BY STEWART SLATER
2012 may have been a banner year for British sport, but 2008 wasn’t bad either. I was working in Singapore at the time, and whiled away many a happy phone-call back to London bantering about our latest gold medal in Beijing – “Oh, we’ve just won another one” regularly punctuating conversations. But I have one standout memory of that golden summer, the moment the words “Britain’s Mark Cavendish wins stage 5 of the Tour de France” crossed my screen.
Ten years earlier, taking a quiet week’s holiday of idle channel-surfing to recover from my previous week’s lads’ holiday, I had fallen for the gloriously nutty world of professional cycling, entranced as Marco “Il Pirata” Pantani went mano a mano with Jan Ullrich on the slopes of the Col du Galibier, the look of incredulity on the face of the East German unit as the wiry Italian stood up on his pedals and danced his way into the distance indelibly etched on my memory – “How is he doing that” I (and, I suspect, the German) thought. That Pantani would die (possibly not at his own hand) from ingesting industrial quantities of cocaine and Ullrich, well, he was a cyclist in the’90’s and an East German, you know the rest, did nothing to quell my ardour.
Nor did the fact that winning cycling races was something foreigners did. Britain’s record was, to be kind, patchy. There was the occasional victory in the prologue of a Grand Tour, or sometimes a time trial. But winning a normal stage? That just wasn’t very British. So, it was with a certain shock that I first learned of Mark Cavendish and, like any good Brit, I wrote it off to fluke.
But it wasn’t. Three more stage wins followed that year. And another thirty since. There were wins in the Vuelta a Espana and the Giro d’Italia and the Sprinters’ jersey in all three Grand Tours. Victory in the “Monument” Milan-San Remo. A World Championship. And the consensus of all who follow the sport that he was the greatest of all time. Even the one blot on his record – the lack of Olympic gold – is, in a way, a compliment. In 2012, when overwhelming favourite in the road race, the other teams refused to help the Brits chase down a break-away on the grounds that, if the field was brought back together, all that would happen was that Cavendish would win. It is a measure of his achievement that before him, a Brit winning was a great day, when he was racing, a Brit not winning was a disappointing day.
It shouldn’t really have been this way. He is, bluntly, the wrong shape to do what he does. Sprinters are big bulky blokes who use their long legs to put more force through the pedals. He compensates for his shorter stature by improving his aerodynamics, doing more revolutions and an unusual ability to “double kick” – sprint again after his initial effort has finished. There have been crashes (occupational hazard for a pro-cyclist) and broken bones, struggles with mental and physical health. Sprinting is a short career. He beat the guys who joined the peloton with him, and the guys who followed them. And the guys who followed them, taking 4 stages and the Points jersey in the 2021 Tour de France, a mere 13 years after his first victory and just months after, having no team, it looked like he would be forced to retire.
And all of that in one of the most physically demanding of sports. For, and let’s be honest here, whoever came up with the idea of riding 3,000km around France in 3 weeks was an absolute loon. As are those who do it. Apart from two rest days (on which competitors usually go out on their bikes), that is three weeks of riding up (and more dangerously) down the steepest hills, across the cobbles, through the winding streets of ancient French towns in all weather conditions apart from snow, with, in the case of sprinters, several kilos of extra muscle which still have to be carried but are only used in the dying seconds of a flat stage.
With the possible exception of boxing, cycling is the sport which takes its competitors closest to the very limits of human performance, each Grand Tour a brutal three week search for the answer to one simple question, “Who is the strongest?” Only those willing to go right to the very edge stand a chance. Teams can win the World Cup, tennis players can triumph at Wimbledon without doing anything extraordinary. Few Tours finish without at least one performance which alters our ideas of what is possible. And every so often, one man makes possible that which seemed impossible to everyone else. Primoz Roglic thought he had the Tour sewn up on the morning of the penultimate stage in 2020. He ended the day slumped on the ground, crying into the yellow jersey which was no longer his after his compatriot, Tadej Pogacar, chose that particular time-trial to rewrite the rules of biology.
Sprinters do not get involved in duels in the mountains, sliding to the back of the pack before lumbering their way to the finish, nor do they see time trials as anything more than a task to be phoned in. But give them a flat stage and a clear run to the line, they will be there, lead-out trains straining for the best piece of road. And in that environment, like the finest General Classification rider, Cavendish did the impossible, finding gaps no-one else could see (they were, to be strictly fair, sometimes correct), choosing the right wheel to follow at the right time, almost always choosing the correct instant to duck out of the slipstream and drive for the line. Like the finest General Classification rider, he imposed his will on his rivals. Andrei Greipel was the Juergen Higson to his Daley Thompson – a German whose job was to come second. Marcel Kittel was able to beat him for a couple of years but was put back in his box – “Le Retour du Roi” was L’Equipe’s headline after the Manxman’s victory in stage 1 of the 2016 Tour.
Fandom is a strange thing, often a barely sublimated tribalism, an expression of the need for “our lot” to be better than “their lot”. And yes, Cavendish is British, proud to race for Team GB. That may explain some of my regard for him. But, whatever groups we may divide ourselves into, we are all members of “Team Human” and there is joy, for Cavendish’s exploits have given me joy (particularly the ever more improbable victories of his later years which prompted a state akin to delirium), in seeing one of our number performing at the utter peak of possibility, expressing his artistry on those last few metres of tarmac, knowing that you are witnessing feats no other human can achieve.
And now it is coming to an end. Life will go on. I will still count down the months to the summer, when 180 blokes will set off on a three week odyssey of pain and suffering around France. But something will be missing. However great the next sprinter will be, he will never be great, great. Cavendish showed us what that looked like, and we will not see it again.
But it is not over yet. There is, apparently, one more Tour. Six more flat stages on which to claim that record-breaking 35th win. One last time to launch the Manx Missile on the Champs Elysees. Must fairy-tale endings only happen in fairy tales?
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.