IF YOU LIVE on the Isle of Man and have been sentenced to jail, the building that you’ll inevitably call home is a grey, star-shaped structure beside an RAF airbase in the north of the island.
It was a place that I’d occasionally passed on bike rides but, needless to say, never expected to see from the inside. That, though, changed one day in the spring of 2010.
A few months earlier, I’d got the news as I waited at Frankfurt airport for a connecting flight to the Tour of Missouri: Andy, the younger brother who had once also been my training partner, but in recent years had gradually become a stranger, had been arrested on drugs offences and was facing time in prison. In April 2010 he stood in a courtroom and waited for a judge to deliver his verdict. The judge spoke: the defendant was guilty on four charges and sentenced to six years in prison.
When I’d heard about the arrest, my predominant emotion had been anger, but that had soon passed and been replaced by concern. In the same period, my friend Jonny Bellis had almost lost his life in a motorcycle accident, and the ordeal that his parents endured in the days, weeks and months that followed had given me a wake-up call: as my cycling career had progressed, I’d become more and more self-absorbed and less and less attuned to what was happening in my family’s life. Andy going to jail was painful for all of us, but it was also an opportunity for me to help bring us closer together.
As soon as his prison sentence began, Andy had started writing me letters and we’d spoken on the phone. It took a couple of months, but we then arranged my first visit. I was nervous, naturally I suppose, when I pulled up that day in the car park, walked over to the gatehouse, gave my name and who I was there to see. When I was finally shown into the visiting area, Andy was waiting for me with arms spread wide. It was like the last few years hadn’t happened.
We talked that day like we’d never talked before. About everything. Like brothers should. The hour flew by. A few weeks later I was back again, and Andy was doing great: every time I visited, in fact, he’d learned a new skill, got a new qualification, in some way moved forward. He finally did his GCSEs, taught himself to play the piano, then the guitar, then he was writing songs. I started to think, and still believe now, that it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He was finally released after three years, not six, on good behaviour.
Andy was anxious about getting out, not least because he’d got married young and had a wife waiting for him. He’d been a joiner before going in and was lucky when he was released to find a guy who had also done time and could offer him the same kind of work, to help put him back on track. That’s one advantage of living on a small island like the Isle of Man – people tend to look out for each other. Andy seems determined to take his second chance and is applying himself much more now than he ever did before. It’s nice, for me, to see that he no longer takes his life for granted, just like I no longer take my brother and my parents for granted.
Obtuse though it may seem, this all helps to explain why Delilah’s tiny outstretched hand wiped away all of my disappointment on the Champs Elysées. Cycling and my career were, are more important than ever – but they’re important because of what they mean to my family. Every time I climb on to my bike now, I do it for them and their future. While I had always known that I was emotional, a big softy double-wrapped in alpha male, I would also never have believed how becoming a parent and discovering the real meaning of unconditional love would transform me and the way I view the world.
Of course this doesn’t mean that losing a sprint won’t still eat me alive and make my insides crawl. That was exactly how I felt on the Champs until the second I stepped out of that doping control to be greeted by Peta, Finn and Delilah. That night we and the whole team went with the sponsor for a plush, end-of-Tour celebration dinner, had a laugh and a joke and a drink like everyone else, but I still couldn’t pretend that I was satisfied with my two stage wins. On the journey home the next day and for the next few weeks, in fact, the memory of the sprints that I’d lost would prod, pursue and preoccupy me. Even after finding out in Gap that my cranks had been uneven and piecing together everything else that could possibly have hindered me in those sprints, I still couldn’t, wouldn’t rest until I knew for sure this was how it was going to be now – I would be fast, sometimes still the fastest, but no longer emphatically faster than all the rest.
The only way to test the theory was to get back on my bike and back to racing. The Tour of Denmark started ten days after the Tour de France and gave me the answer I needed, the answer I was hoping for, but the answer that I was too afraid to expect: all week I felt like a distant, far superior relation of the rider that I’d been in that Tour, with a different level of zest in my legs, a different speed and a different fitness. On the traditional, race-ending stage to Frederiksberg in the suburbs of Copenhagen, I felt quicker, stronger, more agile than I had even when winning on the same finish line 12 months earlier, and before that in 2007. Maybe there was life in the old, 28-year-old dog yet.
Over the course of the week in Denmark, in fact, I had finally realised what the problem at the Tour had been. It was the antibiotics that I’d been taking at the start – they always knackered me, but only after I’d stopped taking them and for a week, in some cases a fortnight, after that. It had happened in the spring of 2012, and it had happened now in the summer of 2013. At the Tour I simply hadn’t been myself. It had been the first time in my career that I had not found form somewhere on the route of the Tour de France.
This, then, was all very reassuring, but as I write a few weeks later, I’m not kidding myself, either: my best years as a sprinter are more likely to be behind than in front of me. This, at least, is in terms of what my God-given speed will allow me to do, even if, over the next few years, I discover and develop ways to eke even more out of that innate ability. After the 2013 Tour, even accounting for the antibiotics and their effects, I had already decided that 2014 may be the year when, for the first time, I have to dedicate substantial time and energy to working on my sprint in training. I’m not old yet, and it’ll be a few years before natural decay robs me of my speed, but the more seasons you race as a professional cyclist, the more your body is being conditioned to ride at relatively low intensities over long periods of time, several hours a day. This is helpful in one sense, as sprinting is also a test of freshness, and as the years go by your body adapts itself to these drawn-out, multiple-hour efforts. Unfortunately, it also means that you’re gradually losing brute velocity.
Another important consideration, of course, is your opponents. You can never legislate for the emergence of a once-in-a-generation talent, and it may be that, in the second half of my career, a nemesis comes along to ruin all of my plans and take my records. Could that rider be Marcel Kittel? Who knows? At the moment he’s a very fast, above all very powerful rider against whom I’m still pretty confident in a head-to-head drag race. It’s not for me to point out, but a few shrewd observers did remark after the Tour that I had won four stages out of 14, aged 23, in my second Tour, whereas this year he won four out of 21, at age 25. Whatever happens over the next few years, I do know that he’s a lovely guy and a fantastic advert for sprinting and cycling. I just hope that, one day soon, the way he defends his sport and his transparency about anti-doping is rewarded with some positive coverage at home in Germany.
If it’s not other riders, judging by the way professional cycling has evolved in recent years, it may be race organisers who end not only my reign but the opportunity for any sprinter to take his place among the crowned heads of the sport. Television rules, we know, and these days so do social networks. The message being sent from armchair viewers to race organisers on Twitter, in particular, is that sprints are boring and more climbs are what is required. The Vuelta a España now finishes up a mountain every other day, the Giro d’Italia is similar; even the Tour de France has cut down on the number of stages likely to yield bunch gallops. Sprints and sprinters are being phased out, or at least marginalised, and it’s because when people say they’re ‘boring’, what they really mean is that they don’t understand them. There’s also a huge misconception, a blatant failure to acknowledge the evidence lurking behind those calls for more mountains, more summit finishes; they are more boring because the Riccardo Riccòs, the Leonardo Piepolis, the Lances – riders who would attack at the bottom of an Alpine climb and solo to the finish – those riders are gone and we all know why.
What we’re left with is a cleaner sport, but one that’s much more conservative, with riders making moves much later in stages because they’re not physically capable of mimicking their doped-up predecessors. Hence, races peppered with climbs and major tours laden with summit finishes will generally end in disappointment … for the fans, as well as for exponents of what I still consider to be my noble art, sprinting.
One day, who knows, I might be able to influence these things in a different capacity. I’d love to run my own team, or perhaps poacher will turn gamekeeper and I, the ‘Bad Boy’ sprinter, the supposed scourge of the cycling establishment, will end up behind a desk drawing up plans for cycling’s future. Before you run for cover, that’s still a long way off, and there are still plenty of boxes left to tick on that list of things to do, races to win and records to break before I retire. One thing my experience at Team Sky in 2012 certainly taught me, and will remain as a guiding principle as long as I’m still riding at the top level: the Tour de France is my raison d’être as a cyclist, the fulcrum of everything that I do, and something that I shouldn’t and won’t sacrifice ever again.
‘Legacies’ are for old legs whose days of winning sprint finishes are long gone, but I can at least begin to think about how I’d like to be remembered. A few words on a mucky stone, maybe draped with some old cycling jerseys, should say it all: Mark Cavendish, cyclist, Tour de France lover and fighter, former world champion and, above all, family man.