Last modified on Sunday, November 21, 2021 05.15 EST

Mark Cavendish just went out on a bicycle. He went out by bicycle this morning, and he will go out by bicycle tomorrow morning. He will go out by bicycle this afternoon. After training, he needs to return to the hotel for an interview. In fact, there is only one mode of transportation that meets the requirements. The point—it’s undeniable that this is not a particularly earth-shattering problem—is that he likes to ride a bicycle. Anytime, anywhere, anyway. This is his refuge, his freedom, his reason for existence.

Therefore, although most of us view professional cycling from a painful point of view-lung-injury sprints, brutal training cycling, tortuous mountaineering in the Tour de France-Cavendish has a different view of things. . Although he endured all the sweat and pain in the saddle, he knew from the painful experience that the real pain was not being able to ride at all.

More than ten years ago, as a typical representative of the golden age of British cycling, Cavendish broke into our collective consciousness. Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton and others sought glory on the track, embracing the world of marginal gains, body fat calipers and ultra-sensitive stopwatches, while Cavendish chose the romance of the road and won classics such as Milan Competition in San Remo in 2009 and the World Championship in 2011. But his most cherished victory was in the Tour de France, the most prestigious cycling race in the world. Between 2008 and 2016, he won a staggering 30 stages. "In the past, I thought I could choose to win," he now said in his Belgian hotel room, just with a hint of desire. "We are so dominant."

All of this alone is enough to make him one of the greatest sprinters of all time, and of course one of the greatest cyclists of all time in the UK. With his career declining sharply from 2017, it feels like Mark Cavendish’s story has been written and the journey is complete.

But Cavendish has other ideas. This summer, at the age of 36, he returned to the tour in the most unlikely scenario, winning four more stages, bringing him and the legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx to a record of 34. The field record was flat. This fact is impressive enough. However, in the context of a debilitating disease, a severe clinical depression, public rejection of him, and a movement that largely abandoned him, it should probably become the most fascinating of our time. One of the eye-catching movement revivals.

The first time I saw Cavendish was in Copenhagen in 2011, on the eve of the men's world championship road race. At that time, the world of the boy racer was at his feet. Sponsors lined up at his door. He is destined to become one of the stars of the upcoming London Olympics. However, the man at the center of this maelstrom is still essentially a boy from the Isle of Man: honed and warm at the British Cycling Center of Excellence in Manchester, not accustomed to fame, and confused by all the attention he seems to attract. Around that time, people often heard an emotion—from someone who barely knew him—cavendish was an excellent cyclist, but not necessarily the kind of person you want to spend too much time on.

"Think of me as a 20-year-old," he pointed out. "No media training, institutionalization, just being pushed into the spotlight. But as a person, I must have grown up. I have children and I have a wife. This has changed you. I have seen the other side of the spectrum of life. It makes you cherish what you have."

Some things have not changed: a devilish smile, a deep analytical mind, a sincere attempt to answer an honest question honestly, and a very low tolerance for nonsense. But as time and trends make us all soft, Cavendish occasionally has a sharp public image. He is now a family man, married to model and writer Peta Todd, and has four children. He has a strong sense of responsibility not only to the people he loves but also to the sports he has devoted his life to. His success this year has not been grudgingly respected, but has won the sincere feelings of cyclists and ordinary fans: this is the highest victory of an athlete who has walked through hell and walked out of the other side.

You will feel that Cavendish still feels vague about all this even when he is very old. "It's difficult because I didn't expect anything," he said of his reaction to the success of the tour. "So when it came, it was beautiful. It felt a lot more humane. Throughout my career, people said "well done." But now people say "thank you." Thank you for what? Damn hell. I am very touched."

Part of the reason Cavendish’s story resonates with so many people is that he has to fight the same demons that many of us face: poor health, self-doubt, and to some extent, the good times are over. The nagging feeling. "The process of coming back, from not being able to walk to the bathroom, not being able to climb the stairs, to returning to the Tour de France: everything before this year made it easy to urinate in the mountain stage, I tell you," he said with a smile. "You will know what real pain is."

But we should probably start from scratch. For Cavendish, the story began in early 2017, when he started to feel unusually tired during training. He was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, one of the causes of glandular fever, which kept him bedridden for weeks.

"Some people will never get better," he said very truthfully. "I would say it was two or three years later that I stopped thinking about it. This is a timid disease. It will appear when you feel stressed or exhausted."

Cavendish has both. The pressure to stay ahead after years of frictionless dominance began to have an impact. To make matters worse, his condition was misdiagnosed for several months. "Someone told me that I can train again in medicine," he said. "And I am not. I still have Epstein-Barr in my system. The only thing that proves to be helpful is rest, pure rest. And I did the opposite, because medical professionals told me that I was fine. Then I stopped eating. Because then you have to become lighter and it starts to bother you. I am suffering from clinical depression."

So began the next challenge. As a young cyclist, Cavendish always laughs at athletes who use mental health issues as an excuse for poor performance. Now he is trapped in his home in Essex, and the walls are beginning to close. "Before I got depression, I was one of those people who didn't take mental health seriously," he said. "I really think this is an excuse. Get rid of it, what's wrong with you? That's why I am passionate about talking about it now. I get it as karma. This mentality of thinking that it is an excuse is very harmful. It is not only unable to Help people get better. It makes people worse."

Every patient with mental health problems experiences them in a different way. For some people, this is a strong, overwhelming sadness, or a chronic lethargy. For others, this is a kind of paralysis, a kind of continuous external judgment. For Cavendish, depression manifests itself as a kind of photographic film. "How fragile you became, how illogical, it was crazy," he recalled. "You have no logical thinking. You can’t control it. It’s not that you don’t care. You don’t care enough, thinking you don’t care. The visual images are all the opposite. My family life has been affected, my career has been affected. I am trying to get a contract. The children are too young to understand, but what is certain is that Peta is difficult to do."

Although Cavendish's cycling career is falling apart, his career has undergone a similar transformation. In the 2019 season, he did not win a game for the first time in 16 years. After a fierce disagreement with manager Doug Ryder, he did not even enter the starting line of the Tour de France that year and was excluded by his Dimension Data team. For the rider who is widely regarded as one of the legends of the sport, this is a cruel lesson of the cruelty of professional cycling. This is a race without emotion, and your value depends only on your next prize check.

"Yes, this is terrible," he said. "How many despicable people in this sport break my heart. But just the whole world."

By the end of 2020, Cavendish seems to have no way at all. His new team, Bahrain McLaren, decided not to renew. Once again, he ended the year without winning. Even his most ardent supporters have given up hope and are now quietly urging him to go away and leave his legacy. The phone doesn't ring anymore. "People still bless me, but they are becoming less and less," he said. "That is the hardest thing."

The contract for the 2021 season is running out. His old club Deconic Quick-Step gave him a life-saving straw, even though he caught the ball several times. His minimum wage is about 40,000 euros. He must find his own sponsor. And, most importantly, the team already has a core of outstanding sprinters led by the talented Irishman Sam Bennett. Cavendish will have to participate in small races in remote areas, fly low-cost airlines and stay in budget hotels: no red carpets, no star bills, and of course no Tour de France.

Cavendish didn't mind. After all, he is happy to be back on his bike. "No matter where I am, I am always a rider they can summon, and I will participate in the race," he said. Gradually, he began to show some flickers of his old form. He won several stages in the Turkish Tour, this was his first victory in three years, and performed well on the Belgian Tour. Nevertheless, only Turkey and Belgium. He still hasn't beaten anyone notable. Even when Bennett's knee injury caused Cavendish to accidentally take a shot in the Tour de France, no one seriously expected him to do well. Well, almost no one. "I know I'm back," he said. "I feel like me before. I know I can climb to the top again."

When you are a sprinter, the tour may last six to seven days. When the track is flat enough, you can really win the stage. The rest of the time you are just surviving, climbing seemingly endless peaks in the Alps and Pyrenees, trying to stay within strict time limits. (As Cavendish himself discovered in 2018, you fall behind too much after the winner of the game and you quit the game.) "It's just pain," he said. "This is too bad. There is no reward other than the opportunity to do it again the next day."

These passages may be the most distressing part of Cavendish's new book "Tour de France", which records his comeback tour with uncompromising and meticulous details. The most interesting thing is that when he takes us into the middle of the professional group, its competition and tactics, pressure and pushing, and the ever-present threat of catastrophic collapse. Cavendish has an extraordinary memory for the details that border the photo. He still remembers every detour on the road, every bottleneck, and the ideal route to bypass every French roundabout.

Most importantly, he remembers victory. The first victory, on the fourth day, rushed to the small town of Fogère in Brittany, which made him burst into tears. "It's like losing weight, I can't stop crying," he wrote. "Everything that happened in the past few years seemed to shock me." Three more victories followed, putting him on par with Merckx's record, even though he missed the chance to break the record on the last day of Paris, when he was at the Champs Elysées. She was almost defeated on the street.

If Cavendish’s early career was amazingly efficient, and a man’s ruthless and primitive speed on the court is simply fantastic, then his comeback has a certain fairytale quality: in the original harsh year of mankind, One of the stories that people feel good about. Luck played a role. It always does. But again, he pointed out: "I know how sick I am. I know where I have to come back from. I signed the minimum wage and found a sponsor for the team. That's not star alignment. That's when I move the stars to Right location."

For the first time in some time, Cavendish found himself not only admired, but also loved, and it didn't matter to him either way. "It doesn't matter to be liked or disliked," he said. "In sports, you have your own personality and style, but this does not translate into what you do as a person. You can fake it, and many drivers do it. They play very well, but they are actually Bastard. I would rather go the other way. I would rather be proud of the person I saw in the mirror than the person I saw on TV."

Cavendish had thought about retiring at the end of the season, but he decided to move on for the time being, while still feeling good physically and still having the game to win. Does breaking Merckx's record mean anything to him? "No," he sneered, and you believed him. The cold accumulation of records, numbers and statistics has never really moved him. Complaining—whether real or imagined—is no longer a source of fuel. "I have lost my desire to prove others wrong," he said. His historical heritage has always inspired him and is now almost guaranteed: "As far as my physical ability on the bike is concerned, I can't do anything."

Then why does he still do this? Well, all this is back to the bicycle. The pleasure of sheer speed. The promise of open roads and oncoming wind. "This is freedom," he explained. "You are not restricted by the arena. You don't have to go to the training venue. There is no tee time. You can leave your front door at the time you want, as long as you want to go as long as you want, the speed you want, the distance you want . You can go out with others, or you can go out by yourself. The world is your oyster. This feeling is why I started. I still have that feeling."

Tour de France: The Tour de France I made history written by Mark Cavendish was published on November 25 by Ebury Spotlight, priced at £20