After 18 years riding on the sharp edges of cycling, in a career measured in millimetres and milliseconds, Mark Cavendish will stop at the end of the season. He will do so as the best sprinter of all time and perhaps Britain’s greatest cyclist too: an underloved sporting icon who pulled off the extraordinary over and over again.
His career has been rich in variety, from the blood and thunder of the velodrome to the agony of the Alps and everything in between. He is a world and Commonwealth champion and Olympic medallist on the track, and a world champion on the road too. But beyond all else, his career will forever be entwined with – and defined by – the Tour de France. As Cavendish put it after winning his first Tour stage for five years in 2021: “This race has given me the life I’ve had, and I’ve given it the life I had.”
