There is a voice note waiting for me on my phone when I get off the plane at Ronaldsway airport. “Mate, I’ll be there in less than five minutes. Head outside the terminal building and you’ll see me. Green Defender.” Sir Mark Cavendish is as good as his word, pulling up outside the Isle of Man’s tiny airport five minutes later on the dot and stepping out of his car to welcome me, and the photographer, Nik, to the island.
Cavendish, 39, has always been a stickler for punctuality. That famously fastidious nature (he’s a self-confessed “control freak”) is going to need a new outlet now that his racing wheels have been hung up for good. Cavendish’s retirement at the end of last year, having won that all-important 35th stage of the Tour de France, which lifted him clear of Belgian great Eddy Merckx and into sole ownership of the all-time Tour stage wins record, brought the curtain down on one of British sport’s greatest careers. Arguably the greatest.
As it happens, the “Manx Missile” is already back in training. And for a race in Paris, too; scene of many of his most famous triumphs. But it is not the Tour de France for which he is training, it’s the Paris Marathon in April. And he admits it would be a stretch to say he will be “racing”. “I’m aiming for four and a half hours,” he says. “My knees are not really up to going any faster.”
Cavendish will be running with his younger brother, Andrew, which is the main thing. The pair – who are a year apart in age – were estranged for a long time after Andrew got into “drink and drugs problems”; he was eventually sentenced to six years in Jurby prison in 2010, at the age of 23, for importing cannabis and cocaine with intent to supply. Cavendish does not often speak about him. But today he wants to put on record just how proud he is of his sibling, and the way Andrew has got his life back on track.
“It was actually my brother who inspired me to go cycling,” Cavendish says, describing the day Andrew came home from school, aged about eight, and spoke excitedly to their mother Adele about a new cycling league for children at the National Sports Centre (NSC) in Douglas. Cavendish went too. The rest is history.
“He was more talented than I was, too,” Cavendish says. “But I took it more serious, you know? He needed to be encouraged the whole time. I didn’t. I needed people to do the opposite and tell me I was s—t. That was what drove me.”
Cavendish says it is a wonderful thing to have a brother again. “He’s a joiner now, living in Whitby. My best mate. Honestly, I’ve never been prouder of anyone than I am of him. It’s a big old thing, you know? It’s one thing to stop doing something but it’s another thing to get healthy. He’s got three kids. He’s a brilliant father. A brilliant uncle. He works so hard. He’s just bought his own house. He never had that discipline before, as long as I’ve known him! Honestly, I’m dead proud.” It feels an apt theme for our interview. Redemption. Circling back to where it all began.
And the Isle of Man is where it all began. The Cavendish family home may be in Essex, where his wife Peta and their five children, Finn, 18 (Cavendish’s stepson, from Peta’s previous relationship), Delilah, 12, Frey, nine, Casper, six, and Astrid, two, reside. But Cavendish still has a house in Laxey on the east coast of the island. His mum lives across the way. And there is no doubt he remains a Manxman at heart.
“Yeah, this is home,” he nods as he fires up the engine and the windscreen wipers on the Land Rover. “Always will be. I’m Manx. My personality is Manx. It’s more real than anywhere else for me. Here I can be just Mark. I love it.”
Just how much he loves it becomes clear over the next two hours as Cavendish takes us on a personal tour of the island; the places he grew up, the events that shaped him. It proves to be an education, peeling back the layers of one of sport’s most compelling characters.
A man who redefined the art of sprinting in his early years when he dominated the sport – cocky, supreme, bolshy, talented – before proving his doubters wrong by fighting back to the top for a second time after years spent battling physical and mental health demons.
Cavendish is often depicted in interviews as moody and brusque. And he can certainly be that. But he can also be kind and generous, big-hearted and loyal. Hence the esteem in which he was held by his teammates at virtually every team he ever rode for. And indeed the wider peloton, who afforded him a “wheel of honour” at his final race in Singapore last November (fittingly, he won the race before dissolving into Peta’s arms).
Cavendish reckons he was actually two different people for much of his career. Much as his fellow knight rider Sir Bradley Wiggins has spoken about his alter-ego, known as “Wiggo” – the character he embodied at the height of his fame, of the mod-loving, sideburn-wearing jack-the-lad who flirted with Sue Barker and jammed on stage after winning Sports Personality of the Year in 2012 – so Cavendish was “Cav” in public, as opposed to Mark, the name he prefers to use with friends and family.
“Who you are on the bike isn’t who you are as a person,” he explains. “But people expect you to be that person. Do you see what I mean?” He pauses. “But I was a d—head. That’s for sure. I can admit that now. I think that came from a place of no education about how to act when you are suddenly in the public eye. I was trying to live up to how people saw me.”
Here on the Isle of Man, Cavendish, who received his own Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement award last month, is able to be himself. And as we rattle along the A5 from Ronaldsway to Douglas and he talks about growing up on the island, and his love for the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races, and the slow pace of life here, it is a very different Cavendish to the bolshy young rider many will remember.
“Say hello to the fairies,” he says at one point. “We’re coming up to the Fairy Bridge. You have to say hello or else you’ll get bad luck.”
I think he is joking, but as we cross over a simple stone bridge, Cavendish gives a little wave and mumbles a hello.
We double back and take the coast road. Visibility is not up to much but Cavendish wants to show off the island’s best side. Then down into Douglas, peering out to Conister Rock and its 200-year old Tower of Refuge from the ferry terminal amid the gathering gloom. It was here, in his teens, that Cavendish used to board the ferry to Liverpool on his bike, for races on the mainland. “I’d sit amongst the vans,” he recalls, rain spattering off his Moncler bomber jacket. “Sometimes my dad would accompany me. But often I’d be on my own.”
Cavendish grew up young. His father, David, worked in the IT department of an accountancy firm. His mother, Adele, who comes from Harrogate, ran a dancewear and bridal shop in Douglas. They divorced when Cavendish was not yet a teenager. It had a big impact on the boys. An hour after Adele sat them down to tell them she and David were separating, Cavendish was on a ferry with the island athletics team, bound for Manchester, weeping.
We head to the NSC, where he and Andrew started out all those years ago, and walk around its 1km cycleway, which is in the process of being renamed the Sir Mark Cavendish Raceway. This is where Cavendish returned in the midst of his depression in 2019. It was a period of his life covered in excruciating detail by the 2023 Netflix documentary Mark Cavendish: Never Enough.
At that point, his career was effectively over; he had not won a race of any significance for almost three years due to injury and illness, in particular the Epstein-Barr virus. He had developed an eating disorder, been diagnosed with clinical depression, and at his lowest point was seen as at risk of self-harm or even suicide. In one memorable scene in the documentary, his psychologist, Dr David Spindler, witnesses Cavendish throwing up the contents of the previous night’s binge, admitting that he has no real expectation of fixing his patient. “I was making sure the situation wasn’t so acute I’d have to call someone to put him into hospital,” Spindler tells the documentary-makers, bluntly.
It was cycling that saved Cavendish, at least in part. One day, during a training ride, he and Spindler stopped at the NSC, where he told Spindler the story of how he first got into racing. It proved to be a lightbulb moment. Spindler managed to connect with the boy who rode his bike for the pure love of it, because it gave him a “sense of freedom”. Two years later, in 2021, Cavendish took four stage wins and, for the first time in a decade, the green points jersey at the Tour de France. It was one of the greatest comebacks in the history of sport.
We pass the house where the Cavendish brothers grew up. A four-bedroom semi on the outskirts of Douglas. There is no blue plaque. Who lives there now? “No idea.”
He shows me Fairfield Junior School, now boarded up. Then Ballakermeen High School, which Cavendish left aged 16. Then there’s the branch of Barclays bank where he worked as a cashier after leaving school. “I started the week of 9/11,” he recalls. “I had to pay Mum rent. If I was going to leave school, I had to pay my way. That was the deal.”
We pass the shop that Adele ran. “That’s how I got into ballroom dancing. One of Mum’s mates’ daughters needed a partner. I loved it.” Cavendish, famously, was a national-level ballroom dancer as a teenager, treating dance competitions with the same fierce single-minded focus he put into cycling.
He credits that period – first competing in dance competitions on the Isle of Man, and later earning a wage, paying his mum rent, travelling over to the UK for races – with making him “a bit more grown-up” than his peers when he did finally earn a spot on the newly formed British Cycling academy programme in 2004, living in student digs in Manchester alongside his fellow future champions Ed Clancy and Geraint Thomas.
The academy celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, with plenty of stories told about the young riders’ high jinks. Thomas has recalled how Cavendish made his mark when he first turned up off the ferry “Like the original boy racer from the sticks: gold Corsa, stick-on skirts around the edge, big sticker across the windscreen saying ‘Goldfinger”’. But there was always something about him. His numbers weren’t the best – indeed, Cavendish is adamant he would never be taken on now – but he was so raw, so passionate, so opinionated. “He’s still loud and confident in his ability,” Thomas said recently. “He’s always had that pure speed really. He’s gifted.”
Cavendish laughs. “Best time of my life. Some of the stuff we got up to. Sneaking girlfriends in. Getting up to all sorts. But at the core of it we were growing up. Rod [Ellingworth, the academy’s founder] gave us responsibilities, you know? Taught us the value of hard work. And respect for others.”
Cavendish’s phone rings. It is Peta. She calls two or three times during our drive. Just short conversations, a minute or less, to check in. “Astrid just saw you in the hairdresser’s,” she says on one call. “I told her, ‘No, Daddy’s not here.’ And then I turned around and it was Men’s Health!” Cavendish was on the November cover.
Astrid, who arrived in 2022, was not planned. But as is often the way with the baby of the house, she has everyone eating out of the palm of her hand now. “Oh mate,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’m complete putty. She’s f—king smart. She knows she has got me wrapped around her finger. It’s got to the point where Peta is accusing me of favouritism. I had her out here with me recently, just me and her, and I had her in bed with me. Peta’s fuming!”
We are back at the house in Laxey now. Modest from the outside, it is like a Tardis on the inside. Open-plan, smartly furnished, clean. Cavendish helped to design it himself. He calls Andrew about some thermostatic radiator valves he is installing. Adele pops over to say hello but he is busy on the phone to his brother so she says she will come back later.
Family, he says, is “everything” to him now. It was the enforced period of lockdown with his children during the pandemic that finally helped him to shake his depression; the simple joys of playing with them. “I don’t have to pretend to be anybody around them,” he says. “They teach me patience, too. I remember Finn, even Delilah, following her around, tidying up after her. But I gave up after that.”
Whatever he does next, Cavendish is adamant that he never again wants to spend as much time separated from them as he did during those years when he was constantly away training or racing, living on his own.
“I can’t wait. School runs and that. I just want a normal life. Normal stuff. I love being part of a big family. Even just dinner, with everyone all over the place. It’s chaotic. The little one is punching her brother. Another one’s running around, she’s had enough. I love it.”
Although he does not say it, there is almost certainly another reason he wants to keep his family close. In November 2021, four masked men broke into their home in Essex in the early hours of the morning and subjected the family to a violent robbery, making off with two Richard Mille watches, worth a combined £700,000, as well as a phone and a Louis Vuitton case. Cavendish was in bed with Peta and Casper at the time. Peta subsequently told a trial how one of the men held a large black “Rambo-style” knife to Cavendish’s throat and threatened him.
The memories, Cavendish admits, are still raw. “I get flashbacks all the time. To have a zombie knife held up to your throat in front of your kid?” Casper was just three at the time. “It was horrific. You think about what you could have done [differently]. Everyone thinks, ‘I’d fight.’ And of course I was swinging at first. But I tell you, anybody gets a knife held to their neck, you can’t do anything. Like, my wife’s there, my kid. I was helpless to do anything.” Three of the intruders have since been caught and sentenced. One is still on the run.
“To be fair, I’m lucky because I was there. I’m happier I was there than if it happened to Peta and the kids when I was away. I would never have forgiven myself.” Cavendish shakes his head. “They were looking for a [particular] watch that didn’t even belong to me. I had borrowed it for something. The GQ awards or something. And then I’d given it back.”
It was not just the violence Cavendish found upsetting. Some of the reaction, as if he had somehow brought it on himself by owning an expensive watch, was very hurtful. “That was almost the hardest thing. Being vilified for having expensive watches. Firstly, Richard Mille is a partner. One of the partners who stuck by me on a personal level when I was at my lowest point. Secondly, you’ve seen today where I’ve come from, you know? I’ve done everything myself. I’ve paid my taxes. Even if I had bought [that watch] myself, how can I be vilified for that? Why shouldn’t I?”
It is getting close to the time for my return flight. Cavendish offers a lift back to the airport but I call a cab. It feels wrong to end the interview on a low note. The last years of his career – the depression, the comeback, the robbery, the record-breaking Tour stage win – have clearly given him perspective. He is still spiky. Still chippy. Get him talking about young riders today, or his wages in his final seasons, or the fact that after 2016 he was only once selected by his country despite continuing to win on the biggest stage (“That hurts because, I tell you, there are guys who don’t give a f—k. I represented that jersey with so much pride”), and he will still give it both barrels. But he knows what really matters. Christmas with his family. Running the Paris Marathon with his brother in April.
What is next? Cavendish admits he is unsure. It looked as if he had a role lined up at Astana, his final team. He helped them to secure a big deal with the bike manufacturer XDS last year. But something went awry right at the end and he ended up leaving.
He hints, though, that he very much sees his future in team management. “My strength is team-building,” he says. “I know what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. These last few years have been preparing me for the next phase. I understand cycling and what is needed to succeed.”
And that is? “In my opinion the problem with the sport today is they don’t know how to tell a story. Pro sport is about inspiring, both actions and emotions. We are in an entertainment industry. I tried to do that with every team I was at.”
He certainly did. Cavendish may have been, in his own words, a dickhead at times. But he was never boring. He grins. “Let’s not beat about the bush. It’s a sport for weirdos. To do what we do you’ve got to be a bit f—king nuts.”
