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Inside the Tour: Behind Cavendish's domination of the sprints

Published: Jul. 5, 2009

Watching Mark Cavendish totally dominate the other sprinters at Sunday’s stage 2 of the 96th Tour de France set me thinking about the first time I saw him race. It was in early 2005 at the world track championships in Los Angeles, when he was only 19.

A last-minute replacement to ride the Madison (a two-man team race), Cavendish was paired with the British veteran Rob Hayles. Fresh out of the junior ranks, Cav' wasn’t regarded as a top prospect by the British track coaches, who said his power numbers and other physical parameters were far below other riders; but they can’t measure a rider’s spirit.

The experienced Hayles, who was a dogged team pursuit rider, knew that he and his rookie partner couldn’t match the sprint speed of a host of seasoned six-day race teams from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands. So they had just one tactic: Try to lap the field and hang on. That’s not the type of strategy you associate with the Mark Cavendish of 2009.

Well, midway through the 50km race, Cav' and Hayles surprised everyone by making an all-out attack ... and they lapped the field in 12 furious laps (3km) of action. That was the “easy” part. They then had to defend their lead position for another 40 laps.

Riders relay each other in a Madison race, with first one then the other racing flat out while the second rider circles the velodrome slowly until his teammate comes along with the pack, grabs his teammate’s hand and catapults him up to top speed.

Every time it was Cav’s turn to be in that 2005 worlds’ Madison race, he struggled to hang in with the older, faster challengers. Two or three times he almost lost contact, but each time he fought like a tiger to keep the Great Britain team in contact. It was one of the gutsiest displays of racing I’ve seen in decades of watching either track or road cycling.

“I wanted this more than anything,” he said after he and Hayles won that world title. “I would have died out there rather than lose.”

By that time in his young life, Cavendish was already a rapid road sprinter. Longtime Aussie six-day track star and road sprinter Scott McGrory told me Saturday that he first raced against Cavendish just before the ’05 track worlds. It was in a short street criterium the day before the famed Madison race at Bendigo near Melbourne.

“He wasn’t that strong in the Madison, but he won the criterium,” McGrory said. “You could already see he was going to be something special.”

In four short years, that “special” prospect has developed into a rider with the acceleration of the renowned 1980s sprinter Djamolidin Abdujaparov of Uzbekistan and the dominance of Mario Cipollini, Italy’s famed “Lion King.”

After an unlucky start and an early departure from his first Tour de France in 2007, followed by four stage wins last year, Cavendish looks set to win half a dozen stages in 2009. Everyone concedes that no other sprinter can match him for pure speed — or rather match his acceleration that he can then maintain — but Cav' also has other qualities.

“He’s developed into a true leader,” his Columbia-HTC team boss Bob Stapleton told me in Monaco Sunday morning. And that quality was clear late Sunday afternoon, when even Columbia’s GC riders Mick Rogers and Kim Kirchen were working hard to keep Cav' in position during the final kilometers into Brignoles.

Cavendish commented, “Nobody else had eight guys to keep them out of trouble at the front.” That’s a respect the young Manxman has earned with his always-wanting-to-win attitude and the spirit of a tiger. No one is going to get in Cavendish’s way. And that was clear from the very start.

Follow John’s twitter at twitter.com/johnwilcockson.