Mark Cavendish MBE
Of all of cycling’s greatest sprinters — of which there are many true legends including Erik Zabel and Mario Cipollini — Mark “Cav” Cavendish is undeniably, irrefutably and unconditionally the greatest of all time. With palmares that include 30 Tour de France stage victories, 15-stage and two team time-trial victories at the Giro d’Italia, Milan-San Remo and the World Championships, Cavendish has in the past decade been the most exciting man to watch in professional cycling.
Part of that is due to the dynamic of his chosen specialization — the balls-out, near-death, brutal carnage of the sprint finish. Part of it is simply that he is supernaturally fast. When you watch Cavendish explode into action in the last 100 meters of a race, achieve critical speed, transform the potential energy into kinetic like no other man on earth, you almost expect it to be accompanied by a Chuck Yeager-like sonic boom, as he explodes through the sound barrier.
To understand just how fast Cavendish can go on a seven-kilogram machine consisting of two wheels and a scant carbon-fiber fuselage, you need only YouTube the final stage of the 2010 Tour de France. In the last half-kilometer of the world’s most prestigious sprint, the finish at Paris Champs Elysées, the peloton flies by Place de la Concorde into the two final turns. In the lead, Thor Hushovd — a massive Viking, a genetic freak of a cyclist — is pounding his pedals with every last ounce of energy. Behind him, the great Italian sprinter Alessandro Petacchi is also riding for his very life, capitalizing on Hushovd’s slipstream to surge past him.
Then, in the background, all on his own, as if riding in a totally different race, Cavendish blasts past them both as if they were standing still. But far from a watt-generating brutalist, Cavendish has constantly demonstrated racing intellect second to none. Indeed, he redefined the dynamics and tactics of the sprint game by famously creating the sport’s most intimidating sprint train of all time.
To be in the peloton and see Cavendish’s sprint train surging to the front must be akin to hearing the hoof beat of Genghis Khan’s Mongol raiders at the outskirts of your village. Which is to say, at once awesome and terrifying. Then to see the concussive double-tap consisting most frequently of George Hincapie and Mark Renshaw — the sport’s greatest lead-out man, who once head-butted an overly aggressive rival rider out of the way — is simply glorious. To witness the famous sprint train in action, watch the final stage of the 2009 or 2011 Tour de France.
In the 2009 stage with 200 of the world’s greatest cyclists, pedalling as hard as the heart, lungs and legs will allow them, with a single kilometer to go, the legendary Hincapie pulls away from the peloton with Renshaw and Cavendish in his slipstream. He surges forward as if compelled by a tractor beam from a mighty alien mother ship. Again, in the 2011 tour, Renshaw seamlessly tows Cavendish away from him to launch the Manx Missile at a rate of
