France, he might advance in the table of stage winners in the three Grand Tours, where he lies third on 52 stages. Eddy Merckx is out of reach on 64, but 90s ace Mario Cipollini’s tally of 57 might just beckon the Manxman.
Further ahead, Cavendish is not expected to travel to this year’s Tour, earmarked for his Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl teammate Fabio Jakobsen, and this week he was keen to play down any hint of rivalry with the Dutchman, who has returned strongly from a serious sprint crash in 2020.
“Fabio and myself have supported each other so much the last years. The last thing I want and the last thing he wants and the one thing that scares me about all this is for any sort of rivalry to be created between us, because we’ve been there for each other,” Cavendish said in conversation with The Breakdown podcast.
“I’m quite reluctant to talk about it, because I don’t want to fall out with a mate because of something that’s out of our control. What’s in my control is not talking about it, so that those outside influences that are outside of my control don’t affect it.”
