and leaves the platoon without one of those figures of whom we say that he was greater than his victories, and these were many. Cavendish, pocket sprinter, bronco, impetuous, the maximum speed symbolized on his nose almost touching the top of his handlebars, so much energy, his head forward, he was an aristocrat of the bicycle, a social class that perhaps disappears with him for a while. a rejuvenated and democratized platoon, with distributive and shared leadership, the last leader of an era that is ending and his demands were at the height of his class. who liked to compare himself to a lion, the king of the jungle, or something like that, and from whom he inherited the title of best sprinter in history, and surpassed him, and also the dictatorial ways in the peloton and in his team, Cavendish, Pure British creature, he contrasted his character, a bulldog on wheels, and the same aggressiveness, the same sprinter selfishness.
“Sunday will be my last race as a professional cyclist,” announced Cavendish (Douglas, Isle of Man, 1985) in an Instagram post published on Saturday, the eve of the race in which, enjoying the complicity of all the participants, Philipsen, from Girmay, as the rule of courtesy requires, raised his arms for the last time on Sunday morning. His last victory. “I am lucky to have done what I love for almost 20 years and now I can say that I have achieved everything I could on the bike. Cycling has given me a lot and I love this sport, I have always wanted to make a difference in it and now I am ready to see what the next chapter has in store for me.”
You can’t be a champion if you don’t think that the world should revolve around your whims, that your needs are more important than those of your peers. This was Cavendish as a cyclist, and, despite this, he was also one of the cyclists most loved by his peers, perhaps because of the certain almost childish spirit that moved him, because he knows how to arouse tenderness, so strong and so fragile, and he cries when he falls. He moves, talks about depression and mental health, sighs, so human, and his four children adore him, and when the last stage of his last Giro arrived, in 2023, all the rival sprinters conspired to help him win in Rome, and at 165 victories that he has achieved in his 20 years as a professional are also not immune to the blind eye of the stewards at the times when help from the car saved him from falling from the peloton in the or the submission of all his teammates or selection that takes you on their wings to the rainbow
Before Bradley Wiggins or Chris Froome, before Sky and its little things that together add up to a lot, British cycling in the Tour was only Cavendish, a student of the Scot David Millar, the first figure of the islands 40 years after the death in the Ventoux of the Tom Simpson myth. When the four of them, Sky, Wiggins, Froome and Cavendish, came together in the same team in 2012, the sprinter understood that he was superfluous. He had grown up in the T-Mobile that since the end of 2006 wanted to forget the Ullrich years and, claimed by the best, reached its peak in the Quick Step, the Belgian team in which, until the arrival of Remco Evenepoel, the sprinter was the God.
Cavendish was, especially in the Tour. He only rode one Vuelta, in 2010 (the three stages he cycled in 2011 don’t count), and his team gave him the honor of crossing the finish line first in the inaugural team time trial at midnight alongside the suffocating Guadalquivir in Seville to to wear the leader’s red jersey, as he had done a year before in the collective time trial in Venice to wear the pink jersey of the Giro. He won three stages in the Vuelta and 17 in the seven Giros he competed in. He ran 15 Tours and only wore yellow one day; He finished five and two of them with the green jersey of regularity, and won 35 stages, more than anyone in history, one more than Eddy Merckx, and his conquest was the obsession that guided him in recent years, the inevitable desire that He forced himself to squeeze his physique to the maximum, until there was not even a drop of energy left.
“Yes, I love this sport. I have always liked this sport, especially the Tour de France. The Tour de France is not just a cycling race, it is the largest annual sporting event in the world. “It’s what children dream about, it’s what adults dream about, it’s what you aim to do when you train,” he says in Singapore as soon as he achieved his last victory, after all his teammates gave him a hall of honor with the bicycle resting only on the rear wheel, upright, like soldiers presenting weapons to their general. And everyone remembers how, among all of them, Jasper Philipsen himself, Biniam Girmay himself, Fabio Jakobsen, Alexander Kristoff, Fernando Gaviria, Arnaud Démare…, all the best sprinters of recent years, collaborated so that their search was the one that delighted all. The warrior could now rest and even King Charles III promoted him to Sir, a knight of the British Empire, shortly after. And as a sir, Mark Cavendish was able to e. Singapore dictate his last words as a cyclist, the epitaph of his career: “Cycling is a form of freedom, it is a way to meet people, it is a way to be alone with your thoughts, it is a way to be whoever you want to be.” .
