Fastest Man On Two Wheels - The Times Magazine
Is Mark Cavendish the best cyclist in the world? Possibly. He’s certainly the most outspoken By Mark Bailey
Given the traditional hostilities between cyclists and taxi drivers, it feels a little odd to be sitting in the back of a London cab with the notoriously combustible Mark Cavendish, the number one cyclist in the world. It’s cramped in here. His sleek, black bike, worth £12,000 and tattooed with the rainbow stripes of a world champion, rattles behind us in the boot. A helmet and an iPad (with FaceTime for video check-ins with his heavily pregnant girlfriend, the former Page 3 model Peta Todd, and a digital version of his favourite game, Monopoly) sit between us. A bag containing the grey Dior suit Cavendish wore when accepting the 2011 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award dangles from a hook near my window. In the front seat, his agent, Simon Bayliff, is fiddling with his phone.
In the build-up to London 2012, I have glimpsed the inner mechanics of the fastest man on two wheels. I’ve met him at the Redbridge Cycling Centre in Essex, close to the home he shares with Peta, enjoyed a bike ride with him and watched him pose for a photoshoot in a studio in London. Cocky yet vulnerable, opinionated yet chivalrous, ruthless yet sensitive, Cavendish, 26, is an intriguingly contradictory individual. His self-portrait, penned in his autobiography, Boy Racer, is a suitably fractured one: “Joker, firebrand, self-acknowledged sometime b******, immature, emotional, generous, recovering scally, team leader and the fastest man in the world.”
As the taxi grinds to a halt in busy traffic, Cavendish stares at passing cyclists. “It really puts a smile on my face when you see people buying into the sport I love,” he says. His Manx accent is, to the untrained ear, Scouse. Usually it bubbles with mischief. Here it’s softer, tender even. “You see people commuting to work, families going out on weekends as a hobby, kids playing in the street. It’s been beautiful to see. Since I won Sports Personality, cars give me more room and kids wave out of the window. This country is getting really excited by cycling. It’s not like people are just beeping at me and trying to get me off the road any more.”
Last July, Cavendish became the first British winner of the coveted Tour de France green jersey (awarded to the best sprinter). In Denmark two months later he secured the nation’s first triumph in the road race World Championships since Tom Simpson in 1965.
This summer, on July 28, Cavendish will cycle a 250km (156 mile) loop from London, out into the Surrey hills, before returning for a sprint finish on the Mall, where he aims to win Great Britain’s first gold medal of London 2012. He hopes he’ll see the curtains of Buckingham Palace twitching as he dashes past. Cavendish collected his MBE from the Queen in December, accompanied by Peta, looking resplendent with a proud bump and defiantly towering pair of Louboutin heels. He was invited to lunch at the palace again in February.
“It was wicked, man. It was completely not how I imagined it. When I got my MBE, I cracked a joke and she wasn’t amused, but this time it was very relaxed. You forget that they’re just normal people – grandparents and mothers. We had lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. It was sound. He is hilarious! They’re quite bouncy and crack jokes. Of course, you have all the formalities of royalty, but they were quite informal.”
Cavendish has fine tastes. He is awaiting the delivery of a bespoke McLaren MP4-12C car, worth more than £170,000. “I collect Lambrettas and have some from the Fifties and Sixties. I love that era,” he says. “I like anything that has fine detail to it. The engines are the simplest form of combustion engines. Mine don’t have mirrors; they’re stripped-down, stylish, Italian and classic. I’m also into the retro side of cycling. I like wearing a cycling cap now, which is quite old-fashioned.
“Even when I was younger I wanted to dress well and everything had to be right,” continues the man who confesses to always carrying a travel iron on tour. “Paul Smith loves cycling and we’ve become good friends. He sorts me out with a lot of stuff. I like watches. I have an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Bumble Bee watch, which is my favourite.”
His sense of style has spilled over into his paternal duties, as he awaits the birth of his daughter. “Peta wants to do stuff, but I’m quite particular about things so I’ve taken over. I’ve done it all, painted the nursery, bought her little clothes. I’ve got a great chair sorted. It’s shaped like a designer egg-chair, but it’s for a baby. It’s so sweet. All the nursery stuff is handmade, quality stuff.”
Every time he mentions Peta’s name, his eyes light up. They met two years ago in Los Angeles. He was on holiday. She was working for the charity Help for Heroes. “I just thought she was incredible. I had to speak to her.
“This could be the best year of my life. I have a beautiful, perfect girlfriend; my daughter is almost here, and I have the chance to win an Olympic medal, more Tour de France stages and wear the rainbow jersey.
“I’m a firm believer that if you’re not settled in your home life, you’re not going to perform in your professional life. A man needs a family environment. I’ve even got a dog now, so I’m feeling proper settled. It’s nice to go home to good surroundings, a wicked house, nice furniture and look after Peta, cook and relax.”
This is the Mark Cavendish who weeps with joy on podiums and exhausts superlatives in heartfelt odes to his team-mates. In person, he is engaging and polite. He apologises for everything from checking a text to eating a pastry.
A month earlier, we had taken a bike ride in Essex. Cavendish forgot his shorts and was going to borrow mine until a local bike shop saved him the shame. Given his piston-like thighs, I was surprised to find he wears size small. At 5ft 9in and 69kg he looks lean, although he has had weight problems in the past. It was our first meeting, organised by Head & Shoulders, for whom Cavendish is now an ambassador. He’d greeted me with a crushing handshake and a shy smile: the eternal Cavendish contradiction.
Before we met I had been warned by journalist friends that he could be frosty. (One described how he glared at him for ten seconds before answering his question: “No.”) But during our ride, he smiles, jokes and asks questions. Lots of questions. He wanted to know whom I ride with, where and when.
He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of roads. Lincolnshire? “Quick, flat roads.” Surrey? “I’ve ridden Box Hill a lot.” Gran Canaria? “Too windy.” When I mention a tough ride, he advises me to, “Train your mind, not your body. You’ll smash it.” This is the endearing thing about Cavendish. He may be the world’s best cyclist, but he genuinely cares about cycling and the people, places and passions involved.
Sometimes that passion can overflow. In 2010, he was withdrawn from the Tour de Romandie in Switzerland for flicking a V-sign at journalists in a playful homage to Agincourt. French magazine L’Équipe alleged he cursed the “f****** Frenchies” at an airport. His black moods are legendary. An online video shows him storming onto a team bus. Seconds later a helmet flies out of the door.
“There are people in sport who sometimes have a bad rep, but that’s because you see the passion they have for their sport,” he explains. “The passion just spills out as euphoria or anger. But for someone to care more about their sport than their image is quite rare in modern sportspeople. I care and it shows.”
As a sprinter, his task is to finish bike races with electrifying speed. The final kilometre of a race is fast, dangerous and gladiatorial. “Imagine every football team in the Premier League on the pitch at the same time all trying to score into one goal. That’s sprinting,” he says.
His team-mates “bury themselves” across stages 180-250km in length, riding in front of him to minimise air resistance and preserve his energy. In the final 300 metres, Cavendish explodes towards the line at speeds above 45mph. “In the run-up to the sprint, there is no room for emotion,” he says. “No joy, fear, nerves, anger. It is quite clinical. It’s like being in a tunnel. You are making 100 calculations every second − how big the gaps are, how fast everybody is moving, who is around you. If you’re emotional, you won’t think correctly. It is really calculated. So when you cross the line all that repressed emotion comes out.”
Many of Cavendish’s character traits can be traced to his childhood and formative years in cycling. He was born in Douglas on the Isle of Man. His father, David, was an IT consultant. His mother, Adele, owned a bridal and dancewear shop. “I’m very driven in what I want to do, but I am also very emotional. My dad is very focused in what he does, yet he’s really closed emotionally. My mum is happy to bundle along, but she’s very emotional.”
He took up cycling to copy his older brother, Andy, and by 14 was competing on the mainland. If his parents shaped his personality (they later divorced), so did the Isle of Man: its lashing winds and undulating roads toughened him up; its isolation cultivated introspection.
“We have a saying: ‘Manx as f***,’” he grins. “In terms of personality, I am definitely as Manx as f***. I’m patriotic, but you get sun for two weeks a year; it’s rainy and windy; the roads are tough, and that’s why we’ve got four or five top professional cyclists from a population of 80,000. You need to love what you do.”
Cycling wasn’t his only passion. He loved competitive ballroom dancing. “My dancing partner [Laura Breadner] was the talented one, but I did it for six years and we were successful. I’d like to do it again. It’s good for a man to know how to dance. Dancing requires so much attention to detail and commitment. I wanted perfection and dancing was something I could practise and practise.”
I ask if he would accept a call from Strictly Come Dancing. Irritation flickers across his face. “I’m not into that TV s***. I don’t like it. I hate all those reality TV shows.” A pause. “But actually Strictly I don’t mind, because you have to learn a skill. I get frustrated when people win things because they’re s*** or stupid.”
In his late teens, Cavendish worked in Barclays Bank. He excelled at speedy transactions and flirting with grannies, but it gave him motivation to succeed in cycling. “They were great people, but every day when I wake up and it’s raining I’d still rather get out on my bike than sit in a bank.”
Aged 18, he was invited to join the British Cycling Academy. He was talented and successful, but exhaustion, stress and criticism led to bouts of depression. And then he would eat. When one coach, Simon Jones, taunted him on a poor training ride – “That’ll teach you, eating all those chocolate bars” – he burst into tears. At times, he alternated days consuming only 1,000 calories a day with weeks sitting on the couch with the curtains drawn eating nothing but Walkers Sensations.
This dark period taught him that self-doubt equated to failure. If he were to succeed, he must harness his mental resolve. In purely scientific terms, Cavendish shouldn’t be as dominant as he is. Analyse his power output and the data would imply an elite athlete, but not a spectacular one. What separates him, he says, is the ability to suffer, to seek perfection and to win at all costs.
Cavendish is now the most feared sprinter on Earth. He has won 20 stages of the Tour de France and could be in line to break the all-time record of 34 held by Eddy Merckx. He has likened his motivation in his formative years to that of American cyclist Lance Armstrong, who kept a “mental list” of people who had crossed him. He was driven by “anger and resentment”.
“There is nothing better to drive you on to achieve stuff than when you are being brought down or in adversity,” he says. “I never did set out to prove people wrong, but you get a kind of spiteful satisfaction when you do. The best thing to keep you humble is to know why you’ve got it and how hard you’ve had to work for it.”
To make up for what the numbers suggest he lacks, Cavendish seeks advantages in every detail of his performance. “I’m a bit of a control freak, but preparation maximises your chances of success,” he says. He trains with brutal seven-hour rides on the roads of Essex, and follows meticulous routines and rituals, organising energy gels in specific jersey pockets, analysing road maps for every gradient and turn that could prove decisive, and only pinning his race number to his shirt when he wakes up on the day of the race, so as not to tempt fate.
He’s the same at home, compulsively tidying and organising. Peta posted a picture on Twitter of him with a sticker reading “I like things in straight lines” plastered to his forehead.
Obsessions are common in sport. Yes, such neuroses help him to achieve brilliance, but with Cavendish you sense there is something else here. He is smart, intelligent and exhaustingly analytical. He just won’t switch off.
On cycling in cities, he says, “People say cyclists or car drivers are dangerous. I hate it when people generalise. If one idiot – in a car or on a bike – does something stupid, it is that individual. Why form a generic rule?”
On pressure, he adds, “I no longer win races; I lose races. So now I suffer closed-mindedness. If I win nine races, then lose one, people talk about nine as a negative. Why don’t they look at the people who have lost nine and won one?”
On sprinting: “Sprinting is a series of calculations,” he explains. “There are so many variables, not just A versus B, but A versus every letter to Z. But it also involves the physical 3-D terrain, gradients, road surfaces, winds and emotional variants like adrenaline and fear, so you must factor all that in.”
Last November, I met Cavendish’s Team Sky team-mate Bradley Wiggins, who knows Cavendish better than anyone. Wiggins commented, “He’s an intelligent guy, seriously intelligent. His brain is like a massive computer.”
Cavendish’s coach, Rod Ellingworth, tells me the same thing. “He’s always thinking. This is why he saves energy, finds gaps, wins races.”
“I do a lot of mental training,” Cavendish agrees. “Whether it is a Sudoku puzzle, a game of chess or Monopoly, if I keep my mind active, it helps me to perform. I stopped doing puzzles once and noticed the difference in my sharpness and decision-making. I wasn’t the same.”
The taxi has almost arrived at our destination. I ask if success in 2012 will change Cavendish. He says the opposite. “Everything I do now is about providing my daughter with the best future she can ever have. I want her to be proud of me. I want to make history for her.”
(C) The Times
Link: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark-cavendish-the-fastest-legs-on-two-wheels-rvmwqkkz6qz