Nearly 30 years after Mark Cavendish rode his first junior race on the Isle of Man, the most successful sprinter in pro cycling history claimed an inevitable victory in his final race in Singapore. It brought down the curtain on a sensational career that saw him surpass Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 Tour de France stage wins.
The 39-year-old – whose 165 career wins also include 17 stages of the Giro and the 2011 world road race title – has experienced moments of ecstasy and pain, invincibility and despair.
Here, we reveal what made the Manx Missile so successful – and explain why his storied career offers a blueprint for every cyclist looking to achieve big goals.
Follow your passion
From childhood rides on the windswept roads of the Isle of Man to the mountain stages of the Tour, Cavendish’s glorious 19-year career was fuelled by his raw passion for cycling.
Having been mesmerised at the age of seven by Chris Boardman winning individual pursuit gold on his futuristic Lotus bike at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Cavendish started racing aged 11.
By the time he was 13, he knew every gradient of the Isle of Man’s roads – and this passion never faded.
“As a kid, I was just pretending I was Johan Museeuw (the Belgian Classics specialist) racing along the cobbles whenever I was sprinting to the nearest road sign,” Cavendish once told me.
“Except for when I’m with my kids or my wife, on my bike is the happiest place I can be.”
Rejecting strict training rules, Cavendish preferred to ride hard in training and finish with a sprint, to replicate a real race scenario. Rain. Cold. Pain. Nothing stopped him.
This ability to sustain the ‘fun factor’ fuelled his career. And it’s a useful reminder never to let training data get in the way of the pure joy of cycling.
This passion is also what enabled Cavendish to endure all the crashes, stress and pressure – from putting up with snoring teammates in budget Campanile hotels to spending 200 days of the year away from his family.
If you really love what you do, you can handle the bad times, too.
Hone the discipline of a dancer
Cavendish credits his dedication, diligence and respect for teamwork to a surprising factor: his love of dancing. In his youth, Cavendish was a talented dancer, specialising in the Latin disciplines.
“I danced since I was eight,” he once told me.
“My dance partner and I won championships on the Isle of Man and competed in British championships. I loved the competition and discipline, but there is teamwork too. I missed cycling races when I was 12 because you can’t let your partner down.”
Honing your discipline and developing positive habits in one area of your life will influence your cycling, too.
Successful people such as Cavendish aim high in everything they do, and build powerful and productive habits as a result.
Get some perspective
Cavendish’s place in history is assured, but as a teen he spent time working in Barclays Bank, rocketing through transactions (like a sprinter) to help fund his cycling career.
Working in a regular day job helped develop Cavendish's work ethic and humility.
When he turned pro in 2005, he felt privileged to ride a bike for a living.
“I do think back to it sometimes,” he told me. “I had some great friends there and they were great people, but in terms of the job I know that every day when I wake up and it’s raining, I’d rather get out on my bike training than sit in a bank and watch it raining outside.”
However rainy it is on your ride, ask yourself: would I really rather be at home watching TV?
Shoot for the moon
Cavendish won so much because he learned to channel his natural competitive instinct, which comes out in everything from games of Monopoly to bike racing.
“Since as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be the best,” he told me.
“It wasn’t enough to be the best I could be. I had to be the best out of everyone.” In fact, his earliest memory is of organising a race across the nursery.
If you can channel your competitive instincts, it will drive you to perform at your very best.
As a young rider, Cavendish routinely struggled in lab-based fitness and performance tests.
However, put him in a race and he’d reach new levels of performance. “I guess I’m addicted to winning,” he admitted.
Train smart
Sprinting may have been the Manx Missile’s primary strength, but if he didn’t arrive at the finish in good shape, he would never have clocked up all those Tour wins.
The 2024 Tour was 3,498km – the equivalent of cycling between London and Cairo. Each rider completed half a million pedal revolutions and burnt 126,000 calories – the equivalent of 213 Big Macs.
To prepare his body, Cavendish trained for 30 to 40 hours per week, and was only at home with his family for three weeks of 2024 before the Tour.
A lot of this training was at a high tempo, too: Cavendish and his team have to ride at a fast pace in the final 50km to ensure the race finishes in a bunch sprint.
“This idea that we do nothing until the final 200m is rubbish,” he insisted. “We’re already in the red when we start sprinting.”
Train for the specifics of your challenge and you’ll be battle-ready come race day.
Pace yourself
Cavendish’s career success was built on intelligence, too. His former coach, Rod Ellingworth, has said Cavendish follows the ‘sugar lump principle’ during races.
Every big-geared effort or unnecessary acceleration chips energy off your ‘sugar lump’ of energy.
But every smart gear choice or minute spent sheltering behind a wheel preserves that sugar lump ready for an explosive sprint finish.
“Cav glides so well and he always has a nice cadence,” said Ellingworth.
“A lot of general punters get that wrong. He is always in a good cadence and he is always looking up the road, thinking about what is coming up.”
Data suggests Cav consistently uses fewer watts to get to the finish than other riders.
From clever gear choices to aerodynamic gains, the same savvy strategies that helped Cavendish clock up a record-breaking number of Tour wins can help you save vital energy in your next sportive, too.
Be a good mate
Cavendish may seem like a lone wolf, but his every Tour stage win has been dependent on the support of his teammates helping him through the mountain stages or setting up a ‘train’ of riders to tee up his sprint finish.
“My teammates absolutely bury themselves for me,” he once told me. “Every win is a team win.”
Over the decades, Cavendish was a demanding teammate known to yell at his colleagues for mistakes.
But he was also gracious and supportive, always thanking his teammates after a victory.
He was generous, too: at the 2016 Tour, he bought Rolex watches for the team. If he lost a stage, he would sit on the team bus, with a towel over his head, crippled by shame.
Every mistake got replayed in his mind, deconstructed, analysed and corrected, so next time the result would be different.
Self-doubt is poison. But self-criticism can be powerful stuff.
As ex-pro Rob Hayles once told me: “He can be very critical of the people around him, but that is only because he is extremely critical of himself. Cav is very highly strung and finds it hard to relax, but that is what makes him the best.”
Focus on your strengths
Cavendish’s career success was built on his clear-eyed view of his strengths. At 5ft 9in (1.75m), he is more aerodynamic than taller, stronger sprinters.
Although bigger riders can hit a peak power of 1,800 watts, Cavendish sprints at 1,400-1,500 watts, but – crucially – he can maintain that effort for longer. And while other sprinters accelerate at 120rpm, Cavendish sprints at 130-140rpm.
“I have always been able to get low on the bike because of my size, which reduces my frontal area,” he told me. “But the other elements are things I have worked on, and a lot of it comes from training and racing on the track when I was younger.”
The lesson is simple: make the most of your unique strengths and you’ll go far.
Address your weaknesses
Knowing your strengths also means acknowledging your weaknesses. Cavendish admits he naturally packs on weight easily, which is why he refined his nutritional habits to ensure he could battle through the mountains and make it to the sprint finish.
In his younger years, he would eat bags of Walkers Sensations. But from snacking on protein-rich pistachio nuts to prevent the munchies to enjoying raw Mediterranean vegetables coated in olive oil to improve his fibre intake, Cavendish managed his diet intelligently to ensure his natural physique never got in the way of his cycling goals.
But the real secret to his success was making sure his diet was personalised – forget general food rules and work out what’s right for you.
For example, Cavendish hates bananas, so he snacks on cherry and fig flapjacks instead. And he doesn’t like porridge, so he eats rice and eggs before a stage.
Train your brain
Every one of Cavendish’s sprint victories was dependent on making lightning-fast decisions. Do I go left or right? Attack or follow?
“In a sprint, you make hundreds of decisions a second,” he has explained.
To boost his mental agility, he would do brain-training games like Sudoku, Slitherlink and Hanidoku. He even played speed chess with his teammates to improve his decision-making under pressure.
“Every rider trains their muscles but few train their brain,” he once revealed.
Never forget that cycling is a mental challenge as well as a physical one.
Focus on the details
Cavendish famously prepares for every race in intricate detail, using Google Maps to analyse road surfaces and examining Eurosport’s helicopter television footage to unpick rival teams’ tactics. Details matter.
At Milan-San Remo in 2009, he raced for 298km before winning the sprint by an inch. “I am quite meticulous,” he has admitted. “And I have to be.”
Survive hard times
For all his success, Cavendish’s historic 2024 Tour triumph resonates because everyone knows he went through hell to get there.
Cavendish, who was knighted in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours List, suffered from periods of depression, and two crippling bouts of the Epstein Barr virus.
Marooned on 30 Tour stage wins since 2016, his hopes of winning more were beset by injuries, eliminations and non-selection. Between February 2018 and April 2021, he didn’t win a race.
But Cavendish showed great persistence and humility to mount a fairytale comeback.
Finding himself without a pro contract at the end of 2020, he rejoined Deceuninck–Quick-Step for minimum wage, spent hours behind the derny in an empty velodrome in Greece to regain his speed, and raced in wet early-season races in Belgium to build his fitness.
Aged 36, he returned at the 2021 Tour to win four stages and equal Eddy Merckx’s 34 wins. Cavendish collapsed in tears of joy.
“I want people to understand that in the middle of that spiral down, there’s a ladder,” he later revealed. “And you can get on that ladder and climb up.”
Even more hardship was to come. Determined to win that mythical 35th stage, Cavendish was dropped for the 2022 Tour and crashed out of the 2023 race.
But he didn’t quit, and after another winter of hard training, he was back for the 2024 Tour. Stage one saw him vomiting with heat exhaustion in 35°C heat.
“If you get through it, you can have an opportunity,” he insisted. And on stage 5, he took his 35th Tour win and embraced sporting immortality.
“You sprint as hard as you can until you get to the finish line,” he said. “And maybe your life changes.”