Eating the Cannibal
Mark Cavendish can finally rest, plus a preview of the first time trial of the Tour de France
In coming to cycling writing from baseball, I’ve been astonished by how closely Eddy Merckx maps onto Babe Ruth as a cultural figure. He’s a historical giant, whose cultural influence on the sport dwarfs even his unparalleled statistical record.
Merckx is the all-time leader in grand tour wins (11) and monument wins (19). Only two other riders are in double digits in even one of those categories, and neither of them has more of five of the other. Merckx is the only rider to have won all five monuments and all three grand tours. He holds the record for most grand tour stage wins (64), and is the only rider to win the general classification at four consecutive grand tours. He’s one of two male riders to win the Tour, the Giro and the world championship in the same year.1 And so on and so forth.
The argument for any other rider as the greatest of all time rests on Merckx dominating an immature sport. The individual races might’ve been more grueling, but just as Ruth won title after title against all-white, almost-exclusively-American competition, Merckx rode in an era when elite riders could contest every race on the calendar. The sport is more specialized now, to say nothing of the fact that it’s open to competitors from the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Eastern Europe. In Merckx’s day, a Tour de France contender from the U.K. or Scandinavia counted as exotic.
This being the 4th of July, I’ve seen the fireworks scene from The Sandlot getting passed around, and herein lies the major difference between the Merckx and Ruth. The Sandlot is a 30-year-old movie depicting events 30 years before its own release, and even within the time frame of the film, Ruth—who by that point had been dead for 14 years—was already a ghostly mythological figure.
But while Ruth drank, ate, smoked, and fucked his way into an early grave, Merckx was not too awesome to live past his early 50s. He’s still alive, looming over cycling like a great marble statue, occasionally weighing in on events of the day. Last year, Merckx anointed Tadej Pogačar as his successor; only 25, Pogačar has already won three grand tours, six monuments, and 21 grand tour stages. By the end of this month two of those totals could be higher. He showed his versatility by becoming the first rider since, well, Merckx, to win both the Tour de France and Tour of Flanders.
Knowing the enormousness of Merckx, it’s easier to understand why Mark Cavendish has lasted this long.
The number is 34: That was, until Wednesday, the record for most career stage wins at the Tour de France. And it belonged, like almost every other record in the book, to Merckx.
Cavendish won his first Tour de France stage in 2008. By the end of the 2011 Tour, he’d won 20 stages. The highest compliment I can pay Cavendish is that he ruined an entire discipline of road cycling for me. His best years in the sport were my first years following it, and to my eye, any stage that didn’t involve major climbing was just not worth watching. You’d sit around staring at a big peloton for four hours, then there would be about 40 seconds of action. And from that cloud of dust, the Manx Missile2 would emerge victorious. Sleep in on those days. Don’t bother watching.
At age 26, Cavendish had 20 Tour de France stage wins. At 28, he had 25, plus 18 more at the Giro and Vuelta, plus world championships on the road and track, plus points classification victories at all three grand tours, plus a monument at Milan-San Remo. Even knowing that sprinters’ legs can go sour quickly, it seemed like an inevitability that he’d get to 34, and eventually 35 wins.
Then, just as he looked to be slowing down, the wheels fell all the way off for Cavendish: The crash with Peter Sagan at the 2017 Tour. Years lost to the Epstein-Barr virus. For the full story, you can read what I wrote about him in 2021, in the context of what happened next: A reunion with the Quick-Step team, backing into Tour de France leadership, and an unlikely second green jersey, with four stage wins, at the age of 36.
This was a miracle. That any sprinter could dominate the Tour at his age, let alone with his medical history. Cavendish, against all odds, finally achieved parity with Merckx, with a chance to win the record outright on the iconic Champs-Élysées.
It didn’t happen.
That was three years ago. And a rider who looked like he was completely cooked for half a decade beforehand seemed to be driven completely mad by the fleeting glimmer of hope he’d been offered by the 2021 Tour.
This is a man pushing 40, with a wife and four kids. His achievements are already such that he was knighted by King Charles last month. But sharing the record with the greatest rider ever to pin on a number drove Cavendish to desperation.
Last year, he declared that 2023 would be his final Tour. Astana, a shadow of its former EPO’d up self, signed the aging Cavendish for this one last shot at glory and notoriety.3 He crashed and broke his collarbone on Stage 8, abandoned the race, then declared that, lol, j/k, he was going to try again in 2024. This time, Astana brought in reinforcements: Michael Mørkøv, who’d been Cavendish’s leadout man at Quick Step, would fill the same role. Mark Renshaw, having filled the same role earlier in Cavendish’s career, would come in as a DS.
Cavendish’s persistence has made him a sentimental favorite, especially in the English-speaking press, but a large part of me wished he’d give it up. Cavendish’s monomaniacal hunt for no. 35 had seemed to imprison him. Getting it would require only a minute or so of perfect strength and positioning, but getting into that position would require a year’s worth of training, plus the risk of getting flattened by a truck on a practice ride.
And there was no guarantee of success anyway. Recent form seemed to indicate that even if Cavendish didn’t get boxed into a fence while navigating a chicane, or snag his handlebars on a fan’s backpack, or lose his grip on the road on a rainy day, he wouldn’t be able to beat a new generation of younger, faster, better-supported sprinters anyway: Arnaud de Lie, Wout van Aert, Fabio Jakobsen, and most of all Jasper Philipsen, who’d made the 2023 Tour just as boring as Cavendish once had.
Nevertheless, Cavendish was going to get no. 35 or die trying.
It was Option no. 1. Thank God.
Boxed in on the final sprint on Stage 5, Cavendish was able to find a gap, outmaneuver Philipsen, and swing through the field. Maybe it’s the last time this will happen, but that doesn’t matter. Cavendish has finally, almost a decade after it looked over the first time, beaten Merckx.
The marble statue, having congratulated Cavendish in person in 2021, was not in attendance this year. Nor did he speak to the press. But he did offer a salute to the new record holder on Instagram: “Congratulations to Mark Cavendish on this historic achievement! Such a nice guy to break my record.”
It seems to be a popular sentiment within the peloton, as rider after rider—as they did in 2021—swung by to offer congratulations. Most memorable of all, Pogačar, in his yellow jersey, handed his sunglasses to Cavendish’s son, who seemed way more excited to see Pog than Dad. As Pogačar embraced Cavendish, the new record-holder offered a friendly warning to the next man in line: “Don’t beat it.”