Project Rainbow (27 page)
Authors: Rod Ellingworth
Mark Cavendish will end up in the history books as the best sprinter cycling has ever had. You can argue about whether he’s there now, but what I do know is that there’s more to come. He has said to me that he wants to be remembered for certain things when he stops racing, which is why in spring 2013, when he won the points jersey at the Giro d’Italia, it mattered so much – it completed the triple, in the wake of the points jerseys at the Tour de France and the Vuelta. He dreams of winning Milan–San Remo in the rainbow jersey. I think he’ll win the Worlds a second time, and he could certainly win at San Remo again. He wants to smash Eddy Merckx’s record for career Tour stage wins and put it on the shelf – and that’s within his reach. I know he wants to wear the yellow jersey in
the Tour. He’s hungry enough to keep going until the age of thirty-three or thirty-four if he stays free of injuries. That need to win drives him insane sometimes, but it’s part of him and it means he doesn’t seem to get tired of racing. Back in 2003, who would have thought Mark Cavendish would end up doing everything that he has done – and that he still can do?
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Great Britain went back to the 2012 world road championship in Valkenburg, Holland, with a defending champion, Mark Cavendish, and a Tour de France winner, Bradley Wiggins. It wasn’t a course for Cav, with a steep hill to the finish, and Brad wasn’t in the form he had enjoyed from March to August that year. So we went with the same mindset as at Mendrisio in 2009, at the start of the Worlds project: have a goal, and build the team behind that. We knew Jonathan Tiernan-Locke was a good little climber and would have an outside chance, although he had never raced the distance before, and the lads got him in the perfect position on the final lap. Jon didn’t quite have the legs, but you couldn’t help but be encouraged to see young riders like him, Luke Rowe and Ian Stannard racing with no obvious nerves in the final laps.
Cav will get his chance to win again in 2016, when the Worlds are in Qatar on another flat course. With a true champion like him all you have to do is get him – or her – to within a few kilometres of the line, and nineteen times out of twenty they will bring it home for you. The task in the meantime is to win the Worlds with riders other than Mark: both Brad and Chris Froome are capable of getting on the podium on a hilly course, but I’d like to think about other leaders for the British team as well – Geraint Thomas or Peter Kennaugh. Pete is a
proper bike racer with a killer mindset like Cav’s when he’s on his terrain; 2015, when the race is in Richmond, Virginia, might suit him, as he’ll be a mature athlete by then. Great Britain have dominated the Worlds on a flat course once; if we truly want to be seen as a cycling nation, a rainbow jersey at the end of a hilly world road championship would be a fantastic way to do it.
- aerodynamics,
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