Cavendish has always been an emotional man, in touch with how he’s feeling and unafraid to show us. Taking him one win ahead of the great Eddy Merckx, the 35th victory should have brought euphoria but that is to imagine he’s like every other superstar. After hugging his kids, kissing his wife, embracing his team-mates and having been touched on the shoulder by pretty much every rider in this Tour, he turned to a TV interviewer and softly said: “I don’t know how I’m feeling. I’m ecstatic but I don’t feel I’m bouncing off the walls. Almost like a relief, like a weight’s been lifted. I’ve had 19 days at home [this year] but we’ve got this year and then we [his family] have got all the time in the world. I’m sorry I’m not bouncing.”
Perhaps this was nothing more than a mature and heartfelt response to what he’s been through. After four stage victories at the 2016 Tour, things went wrong for Cavendish and he wouldn’t win at the Tour for another five years. Early in 2017 he contracted the Epstein-Barr virus and he crashed out of that year’s Tour. The year after he failed to make the time cut on stage 11 and wasn’t even selected by his team for the 2019 Tour. Through this period he suffered from depression and he learnt about life.
We spoke over a coffee in a bar near Alicante last December when he was immersed in another training camp, a week before Christmas. And he said something so profound that he’s the only athlete who could have said it. “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 these 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.”