‘I’m a different person’
‘I will never be completely mentally the same – I don’t think anybody is after any mental health struggle’
Mark Cavendish seems different today. Reflecting on the past year, and looking ahead to another – perhaps final – year of racing, he appears calmer, more nuanced in his opinions. Gone are the brash, bold absolutes of his younger days. Nothing is 100 per cent certain in Cavendish’s world anymore, except that he loves his family and his bike.
Some things haven’t changed. Cavendish is still strong, still passionate, still searingly honest, still wounded, still ready to shut people up. And still winning.
The spiky boy racer who rocketed to four stage wins at his first Tour de France in 2008, aged just 23, is now a doting 36-year-old husband and father of four who enjoys drawing Harry Potter cartoons with his kids. But in recent years Cavendish has experienced life’s darker shadows: crippling bouts of depression, stress, pain and two hellish years in the grip of the Epstein-Barr virus. The legend with 30 Tour de France stage wins endured five years without any Tour wins at all. Between February 2018 and April 2021 Cavendish didn’t win a single race.
Even his mentor and friend Rod Ellingworth lost faith. In late 2020 Cavendish was not offered a contract extension at Ellingworth’s Bahrain-McLaren team. The obsessive cycling fanboy, who as a child used to make pilgrimages on the ferry from the Isle of Man to race on the mainland, was about to become an outsider again. The ferocious
