Quite how the BBC did not see fit to include Mark Cavendish in their shortlist for this year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year show will remain one of life’s great mysteries. It is difficult to overstate quite how extraordinary it was that, at the age of 36, he should come back and win four stages of the biggest bike race in the world, plus the green jersey 10 years after he last won it.
It wasn’t just one of cycling’s great comebacks, it was one of sport’s great comebacks, up there with Tiger Woods, Sir Bobby Charlton, Niki Lauda, Monica Seles, and Muhammad Ali.
Eight months earlier it had looked for all the world as if the Manxman’s career was over. Without a contract, without a win in almost three years and having battled Epstein-Barr virus and clinical depression for much of that period. Not many in the sport could see a way back for him. Cavendish could.
A one-year, bring-your-own-sponsorship deal with his old team, Deceuninck-QuickStep, gave him the time to build a bit of form. And a few wins at the Tour of Turkey in the spring gave him confidence. But it was only when QuickStep’s No 1 sprinter Sam Bennett got injured that the possibility of returning to the race he once bestrode like a colossus was even broached.
Out in France, and armed with the best leadout in the world, Cavendish proceeded to roll back the years, quite literally in the case of his stage win at Chateauroux, where 13 years earlier he had taken his first in the Tour. This picture was taken at the finish line to stage 13 in Carcassonne, where Cavendish won his fourth and final stage of this year’s Tour, drawing him level with the great Belgian Eddy Merckx on 34. I remember the emotion in his press conference afterwards. After years of being asked about the record by cycling journalists, which he hated, finally he could put it to bed.
It looked at that stage as if the outright record would be his. It wasn’t to be. And it may never be. But for one glorious summer, Cav was back. Tom Cary
