“Oh mate, for the last couple of years I’ve been broken,” Mark Cavendish says with a throaty chuckle as he considers the state of his body after decades on the bike. Cavendish will turn 40 next May and his extraordinary career finally ended last month when he won his final race in Singapore to follow his record-breaking 35th Tour de France stage victory this summer.
Cavendish is the greatest sprint cyclist the sport has seen and all the blurring wins and moments of history mean there are no regrets even when he feels so battered. “I have to do so much maintenance of my body now,” he says, “and I feel it most when I go running. It gives me a perspective on how many hours I’ve spent crouched over the handlebars while I’m trying to run. That’s when I realise how I’ve been in the same physical position for the best part of 30 years and at the highest level for nearly 20 years.
“That’s the nature of being a sportsman. My best friend, Cal Crutchlow, was a MotoGP rider, so he’s broken bones everywhere. We’re very lucky our joy came from professional sport but the payoff, apart from having a nice life, is the state of our bodies now.”
At least, rather than riding his bike or running, Cavendish can walk leisurely on to the stage at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards in Salford on Tuesday evening. He will receive a lifetime achievement award and, as we discuss the plaudits that will greet him, I realise his competitive spirit remains fully intact. Ever since the Spoty shortlist was announced, and Cavendish was left off despite breaking the record 34 Tour stage wins he and the great Eddy Merckx previously shared, there has been an uproar on social media.
His lifetime award was only announced on Monday morning but Cavendish has known about it for some time. It’s the reason we’re doing this interview but I love the fact that, for all his polite gratitude towards the BBC, Cavendish can’t help but talk honestly: “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I hoped to be on the shortlist, but it’s the same as 2021 when I also wasn’t nominated.”
That omission was more controversial as Cavendish, having spent years in the wilderness dealing with his Epstein-Barr virus and being diagnosed with clinical depression while struggling for a contract, roared back to win four stages at the 2021 Tour. Cavendish shakes his head and says: “Yeah, the comeback, the four stage wins, winning the green jersey, and I still wasn’t nominated. Sometimes you don’t know what you have to do.
“The lifetime award is very nice but, as a competitor, the main award is being shortlisted. That’s my job – to compete. Although a Spoty award is subjective it’s still a competition. A lifetime award is a bit like when I received my knighthood earlier in the year. It’s not something you’re expecting or you work towards. It gets bestowed on you so that’s very nice.”
There is no doubt that Cavendish feels honoured but he also shares the widespread disbelief that Tadej Pogacar, who won the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and world championship road race this year, was not included on the BBC’s World Sports Star shortlist. “I was really surprised,” Cavendish says before opting for diplomacy. “Obviously as cyclists we’re going to look at our world because it’s human nature to think that what you do is very important. But there are so many people that deserve to be recognised and it’s also been an Olympic Games year. It’s very difficult to keep everyone happy.”
Cavendish shakes his head when I ask if his lifetime gong will also bring some sadness as it is another sign that his glorious career is over. “No, because I’ve completed everything I could do in cycling. Of course I will miss racing but I’m happy because I’ve had 20 years and done more than I ever could have planned or dreamed of doing.”
That includes winning his last race when he conjured up a final blistering sprint finish in the Singapore Criterium. “It was very emotional from the start,” Cavendish confirms. “The guard of honour that the other riders gave me was completely unexpected, but it was really beautiful to have that from your peers. I’d been able to relax a bit since the Tour and the flat Singapore course was always going to suit me. So it was definitely a nice transition before really stopping and then to actually win the race was so special.”
Thirteen months earlier, in October 2023, Cavendish decided to ride for one more season after he had come close to retiring after a difficult year. The lowest moment came when he crashed out of the Tour that July and broke his collarbone. “I’d lost condition after the injury,” he says, “and I thought about retiring. But, once I made the decision to continue, you’ve got 10 months and so you make every day count.
“You know you’re going to hurt yourself with the work but it’s the last time you’ll do it. Same with that interval where you’re going to vomit. It’s the last time you’re going to do that sprint where you collapse off the bike afterwards. It’s the last time you’re going to do that long, brain-numbing ride alone in the race.”
There was the further motivation of remembering the various slights which had affected his later years on the bike. Excluded from the 2022 Tour and out of contract with his Deceuninck-Quick-Step team, he joined Astana in a late switch for the 2023 season. “There are ex-riders who manage teams and they wouldn’t give me contracts even though they’d never won a Tour de France stage. And they now determine whether I can win or not and get a contract. It doesn’t make any sense. Only two people in the world know what it takes to win 34 stages on the Tour and that’s me and Eddy Merckx. So I felt like I was pretty well-qualified to decide whether I could win another.”
Cavendish used to dismiss the holy grail of a 35th stage win as a media construct but, deep down, was it the real goal in coming back for one last year? “Yeah, I can actually admit that now,” he says with a grin. “It gives you a goal to get out of bed. Everybody needs a goal and what else could I focus on that I hadn’t already done? The only thing I hadn’t done was win 35 Tour stages. I wanted to show it could be done – not just to me but to everyone. It’s like the Roger Bannister effect [in breaking the four-minute mile], isn’t it? I showed it can be done.”
The first few stages on this year’s Tour were brutally hard, and hot, and Cavendish ended up vomiting with exhaustion. “I was really tired but winning stage five was actually won in the first four days, how my team rode and looked after me, how we got through it with a plan. Then we got to the sprint finish on the fifth stage and, in those moments, you don’t have feelings. It’s all about the process before it ends in elation or absolute despair. This time it was elation again and to let out an audible roar sums it up. It was no different at that point to any other Tour de France stage win.”
But it became something unforgettable as his wife and children and so many riders in the peloton shared his euphoria. “That was very, very emotional,” Cavendish says. “It was something I didn’t expect and yet that really meant so much to me.”
Cavendish lights up when I mention how a different Tour de France image of his suffering lingers in my head as powerfully as all those stage victories. On the 2018 Tour, near the end of the gruelling mountain stage of La Rosière, Cavendish knew he was about to be eliminated from the race for missing the time cut. Even though he could have just got off his bike and hitched a ride to the finish, he insisted on completing the stage.
“There’s always a finish line, isn’t there,” he says. “And it’s the Tour de France. As much as I’ve given my life to it, the Tour is bigger than I am, isn’t it? I’m privileged to get to ride it, so you need to show the race the respect it deserves. The Tour de France was started as much as an endurance test of humankind as it was a bike race. That’s never changed to this day. That’s what sets it apart. So you just keep going until you arrive at the end.
“How can I tell my kids not to give up on what they do if I stop because it’s hard? Of course it’s hard. It’s the Tour de France! I’ve never been worried about people seeing me suffer – even if most guys I raced with didn’t want to be seen suffering on a bad climbing day. They just stopped riding. But I would never do that.”
Cavendish, being the most human of great sportsmen, has never hid the fact that “I’ve had my demons my whole career. I was ill with depression but, even then, I held on to my winning mindset. In the years when I won everything, it was almost taken for granted that I would do that. When you’re ill you have to keep that mindset. It’s just different circumstances but I never forgot it was all about me getting back to winning.”
How will Cavendish cope without the intensity of competing and winning in the more prosaic world of retirement? “I think the intensity of my wife, Peta, being at home with five kids has outweighed anything I’ve done. So I’d quite like to share that beautiful intensity with her and my family. Peta was with me in Singapore, and we were in Japan the week before. Those two weeks are the longest we’ve ever spent together, just us two, and I want to do more of that with her.
“Obviously I’ve still got a lot of life left, and I still have to provide for my family, and so I think that’s going to be in cycling team management. I know the sport and I know how to build a team and that’s where I’m heading. It’s exciting.”
There is also serenity in these last days of being recognised as a great rider. Cavendish nods and smiles. “There is nothing more I could have done in the sport. And there already was zero to be done a long time ago. I’m very, very lucky that I get to retire, having zero regrets. I’m finally going out on my terms – not because of injury or some team manager trying to make me retire. I’ve done everything I wanted and I’m choosing the way I leave the sport as a competitor. How lucky is that?”
BBC Sports Personality of the Year will be live on BBC One and iPlayer from 7pm on Tuesday
