What makes mark cavendish a good sprinter

Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer. Home News Sport Olympics Cycling. In Focus. Handball: swapping bikini bottoms for tight pants. We saw him hug and celebrate with his teammates after Tour de France victories and I was present beyond the finish line at Milan-San Remo when Cavendish burst into tears as he realised that he'd won La Classicissima.

Of course, we were also witness to Cavendish's defeats, and were often the target of his anger. More than once, Cavendish has responded badly to journalists — especially television journalists that were simply looking for a post-race reaction. In his own autobiography, Cavendish recalls one such incident at the Tour de France when he ran out of patience with a television journalist chasing a sound bite.

Cavendish's quick-thinking, but not very diplomatic, answer was: "That journalists sometimes ask some stupid fucking questions. I've had similar reactions at Tirreno-Adriatico, the Dubai Tour and elsewhere. Just seconds after the finish, Cavendish's tongue can be as sharp as his sprint. It's never nice when you are just trying to do your job, but in truth it's always worth the risk.

Cavendish is so emotional after a sprint that when he does open up and let out his true feelings, you capture who he really is and what drives him; you capture a sense of the adrenaline-fuelled emotions of sprinting shoulder to shoulder at over 70kph.

Cavendish's unwillingness to compromise on saying what he thinks is congenital. He'll probably never change, and I honestly wouldn't want him to change. His fits of anger and aggression have turned some of the media and other riders against him. But those who have learned to understand and appreciate Cavendish are able to see beyond his initial anger, knowing a different, far more caring character is there when the red mist of sprinting fades.

Strangely, Cavendish is so very different away from a finish line, in an almost Jekyll and Hyde way. At pre-race press conferences he is quiet and careful with every word. He's polite in front of race organisers and sponsors, and even courteous to local media who know little about professional cycling and sprinting. He avoids contentious questions by staying silent. Once, while the television cameras were rolling, he opted to slowly spin around on his stool than answer a difficult question.

It was his way of counting to But if you hear the tone of what I'm saying, it's a lot different. People don't get tone," he told Procycling magazine in early Cavendish was speaking after two years in a personal wilderness, sparked by his fight with the Epstein-Barr virus and depression.

His success in — winning again at the Tour de France and wearing the yellow jersey, and then chasing world titles and Olympic medals on the track and on the road — eventually came at a price. He thought he had recovered in the spring of but then crashed out of the Tour de France after his famous clash with Peter Sagan on stage 4 to Vittel. He raced in the final months of and the first part of , but crashes at Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-San Remo left him battered and bruised.

Dimension Data manager Doug Ryder did not select him for the Tour de France, and his relationship with the team ended anonymously. His diagnosis could have been better and his comeback could have been more disciplined. But he has paid a high price, only finding solace with his young and loving family, and especially his wife, Peta. I probably would,'" he told Procycling. This has always been Mark Cavendish.

Too hot or too cold, never comfortable. It was July 16, when he last won a stage of the Tour de France. Five long years between his 30th Tour win and his 31st. Years full of headlines for the riders who overcame him. Sam Bennett. All as Cavendish slowly, quietly faded. First the victim of Epstein Barr virus, then a victim of losses begetting losses. Last fall, Cavendish was handed a lifeline.

He has mellowed a little over the years, but he remains and probably always will remain an intense individual, for better and for worse.

Without the intensity, he doesn't win bike races, which is why the resigned, low-energy Cavendish of the last few years was barely contesting sprints, let alone in a position to win one. But we also saw all the other typical Cavendish tropes through the race — tears, highs, lows, fractiousness, memorable and engaged mixed zone interviews, intensity, righteous hugs, scowls and even a video uploaded to social media showing him quite spectacularly losing his rag with one of his team mechanics.

The transgression looked in no way enough to justify the elemental yell Cavendish directed at the hapless wrencher, but the Manxman has always been a character of extremes. He's capable of great sweetness and light, and also being like a petulant child. You can't like one without accepting that the other also comes with the package. Through the Tour, Cavendish refused to treat any of his wins as part of a wider oeuvre.

Each win, be it the first or the 31st, is special and stands alone, he insisted. And he maintained that line through wins 32, 33 and even as the greatest sprinter there has ever been equalled the stage victory record held by the greatest cyclist there has ever been. However, the achievement in equalling the Merckx total is one of the greatest in cycling in this century, no matter how irrelevant to the man who has actually done it.

Greatness can be an elusive, qualitative concept, so cycling fans sometimes attempt to define it by quantifying whatever they can. It is written into cycling lore that five Tour wins is the record, that Merckx won Milan-San Remo seven times and that nobody has so far managed to win the Tour of Flanders more than three times.

This is true, and neither diminishes Cavendish's achievement nor changes the fact that on that one metric — who has won the most Tour de France stages — Cavendish and Merckx were equally good. For once Deceuninck-QuickStep's lead out was caught out as a large number of riders surged on the other side of the road with 2.

He did get back into a decent position in the last kilometre and put himself on Wout van Aert's wheel hard against the barriers on the left-hand side, but this time the path simply never opened up. Alpecin-Fenix's sprint operation to his right, kept him boxed behind Van Aert, and the Belgian, still quite tight against the barriers, kept a straight line all the way to the finish.

Sometimes that is also how life, and sprints, work. But there are a few that also got away and may remain regrets. The Olympic road race was one of these — he was the favourite on a course which wasn't too complicated for him, but the five-man GB team couldn't control it. He sprinted at the Worlds in Qatar, went left instead of right and found the door closed. He was the silver medallist at the Olympic omnium. The 35th win will have to wait.