THE FIRE WITHIN

Most, if not all cycling fans must have watched the steady cooling of Mark Cavendish’s sprinting career over the last four or five seasons and concluded that the days of Tour stage wins were long gone. Cavendish has famously never been a ‘numbers’ guy, which is just as well for him, because the numbers told the story starkly: one win in 2017; one in 2018; none in 2019 and 2020. Even if the data weren’t the whole story, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that the process was also misfiring. Cavendish was pulling up well before the sprints properly started in the 2018 Tour, his Dimension Data team didn’t even take him to the race in 2019, and 2020 was a write-off. The younger Cavendish fizzed and burned with energy, while the careworn thirty-something of the reluctant post-race postmortem through the late 2010s looked beat. Quantitatively and qualitatively, his career looked over. The fire appeared to have been extinguished.

However, any firefighter will tell you that smouldering embers can suddenly reignite and cause another blaze. While the rest of us were raking over the ashes and thinking back to the white hot intensity of Cavendish’s earlier career, Cavendish himself was about to start another fire.

It would be easy to say that Cavendish’s unlikely journey through 2021 was a case of stars aligning, or steps, each leading to the next. He leveraged his heft