What’s next for Sir Mark Cavendish? It’s a question cycling fans have been asking themselves for years. The first whispers came in October 2020, when on a torrid day out at Gent-Wevelgem, the teary-eyed Manxman said he had just finished “perhaps the last race of my career”. Fans gasped. What will he do now?
Hindsight, of course, tells us it wasn’t his last race. There would be the comeback Tour de France in 2021, when he won four stages and drew level with Eddy Merckx’s all-time stage win record. Then came the national title he won from the breakaway in 2022, the Giro d’Italia stage win in Rome in 2023, and the unfortunate crash out of the Tour later that summer. He was scheduled to retire at the end of the season. Was that the last we’d see of Cavendish? What would come next?
