1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
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Astana have offered Cav a ride for next year. 
The Cycling Thread
- Thread starter aussiespursguy
- Start date
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
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I can't see him going for it TBH. I know Astana have offered him a ride but he went all in for this year's race and what with everything that's happened in his life over the last few years it would take a serious mental and physical effort to do it all again when he expected to be winding down with a few 'testimonial' races.
Would love to see him do it, but tied with Merckx is no bad place to be.
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
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Cav snippet from the BBC, will check out the documentary on Netflix - Never Enough.
Mark Cavendish Netflix documentary: 'I don't want anyone else to go through what I have'
Mark Cavendish is "still thinking" about a Tour de France comeback, but he hasn't had an easy ride to this point.
www.bbc.co.uk
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
Just caught up on the first full day on the Worlds from Glasgow, track yesterday GB 2 golds (Tidball leaving it till the last bend in the Men's Scratch), silver by 0.075 in the Women's Elite Pursuit and some brilliant disabled events. Looking forward to watching mountain bike downhill racing, only seen snippets before but seeing some interviews with riders looks mad. Road and cross country moutain bikes to come.
Fills the gap between Le Tour and Vuelta.
Fills the gap between Le Tour and Vuelta.
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
Well Cav is back for one more tilt at the TdF. Fingers crossed .
.
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
Having seen Le Tour's route for next year, two things.
1. Cav is wishing he had retired.
2. Mountain goats only need apply,
www.letour.fr
1. Cav is wishing he had retired.
2. Mountain goats only need apply,
2802 M
The height of the summit of the Bonette pass in the Alps, the highest tarmac road in France, which will be the “roof” of the 2024 Tour.52 230 M
The total vertical gain during the 2024 Tour de France.
Official route of Tour de France 2024
The route of the Tour de France, stages, cities, dates
www.letour.fr
Marty
Audere est farce
- Mar 10, 2005
- 40,173
- 63,898
Also it will be so strange not having a Champs Elysees finale because of the Olympics that start so soon after.Having seen Le Tour's route for next year, two things.
1. Cav is wishing he had retired.
2. Mountain goats only need apply,
2802 M
The height of the summit of the Bonette pass in the Alps, the highest tarmac road in France, which will be the “roof” of the 2024 Tour.
52 230 M
The total vertical gain during the 2024 Tour de France.
Official route of Tour de France 2024
The route of the Tour de France, stages, cities, dates
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
- 4,176
- 19,403
Looks like it's favourable (ish) for him up to stage 13. 8 flat, 3 hilly and only two mountain stages*. If he hasn't got that stage win by then it looks really tough after, especially with the last chance sprint on the Champs Elise replaced by an unwinnable ITT.Having seen Le Tour's route for next year, two things.
1. Cav is wishing he had retired.
2. Mountain goats only need apply,
2802 M
The height of the summit of the Bonette pass in the Alps, the highest tarmac road in France, which will be the “roof” of the 2024 Tour.
52 230 M
The total vertical gain during the 2024 Tour de France.
Official route of Tour de France 2024
The route of the Tour de France, stages, cities, dates
*Haven't looked at the profiles of the flat/hilly stages so don't know how many finish with kickers or a random cat 2 with 30km to go.
Smells like another Danish victory.Having seen Le Tour's route for next year, two things.
1. Cav is wishing he had retired.
2. Mountain goats only need apply,
2802 M
The height of the summit of the Bonette pass in the Alps, the highest tarmac road in France, which will be the “roof” of the 2024 Tour.
52 230 M
The total vertical gain during the 2024 Tour de France.
Official route of Tour de France 2024
The route of the Tour de France, stages, cities, dates
… delicious!
aussiespursguy
Well-Known Member
- Mar 21, 2015
- 3,445
- 6,704
- Thread starter
- #492
Absolutely shocked!
www.dailymail.co.uk
World champion cyclist charged over wife's death
A former world champion cyclist has been charged with the death of his wife after allegedly hitting her with a ute.
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
- 4,176
- 19,403
Absolutely shocked!
World champion cyclist charged over wife's death
A former world champion cyclist has been charged with the death of his wife after allegedly hitting her with a ute.
Bloody hell
Marty
Audere est farce
- Mar 10, 2005
- 40,173
- 63,898
Whether premeditated or an accident, that is just awful.Absolutely shocked!
World champion cyclist charged over wife's death
A former world champion cyclist has been charged with the death of his wife after allegedly hitting her with a ute.
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
- 4,176
- 19,403
David Walsh interview of Mark Cavendish for tomorrow's Sunday Times. Always have thought Walsh on of the best profilers in sports journalism. Not a long interview, but as usual with Cav, some interesting snippets.
www.thetimes.co.uk
Mark Cavendish: I had so much confidence – now it’s the opposite
The sprinter talks about his enduring popularity, bouncing back from crushing lows and why the Tour de France is harder than it ever was
www.thetimes.co.uk
Mark Cavendish walks into the bar of the Hotel Villa Gadea in Altea on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Before coming here to meet him, I’d been trying to think of great sprinters who, late in their careers, were able to win at the Tour de France. Not many. Alessandro Petacchi at 36, André Darrigade and Robbie McEwen at 35. This summer Cavendish, the greatest of them all, will try to win at 39. Crazy or what?
Maybe not crazy. Different, though. As he sits, he doesn’t look his age. You recall the kid winning for the first time at the Tour. Châteauroux 2008, his hands caressing his temples as he crossed the line, the expression of surprise fake or real? We weren’t sure. He was smarter, more clued-in than any 23-year-old had a right to be. He has aged like a fine Bordeaux, maturing into something special.
So many lives packed into the past 16 years. Cavendish the winner. Cavendish the broken. Cavendish the abandoned. Until, ultimately, Cavendish the cycling legend. Thirty-four stage victories, 12 more than the next best sprinter, Darrigade. He overtook the Frenchman with his victory on the Champs Elysees in 2012. That was 12 years ago.
Cavendish celebrates his first Tour stage win at Châteauroux in 2008 and, right, winning at the same place 13 years later
PASCAL PAVANI,GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/POOL/AFP
Then on the next year’s Tour, he struggled through the first week on a course of antibiotics for his bronchitis and still won the fifth leg into Marseille. At the finish that afternoon, the 84-year-old Darrigade came to say “well done”. Here was a man with a similar physique to Cavendish, the same mentality, who could shake his hand and say, “I know what it takes, son, to do what you’ve done.”
Cavendish has long believed that we, the chroniclers of his story, don’t get it. An example: that win into Marseille got him into fourth place in the all-inclusive list of stage winners at the Tour. The next day some of our brethren wrote that if Cavendish could win one more, he would go to joint third on the all-time list, behind just Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault.
It seemed to him we were the beast that couldn’t be fed. Twenty-four stage wins, not enough. And now, in this Spanish hotel, he’s bristling from a just-completed press conference where, as if to annoy him, the question resurfaced. He wants someone to explain this to him.
“One thing I want to ask you, why do these cycling journalists ask me if I think I can get another Tour stage? What does it matter if I do or if I don’t? I’d like to know their opinion on how it affects my career. What does it matter if I don’t win another Tour de France stage? I have literally won 34 of them. The very fact that I’m going for a 35th means I have 34, do you know what I mean? If I’d won 36, I’d be going for 37.
Cavendish poses with Merckx after equalling his record of 34 stage wins at the 2021 Tour de France
EPA
“For me, it doesn’t matter, nothing changes. I’m super happy with my results, and the journey I’ve taken as a person in that time. The friends I’ve made, the memories I’ve created. I’ve had a wonderful career and I will be retired for a long time after.”
Then the angst passes. “I suppose it means you’ve done something right if they’re asking you that question.”
What is it about him? No athlete I’ve written about is more loved than him. Hoping he can explain it, I tell him about his popularity. “I have no idea, but it is truly humbling. Maybe I have never hidden behind a mask, I have always tried to be real. I think that’s relatable. If you are not real, a lot of people won’t like you. Trying to be real, you see the good of me, and the bad of me. It’s the real good and the real bad.
“That’s why I’ve always got upset when something’s been perceived bad, do you know? Something that’s not what happened, do you see? Likewise, I’m not going to take credit for something I haven’t done, because of my name. I’ll just try and be real and I always ask that people are real with me. With the kids, they have to be straight, they have to be real, my own kids, that is. I tell them, don’t hide behind something.”
Consider his career in the sport, his life outside it. So much has happened, and much of that out of the ordinary. The boy, in his final year of primary school on the Isle of Man, is persuaded to sit the entrance exam for the prestigious private school King William’s College. The task was to compose a poem, write about a musical instrument or create a short story. “Why can’t I do all three?” he said.
His work earned him a full scholarship to King William’s. He thought about what being separated from his friends would mean to his life and turned down the scholarship. Instead he went with his mates to Ballakermeen High School. Think of him at 14, leaving for the ferry on Friday afternoon, rucksack on his back, road bike beneath, his outstretched left arm holding on to his track bike.
Once on the ferry he’d sit and shoot the breeze with the truck drivers. Landing in Liverpool, he’d make his way to the train station, get both bikes on board and head for the National Cycling Centre in Manchester. Rod Ellingwoth, the nurturer of young talent at the centre, asked him: “How did you get here?” He’d list the different legs of the journey. They thought: “This kid is something else.”
It’s hard to reckon with the success he enjoyed in the early Tours. Four stage wins in 2008, six in 2009, five in 2010, five in 2011, three in 2012. An idiot fan threw urine over him on the 11th stage of the 2013 Tour and then a year later, desperate to win the opening stage in his mum’s home town of Harrogate, he crashed in the finishing straight, smashed up his shoulder and was out of the race.
Crashing on the sprint on the Tour stage between Leeds and Harrogate in 2014 was a career low point
REUTERS
What does he do? He comes back, wins another stage in 2015 and then another four in 2016. Then the really bad times. Diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus in 2017, he struggled with his mental health. Now into his thirties, it seemed the light was going out. He finished outside the time limit on Stage 11 in 2018 and didn’t get selected for the Tour by his team in 2019 and 2020.
He casts this as a general observation but it’s personal. “You see with a lot of sportspeople who become successful very young, they’re never told ‘no’ or they’re wrong. And it’s usually from people who have something to gain from them. Once things aren’t going their way, then people kind of f*** off and people who actually matter, who were the ones saying ‘no’ before but weren’t listened to, they are the ones that are still there.”
Out of the darkness came the great comeback. Five years after his previous win in the Tour, he claimed four victories in 2021. Then, four months later, another upheaval. In the early hours of November 27, criminals broke into his home in Essex. He had just got out of hospital after a crash and a collapsed lung. He was in bed with his wife, Peta, and their three-year-old son when they entered his room, beat him while wielding a knife and escaped with two valuable watches.
Two of the burglars were given length prison sentences early last year. Even now, more than two years after the ordeal, he finds it very difficult to talk about. “You would never wish that on anyone. It wasn’t a nice time.” Does he feel it left a scar? “Yeah, no trust in anything really, I guess. It wasn’t very nice. We don’t live in a fairytale world. I guess, we were lucky, there’s people that come out worse from home invasions. We’re still here to talk about it. Material things can be replaced.”
His greater maturity, he says, is down to having children and learning to be a good father. His happiness with the world, he puts down to the team friendship and culture he has discovered in the Astana-Qazastan team. The team have recruited a group of riders specifically to help him in this year’s Tour and he is excited by the challenge.
I mention that he seems more content than ever and then comes the reminder that with Cavendish you can never be sure of his response: “I don’t know,” he says. “Isn’t it strange that now I am lot more content in myself than I ever was. Yet I lack self-confidence like I never did before. Ten years ago, I had so much self-confidence, yet I fought against the world. Now it is the complete opposite.”
How does the lack of confidence express itself? “Ah, it just does. It’s something to talk to my therapist about, I’m afraid. Sorry. It’s for my psychologist.”
Why is it, I ask him, that bunch sprinting has generally not been a game for the older cyclist, the one in his mid-thirties and beyond, suggesting that it’s hard to have the fearlessness of youth when you’re no longer young. “For me, it’s not that. Do you know what it is for me? The sport’s changed so much that it’s very, very physically difficult for a sprinter to be a professional cyclist. The physiological demands of a cycling race are so much tougher than previous. It’s f***ing horrible. On a physical level, on a suffering level, it’s horrible.
“The mental strain of spending most of the race alone with a team-mate out the back, trying to make a time cut. In 2008 when I did my first Tour that I won stages in, there were like 12 HC (hors catégorie, beyond categorisation) Category 1 or Category 2 climbs. Twelve. In the 2024 Tour, there are 28. It’s hard, and I think you don’t want to do that for very long if you’re a sprinter, or you can’t. I know how to do it, I know how to suffer.”
Remarkably, he’s prepared to go there again this summer.
Maybe not crazy. Different, though. As he sits, he doesn’t look his age. You recall the kid winning for the first time at the Tour. Châteauroux 2008, his hands caressing his temples as he crossed the line, the expression of surprise fake or real? We weren’t sure. He was smarter, more clued-in than any 23-year-old had a right to be. He has aged like a fine Bordeaux, maturing into something special.
So many lives packed into the past 16 years. Cavendish the winner. Cavendish the broken. Cavendish the abandoned. Until, ultimately, Cavendish the cycling legend. Thirty-four stage victories, 12 more than the next best sprinter, Darrigade. He overtook the Frenchman with his victory on the Champs Elysees in 2012. That was 12 years ago.
Cavendish celebrates his first Tour stage win at Châteauroux in 2008 and, right, winning at the same place 13 years later
PASCAL PAVANI,GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/POOL/AFP
Then on the next year’s Tour, he struggled through the first week on a course of antibiotics for his bronchitis and still won the fifth leg into Marseille. At the finish that afternoon, the 84-year-old Darrigade came to say “well done”. Here was a man with a similar physique to Cavendish, the same mentality, who could shake his hand and say, “I know what it takes, son, to do what you’ve done.”
Cavendish has long believed that we, the chroniclers of his story, don’t get it. An example: that win into Marseille got him into fourth place in the all-inclusive list of stage winners at the Tour. The next day some of our brethren wrote that if Cavendish could win one more, he would go to joint third on the all-time list, behind just Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault.
It seemed to him we were the beast that couldn’t be fed. Twenty-four stage wins, not enough. And now, in this Spanish hotel, he’s bristling from a just-completed press conference where, as if to annoy him, the question resurfaced. He wants someone to explain this to him.
“One thing I want to ask you, why do these cycling journalists ask me if I think I can get another Tour stage? What does it matter if I do or if I don’t? I’d like to know their opinion on how it affects my career. What does it matter if I don’t win another Tour de France stage? I have literally won 34 of them. The very fact that I’m going for a 35th means I have 34, do you know what I mean? If I’d won 36, I’d be going for 37.
Cavendish poses with Merckx after equalling his record of 34 stage wins at the 2021 Tour de France
EPA
“For me, it doesn’t matter, nothing changes. I’m super happy with my results, and the journey I’ve taken as a person in that time. The friends I’ve made, the memories I’ve created. I’ve had a wonderful career and I will be retired for a long time after.”
Then the angst passes. “I suppose it means you’ve done something right if they’re asking you that question.”
What is it about him? No athlete I’ve written about is more loved than him. Hoping he can explain it, I tell him about his popularity. “I have no idea, but it is truly humbling. Maybe I have never hidden behind a mask, I have always tried to be real. I think that’s relatable. If you are not real, a lot of people won’t like you. Trying to be real, you see the good of me, and the bad of me. It’s the real good and the real bad.
“That’s why I’ve always got upset when something’s been perceived bad, do you know? Something that’s not what happened, do you see? Likewise, I’m not going to take credit for something I haven’t done, because of my name. I’ll just try and be real and I always ask that people are real with me. With the kids, they have to be straight, they have to be real, my own kids, that is. I tell them, don’t hide behind something.”
Consider his career in the sport, his life outside it. So much has happened, and much of that out of the ordinary. The boy, in his final year of primary school on the Isle of Man, is persuaded to sit the entrance exam for the prestigious private school King William’s College. The task was to compose a poem, write about a musical instrument or create a short story. “Why can’t I do all three?” he said.
His work earned him a full scholarship to King William’s. He thought about what being separated from his friends would mean to his life and turned down the scholarship. Instead he went with his mates to Ballakermeen High School. Think of him at 14, leaving for the ferry on Friday afternoon, rucksack on his back, road bike beneath, his outstretched left arm holding on to his track bike.
Once on the ferry he’d sit and shoot the breeze with the truck drivers. Landing in Liverpool, he’d make his way to the train station, get both bikes on board and head for the National Cycling Centre in Manchester. Rod Ellingwoth, the nurturer of young talent at the centre, asked him: “How did you get here?” He’d list the different legs of the journey. They thought: “This kid is something else.”
It’s hard to reckon with the success he enjoyed in the early Tours. Four stage wins in 2008, six in 2009, five in 2010, five in 2011, three in 2012. An idiot fan threw urine over him on the 11th stage of the 2013 Tour and then a year later, desperate to win the opening stage in his mum’s home town of Harrogate, he crashed in the finishing straight, smashed up his shoulder and was out of the race.
Crashing on the sprint on the Tour stage between Leeds and Harrogate in 2014 was a career low point
REUTERS
What does he do? He comes back, wins another stage in 2015 and then another four in 2016. Then the really bad times. Diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus in 2017, he struggled with his mental health. Now into his thirties, it seemed the light was going out. He finished outside the time limit on Stage 11 in 2018 and didn’t get selected for the Tour by his team in 2019 and 2020.
He casts this as a general observation but it’s personal. “You see with a lot of sportspeople who become successful very young, they’re never told ‘no’ or they’re wrong. And it’s usually from people who have something to gain from them. Once things aren’t going their way, then people kind of f*** off and people who actually matter, who were the ones saying ‘no’ before but weren’t listened to, they are the ones that are still there.”
Out of the darkness came the great comeback. Five years after his previous win in the Tour, he claimed four victories in 2021. Then, four months later, another upheaval. In the early hours of November 27, criminals broke into his home in Essex. He had just got out of hospital after a crash and a collapsed lung. He was in bed with his wife, Peta, and their three-year-old son when they entered his room, beat him while wielding a knife and escaped with two valuable watches.
Two of the burglars were given length prison sentences early last year. Even now, more than two years after the ordeal, he finds it very difficult to talk about. “You would never wish that on anyone. It wasn’t a nice time.” Does he feel it left a scar? “Yeah, no trust in anything really, I guess. It wasn’t very nice. We don’t live in a fairytale world. I guess, we were lucky, there’s people that come out worse from home invasions. We’re still here to talk about it. Material things can be replaced.”
His greater maturity, he says, is down to having children and learning to be a good father. His happiness with the world, he puts down to the team friendship and culture he has discovered in the Astana-Qazastan team. The team have recruited a group of riders specifically to help him in this year’s Tour and he is excited by the challenge.
I mention that he seems more content than ever and then comes the reminder that with Cavendish you can never be sure of his response: “I don’t know,” he says. “Isn’t it strange that now I am lot more content in myself than I ever was. Yet I lack self-confidence like I never did before. Ten years ago, I had so much self-confidence, yet I fought against the world. Now it is the complete opposite.”
How does the lack of confidence express itself? “Ah, it just does. It’s something to talk to my therapist about, I’m afraid. Sorry. It’s for my psychologist.”
Why is it, I ask him, that bunch sprinting has generally not been a game for the older cyclist, the one in his mid-thirties and beyond, suggesting that it’s hard to have the fearlessness of youth when you’re no longer young. “For me, it’s not that. Do you know what it is for me? The sport’s changed so much that it’s very, very physically difficult for a sprinter to be a professional cyclist. The physiological demands of a cycling race are so much tougher than previous. It’s f***ing horrible. On a physical level, on a suffering level, it’s horrible.
“The mental strain of spending most of the race alone with a team-mate out the back, trying to make a time cut. In 2008 when I did my first Tour that I won stages in, there were like 12 HC (hors catégorie, beyond categorisation) Category 1 or Category 2 climbs. Twelve. In the 2024 Tour, there are 28. It’s hard, and I think you don’t want to do that for very long if you’re a sprinter, or you can’t. I know how to do it, I know how to suffer.”
Remarkably, he’s prepared to go there again this summer.
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
Ouch! Only caught the back end of the highlights on TV last night, so missed this.
Wout van Aert: Team Visma star to miss Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix through injury
Wout van Aert will miss the rest of the classics season after breaking his collarbone and several ribs in a crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen.
www.bbc.co.uk
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
What the heck, by this rate most of the favourites for TDF will be off their bikes. I caught the Roglic crash on Tuesday and he should not have been allowed back on. Pidcock did not start as he crashed on a recce run before the start.
Its Paris Roubaix this Sunday, just hope the storm clears and the cobbles dry out otherwise it could be carnage.
Itzulia Basque Country: Jonas Vingegaard suffers broken collarbone and ribs in crash
Reigning Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard suffers a broken collarbone and several broken ribs in a crash at the Itzulia Basque Country stage race.
www.bbc.co.uk
Its Paris Roubaix this Sunday, just hope the storm clears and the cobbles dry out otherwise it could be carnage.
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
- 4,176
- 19,403
Saw Vingegaard had crashed but didn't realise Roglic and Pidcock had also been off. Vin's sounds pretty bad too - hopefully that's not a near career-ender like Froome's crash was.What the heck, by this rate most of the favourites for TDF will be off their bikes. I caught the Roglic crash on Tuesday and he should not have been allowed back on. Pidcock did not start as he crashed on a recce run before the start.
Itzulia Basque Country: Jonas Vingegaard suffers broken collarbone and ribs in crash
Reigning Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard suffers a broken collarbone and several broken ribs in a crash at the Itzulia Basque Country stage race.www.bbc.co.uk
Its Paris Roubaix this Sunday, just hope the storm clears and the cobbles dry out otherwise it could be carnage.
1961beavera
"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong'"
- Jun 15, 2009
- 1,437
- 1,788
Vingegaard's team have said the diagnosis includes a Collapsed lung and tissue bleeding.
Evenepoel was also injured, no details.
PCozzie
Well-Known Member
- Sep 9, 2020
- 4,176
- 19,403
Ouch, that's going to take a while to return from. Sounds like carnage out there.
