Etape. Richard Moore

Aubenas sits on a hill overlooking the valley.

      It was the kind of stage that Cavendish, the best sprinter of his or perhaps any other generation, would have studied and then probably dismissed. Cavendish and Riis had this in common, if nothing else: both were assiduous in their preparation. Every evening, while some riders were playing computer games or phoning home, Cavendish would study the official road book: the bible of the Tour, detailing every village, every hill, every bend in the road, along with brief tourist-style descriptions of the start and finish towns (‘Aubenas,’ read the entry for stage nineteen, ‘perched on a rocky spur overlooking the Ardèche Valley, with a population of 12,000, benefits from the temperament, the accent and the radiant smile of the south. In the summer, the sunlight illuminates the treasures of the town, captivating the senses of those who visit the city of the Montlaurs …’).

      When Cavendish looked at the profile for the stage to Aubenas, it did not look promising. A lumpy first 50km included two category-four climbs, and four peaks in total: up, down, up, down, up, down, up. These so-called ‘transitional’ stages can be the hardest of all. There would be too many riders who would fancy their chances. And it would be their last one, with Ventoux reserved for the overall contenders, and the Champs-Élysées, on the final day, reserved for the sprinters: for Cavendish.

      It was the final week; everyone was tired. Nerves were frayed, tempers were short. The day before the stage to Aubenas was a time trial around Lake Annecy, over 40.5km, which Cavendish wanted to treat as another ‘rest’ day. Only, it didn’t quite work out like that. When he heard his time, at half-distance, he realised there was a danger he could finish outside the time limit and be eliminated. He had to ride the second half almost flat out. And he had wasted some seconds – and expended needless nervous energy – when he rode past some British fans on the hill. ‘Cavendish, get up off your arse!’ yelled one. Cavendish briefly stopped pedalling, glared at the spectator, and yelled back his own insult.

      It was typical Cavendish. But in the end he comfortably made the time limit in the time trial: 126th, five and a half minutes down on Alberto Contador.

      He had already won four stages at the 2009 Tour, the same as in 2008, when he didn’t finish, pulling out with a week to go. Now he was going to finish, at least. But for Cavendish, ‘at least’ was never enough. Still only twenty-four, this feisty, edgy young man from the Isle of Man already had the air and attitude of someone who knew he was capable of something special. He was cocky; he carried himself with the swagger of a boxer rather than a cyclist.

      He wasn’t big-headed, he said after explaining that he was the fastest sprinter in the world. It was just a fact. How could telling the truth be construed as arrogance? Never mind that he was speaking in June 2008, before he had won any stages of the Tour. He had a point, and it wasn’t long before he hammered it home. When he sprinted to those four stage wins in 2008, it was an arresting sight. He was unlike any other sprinter. He was Usain Bolt in reverse. Just as the giant Bolt broke the mould among track sprinters, so did Cavendish, a diminutive five foot nine in a field of six-plus monsters. Low-slung, weight forward, elbows bent to about seventy degrees, nose almost touching his handlebars, he resembled a cycle-borne missile. Perhaps only Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, the ‘Tashkent Terror’ of the 1990s, looked so fast. Alongside Cavendish and the equally diminutive Abdoujaparov, other sprinters were bigger, more powerful, and punched a larger hole in the air. Unlike the crash-prone Abdoujaparov, Cavendish could ride his bike in a straight line. In fact, his bike-handling skills were extraordinary, honed by riding on the steep, sloping boards of the velodrome in fast, chaotic madison races.

      Cavendish was a bundle of contradictions. Hot-headed yet analytical. Supremely self-confident and yet, at times, cripplingly self-conscious. Highly sensitive – he would burst into tears and declare his love for his team-mates – and at times coarse and aggressive. Just ask those British fans in Annecy. Blessed with intelligence, but sometimes unable – to his own frustration – to express himself as he would like.

      He worried about his Scouse-sounding Isle of Man accent; about how people would judge him. ‘Although I talk like an idiot, I’m not really a fool, like,’ he tells me. Then there was the question of his athletic ability: were his gifts of the body or mind? As a teenager, Cavendish famously ‘failed’ the lab test designed by the British Cycling Academy to weed out those who didn’t have the physiology to make it as a professional; he was given a reprieve, and went on to become not just a decent rider, but one of the greatest. Whatever his physical gifts, one thing was certain: his desire. Cavendish didn’t seem to want success; he needed it. And he had decided, long ago, that he would have it.

      There was something else. His ability to analyse what happened in the frenetic closing kilometres and metres of a stage of the Tour de France was uncanny, even a little spooky. It was as though Cavendish had been watching the action unfold not from ground level, but from the air; as if he had access to the TV camera in the helicopter hovering overhead. Call it spatial awareness, or peripheral vision; whatever it was, Cavendish seemed able, invariably, not only to be in the right place, but to know what was happening around and behind him: where riders or teams were moving up fast, or slowing down, or switching; and adjusting his position accordingly to emerge from the mêlée and throw his arms in the air in victory. (The peloton might look organised and fluid, even serene at times. It’s not. And in the final kilometres, it’s chaos. A neo-pro, Joe Dombrowski, sums it up best: ‘People don’t realise how argy-bargy it is. When you watch it on TV, it looks like everybody just nicely rides together and occasionally there’s a crash. But it’s a constant fight for position.’)

      Road racing was memorably described by the American journalist Owen Mulholland as ‘chess at 150 heartbeats a minute’. In the bunch sprints, it is chess at 200 heartbeats a minute. Coincidentally, chess is something Cavendish plays. But speed chess. ‘Ten seconds a move. You can’t think, you just have to move.’

      The 2008 Tour offered a glimpse of Cavendish’s other weapon, besides his lightning speed, his bike-handling and analytical and positioning skills. His team, Columbia-High Road, formed a lead-out the likes of which the sport had seldom seen. It was a team of strong riders but built around their young sprinter. Few teams are so assured in their focus. Their confidence in him could be seen in the way they rode. The cockiness, the swagger: it seemed that his team bought into this, and fed off it, reflecting their leader’s confidence, and reinforcing it.

      * * *

      I meet Cavendish in the deserted coastal town of Calpe in southern Spain, in the bar of an out-of-season hotel. It’s early January. It is a pretty bleak setting. And Cavendish is cagey and monosyllabic when asked about recent controversies – there are always recent controversies with Cavendish – and immediate plans. But ask him to discuss his best ever stage win in the Tour de France and he is tranformed. He sits upright. His eyes – framed by long, cow-like eyelashes – widen and sparkle. He uses his hands to speak. And he recites what happened as though he was reading from the road book, recalling every corner, every hill, every pothole.

      But first, he has to settle on which stage win is his ‘greatest’. He thinks aloud. There are some contenders. Stage eighteen in 2012, from Blagnac to Brive-la-Gaillarde, three days from Paris, is one. ‘It was a fucking hard day. Block headwind, 230k, and it wasn’t flat, it was heavy roads.’ It was doubly – or triply, or quadruply – hard because he felt he was going against the orders of his team, Team Sky, who led the race with Bradley Wiggins. The team meeting that morning had been confused: Sean Yates, the director, told them to take it easy, at which point Cavendish, who had been led to believe they would set it up for him, raised his hand: ‘What about me?’

      Wiggins piped up: ‘I’m in favour of riding for Cav,’ and the plan was changed. But Cavendish did not have the support of old; he was feeding off scraps. In the end, in the final kilometres into Brive, it was Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen who helped him, but Cavendish still had an awful lot to do: there were riders up the road in a break, strong riders, and going into the final kilometre it seemed that they would hang on.

      ‘At 750 metres to go, I did this calculation,’ says Cavendish. ‘I used Edvald to slingshot to the break; I did it in a split second. I knew, if I go now … I timed it perfectly. I didn’t sprint;