That’s how the Tour goes, or maybe that’s how cycling goes. And then a boring, predictable, quiet, flat stage for sprinters becomes a stage of history. Mark Cavendish wins the Grande Boucle for the thirty-fifth time: it’s a record. But what has made him enter straight into cycling legend is having surpassed Eddie Merckx. He ate the “Cannibal” by triumphing in an elbow-to-elbow sprint in the fifth stage of the Tour, the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne-Saint Vulbas. “I don’t believe it, I’m incredulous,” he said upon arrival. “It’s something unique. Astana has made a big bet on this victory…”.
It was becoming almost an obsession. He suffered losing more than half an hour in the first stage in Rimini, he struggled yesterday on the Galibier but he didn’t give up because the sprint, in this corner of France among the green of the Rhone, had circled him in red awaited. A liberation, which consigns him to history and that comes after a rethink because his last Tour should have been the one last year when he announced his retirement and it seemed like the end credits were about to roll on the incredible career of one of the strongest sprinters of recent years, with over 160 victories, with a world championship in 2011, with three world gold medals on the track in the American, with an Olympic silver in the omnium in Rio 2016, with a Milan-Sanremo.
But many things are said in the heat of the moment. Then you look around, you reflect, you think again. Also because that 35th victory was more of a bug than a dream: to enter the eternal ranking: “Cannonball” who puts his wheel in front of that of the “Cannibal”. Even if it is clear that it is not the same thing, that they are worlds, planets, different champions, different stories. That the Belgian is unreachable for everyone and not just for the champion from the Isle of Man. But Cavendish remains Cavendish with all the differences, with all the distinctions, with all the distances of the case. And he finds a place in the galaxy of a fighting and winning cycling that he, like few others, has interpreted with his elbows wide.
It’s the story of “The Manx Missile”who before pedaling tries his hand at dance and then as a full-back in the Leeds youth team, and who gets on a bike at twelve, competitive right away, “grumpy” right away, fast right away. And then there are certain characteristics that perhaps one doesn’t even need to train because they are in his DNA and not only when he rides a bike or sprints given that, already as a boy, when for a period of his life he works in a bank he sets his mind on beating the record for transactions to be made in a single day. Wheel by wheel even behind a counter that doesn’t change the lifestyle of someone used to “door-to-door”. Married, four children, he has kept the bike at the center of his life for 25 years: passion, work, glory and victories.
A life in the belly of the group, in the “bubble”, as he often said in his interviews, where you feel good, where there is someone to think for you for many things, where you only have to think about pedaling and, in his case, winning. But you don’t live on glory alone and the wheels don’t always turn as they should, so “Cannonball”, due to a strange alchemy that sometimes makes sport cruel, five years ago seems to have reached the end of the line. Undermining his muscles and his mind is the Epstein-Barr virus but above all depression. His last victory was on February 8, 2018 in a stage of the Dubai Tour. One of his sprints, edgy and winning. Then nothing more. Then the light goes out and cycling takes a back seat. Two years in the dark without stimuli, without desire but above all without a team anymore. Which is not the least of the details when cycling is your job. A thousand and two hundred days without raising his arms to the sky for a pure sprinter are an eternity and a sentence. I am a tunnel from which you can’t always get out. You think about a lot of things but above all you think about the retreat.
But nothing is written and fortunately much can be rewritten, so when everything seemed black a flash of light comes right from the past, from Patrick Lefevere team manager of Deuceuninck-Quisckstep, the Belgian team where Cavendish had raced and won, which gives him a new chance. The last one. As long as he himself finds a sponsor to pay his salary. A gamble for everyone, but for someone used to elbowing in sprints, to dodging at 80 miles an hour and filing away millimetres of tubulars, it can’t be a problem. And in fact he sets off again. Slowly ahead at the start. Gregario? Not really. There are riders who have victory in their DNA and Cavendish just has to make an effort of memory that he suddenly finds, almost by magic, in April three years ago in the second stage of the Tour of Turkey when he returns to join Andrè Greipel and Jasper Philipsen. Cycling is strange, life is strange. The circle closes: Cannonball, who last year at the Tour had said goodbye to everyone, is back this year. He had a score to settle with history. Now he can put his heart at rest but he won’t. Bets are accepted.