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Mark Cavendish: I’d even try synchronised swimming if it gave me chance of going to Rio Olympics
Mark Cavendish on how transfer to new team could help him to fulfil Olympic dream and why he is scouting flats in Manchester to boost his selection battle
The level of Mark Cavendish’s commitment to riding at the Rio Olympic Games next year, the seriousness with which he is preparing to take on the challenge, is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the Manxman has already scouted flats to rent in Manchester, so much time is he planning to spend at the national velodrome over the coming months.
“I need to look at how many days I will be up there but it will be a lot,” he says. “It might be worth renting to be honest. Nicer than staying in hotels all the time…” Cavendish volunteers this nugget of information as we sit in a small anteroom at the four-star Yas Island Rotana hotel in Abu Dhabi.
Outside it is sweltering 35C heat but inside the air-conditioning is working overtime and Cavendish is looking cool in a fitted grey suit, white shirt and skinny polka dot tie. He is here to promote next month’s Abu Dhabi Tour, pro cycling’s new, glittering, end-of-season bauble, although Cavendish himself will play no part in the four-day race which ends on the billion-dollar Formula One circuit.
Nursing a shoulder injury sustained at the recent Tour of Britain, he will announce shortly after this interview takes place that he is pulling out of the world road race championships which took place in Virginia last week. The injury, so poorly timed, is a bitter pill to swallow for the 2011 world champion who felt that the Richmond course might have suited him. But Cavendish, 30, is already looking ahead.
Confirmation of cycling’s worst kept secret, that Cavendish has signed for the African Pro-Continental team MTN-Qhubeka – or Team Dimension Data as it will be known – for the next three years, at last brings into the open what we have known for weeks.
Cavendish is really going for Rio. Not just flirting with the idea. Not just keeping the door open. After the pain of 2008, when he and Bradley Wiggins missed out in the Madison, and then 2012 when he was marked out of the road race, he is hoping to make it third time lucky at the Olympics.
“To be fair,” Cavendish admits, “it has got to the point that even if it’s in synchronised swimming… an Olympic medal is the only thing I’m missing. I’m 30 years old. I want these challenges. The last few years I’ve been doing the same stuff.” Until now, he has been fairly coy on the subject of Rio. Not only does he get exhausted, and irritated, by incessant questions regarding the ‘one glaring omission on his glittering CV’, but he could not give a straight answer even if he wanted to.
Etixx-Quick Step, the Belgian team for whom he has ridden for the past three seasons, paid him €3 million (£2.2 million) a year to win races for them on the road, not to be dressed in Sky-emblazoned Great Britain skinsuits.
Cavendish was not sure where he would end up riding next year, whether he would have time to qualify, or even whether he would be selected for the omnium – his chosen, multi-race event – if he did.
He still is not sure on that last one. Ed Clancy, the two-time Olympic team pursuit gold medallist, won bronze in the omnium in 2012 and has declared his intention to go for it again. And not only is Clancy extremely talented, he is probably Team GB’s strongest team pursuit rider, the discipline which BGreat Britain prioritise above all others. This could be key to Cavendish’s chances.
Heiko Salzwedel, GB’s endurance coach, admitted to Telegraph Sport at last month’s Revolution Series event in Derby – where Cavendish made his track return, finishing second behind Clancy in the omnium – that nothing would be allowed to get in the way of the team pursuit.
Whoever rides the omnium in Rio, Salzwedel said, may need to be ‘fifth man’ in the team pursuit. It is difficult to justify picking a specialist omnium rider.
It begs the question: is Cavendish prepared to commit the time necessary to riding a round or two of the team pursuit if that is what is required? “I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m going to do some efforts with them. I’m built for it. But you need to commit so much time… “It’s more that I don’t want to let down the team [pursuit squad]. Even if you did half the training that the other guys do, to come into a group that works that hard together… I’ve never been like that. I appreciate working hard as a group.”
Qualification, at least, should be a cinch. Cavendish’s second place in the omnium in Derby, and a third place at the Dudenhofen GP in Germany the following week, enabled him to gain the points necessary to ride at World Cup events this autumn. He now just needs to finish 24th or higher in one of the 2015-16 Track World Cup events to qualify for Rio. Then it will be up to the selectors. Cavendish or Clancy. “It’s no formality,” he admits. “That’s what people have to understand. Ed is a brilliant rider. I can’t just say: ‘I’m doing the Olympics.’ But at least the door is open.”
Cavendish does have one big thing going for him. The rejigged format of the omnium which places a far greater emphasis on the final event: the points race. “Look if it was the old omnium, as it was at the last Olympics, Ed would be going, 100 per cent. The reason I’m even going for Rio is because of the points race. It really suits me.” Whatever happens, Cavendish promises, he will support British Cycling’s decision.
Certainly there will be no animosity between himself and Clancy, who go back to their earliest days together on the Great Britain performance programme, when they shared a flat in Manchester with Geraint Thomas. “Me and Ed speak all he time,” Cavendish says. “He actually helped me out in Derby. He could have got some extra points on me but he was brilliant. I’ve been straight with him and he’s been straight with me. I don’t want to get the ride because of my history in cycling or who I am or whatever. I don’t want any favours. I want to get it because I am the best man for the job.”
At the very least the extra training on the track should stand him in good stead on the road with Dimension Data over the next three years.
Cavendish will not actually discuss his move to the African team, out of respect to Etixx-Quick Step, to whom he remains contracted until the end of the year. He has declined all interviews and put out only a brief statement on Twitter.
It is clear, though, that he feels that training in the velodrome, as he did in his pomp, will help him. “I feel the benefits every time when I go from the track to the road. But I can understand why Patrick Lefevere [the Etixx-Quick Step manager], didn’t let me do it so much. He is a businessman and he was paying me a lot of money. To be fair, I have so much respect for Patrick. He’s blunt like me but he doesn’t say something that he wouldn’t say to my face. When I had lulls he always supported me. He built the team for me, he got the riders in I wanted. You know? We get on really well actually.”
Cavendish is maturing with age. Married, and now a father of three – his baby boy Frey was born last month – there remains just one big challenge left for this most bolshy and brilliant of sportsmen: shutting us journalists up. “I was talking to Brad [Wiggins] about this in Derby,” he smiles. “The main reason I want an Olympic medal is to stop you asking the question. Seven years now it’s been going on!”
Could it be third time lucky for Cavendish?
Beijing 2008: Madison
Team GB claim eight golds in the cycling but Mark Cavendish, fresh from taking four stages at the Tour de France, is the only track cyclist not to win a medal as he and Bradley Wiggins, exhausted from earlier events, finish ninth in the Madison. The pair do not speak for months. ”I’m finished, there’s nothing for me on the track now,” Cavendish, 23, says.
London 2012: Road race
Now the fastest road sprinter in the world, Cavendish arrives in London as favourite, having just won the sprint on the Champs-Elysées at Wiggins’s triumphant Tour. An all-star British team are marked out of it, though, and Cavendish is unable to challenge for victory, finishing 29th. Team GB’s cyclists go on to claim eight golds again.
Rio 2016: Omnium
Having spent three years with Etixx-Quick Step, Cavendish is moving to MTN-Qhubeka next year, partly to give himself the chance to qualify for Rio in the omnium; the six-discipline event. If selected by Team GB, he will likely come up against Team Sky’s Elia Viviani, of Italy, and current team-mate Fernando Gaviria, of Colombia.