Mark Cavendish - World Champion Cyclist HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk. Over the past five years, my guest has enjoyed the

reputation of being the fastest man on two wheels. Mark Cavendish is a

cycling phenomenon, an explosive sprinter, a world champion, and the

winner of more Tour de France stages than any other Briton. He also has

the reputation for blunt talk in a sport tainted by illegal drug use.

Has cycling cleaned up its act and thrown out the cheats?

Mark Cavendish, welcome to HARDtalk. What has been more important for

your cycling career, strength of body or strength of mind? Strength

of mind. If you look at lab tests, growing up, it was my will to win

that got me through. Cycling, kept me riding. It's not even a debatable

subject. You say will to win. Explain to me how deep that sort of

competitiveness, the winning mentality, runs. For as long as I

can remember. It was not enough to be the best that I could be. When

people tell you to be your best, that was not enough. I wanted to be

the best of everyone. Whether it was a spelling test, or general

knowledge quiz, I had to win at everything. I did not always win,

obviously. But my mentality was that I was going out to win. That is a

bit of a contradiction. You say that you were not the strongest, maybe

you were not even physically built to be the best, you have commented

about your own short legs compared to some of your rivals, that

physically your body was not naturally built for cycling,

therefore, arguably it is more difficult to win. Why did you

embrace cycling? I kind of talk generally that I'm not good at

cycling. Sprinting, I am very good. My shortness helps me. To get into

the sprint. I would be suited to sprinting on the track. But it is

kind of like a different sport to what I do. For me, the nice sprint

at the end of 200 kilometres... You have done the endurance, you have

survived climbs, you have gone 250 kilometres, then you have to go to

another level. I'm not good at getting over the mountains. But it

is not so hard that I physically cannot do it, I just suffer more.

You have to push it to limits. That is what I can do. But it is worth

it. It is always nice to win. We will talk more about the way that

your career and life is gone, getting inside your head, and you

use this word, suffer, and suffering. There is something very

particular about cycling. You captured it. When you said of the

Tour de France, it is like somebody torturing you, except you are doing

it to yourself, and the person who can take it longest wins.

Physiologically, I cannot win the Tour de France. My muscle

composition is for sprinting. It is not for going across mountains. I

can have a high output of power for a short amount of time, kind of

medium power, I can hold it on the redline. I can go very anaerobic,

but I cannot go the line between anaerobic and aerobic. That means

you will never be the outright winner, but you have won 25 stages.

You have also won the overall points classification which goes to the

best sprinter. The more consistent rider. So getting back to this idea

that you have triumphed in an event which you say yourself represents an

extraordinary form of torture, I just wonder how year after year,

after year, you find it within yourself to go back to that. I love

it. It may be a bit sadistic but I love it. The emotional rollercoaster

that you get is as great as that feeling, not ecstasy, but the

feeling of joy you get when you know that you have pushed yourself and

you have got success from doing that. We race 100 days a year. There

are two other grand tours. There are also week-long stage races and

single day races. The Tour de France, for me, is the pinnacle.

What is also intriguing about it, and your form of road racing, it is

a mix of highly individualistic and a very lonely place to be, you and

your bike, enduring the pain, but also it is built on teams and team

work. You cannot win without having the support of your team. Are you a

selfish sportsman? Not at all. Quite the opposite. I need the team to

win. Some guys do not need a team to win. I cannot compare it to any

other sport. You ride in a team, yet there is only one guy who crosses

the line. A striker scores the only goal of the match but his whole team

wins. We do win as a team, but there is only one rider who goes on the

podium. Only one rider gets the glory. Do you want the glory? You

have to look at it like this. Any professional sport is

commercialised. It is sponsors, people paying money to have their

brand advertised. In cycling, the name of the team is the name of the

sponsor. So technically we are moving billboards. And the best way

to display the sponsor's logo is across the line with your hands in

the air. There are nine guys on the team in Tour de France. On a sprint

day, it is not like anybody can go and win. We have to find the most

efficient way to display our sponsor's logo. We are getting nine

guys. That is very cynical. It is a way to put it, so it is not a load

of guys, why would they work for them? It's like building a kit car.

A lot of pieces go together in a certain way. You are not going to

stick the cylinders where the brake pedal goes. It does not go like

that. So you put an engine together, a car together, and the bit that

makes the noise is the bit that makes the noise. You say you

understand the importance of the team, but it is fair to say, that in

your career, you have not always found it easy. These are the words

of David Brailsford, who was a cycling guru for the British Olympic

team, and you have worked closely with him, he says that Mark's

general view on life is that he knows better than anybody else about

everything. You are a kind of a difficult guy to work with. He says

that with a smile on his face. I have known him for many years. We

have a good relationship. I am not afraid to put my point across.

Cyclists, especially the guys that he works with, a lot of them, they

are silent. They are not interested in pushing boundaries. They are

there to win. They do not pipe up if things are good. They do not pipe up

when things are bad, they moan to each other. They do not necessarily

pipe up to improve things. I am critical of things that do not work.

But I find a solution. There are mechanics who will tell you that I

am the only rider who will ever sit there two hours with a mechanic and

go through a bike to make sure that everything is working well. I'm the

first person to heap praise as well. They are quick to be critical of

things, when things go right, they take it for granted. I also offer a

solution when I criticise. It is at its most brutal in the sprint

finish, when you have one dozen or more sprinters, who have trained for

this moment at the end of a long stage, and you are all coming for

the line. There, to the outside observer, it looks like chaos, it

looks extraordinarily dangerous and highly aggressive. How far are you

prepared to push it? Sorry to blow the kind of romance out of the

sprint, a lot of guys do get aggressive. I am small, I cannot be

aggressive. What am I going to be aggressive against, a guy who is six

foot four? I am nearly a stone less than the other guys. What will I

gain? I have to look for spaces, not for people. It blows the romance out

of sprinting, but I'm kind of... The adrenaline is not there. All the

emotion has gone. I am aware of everything, everyone and everything.

Trying to find the gaps that go through. You stress the rationality

of it as you see it unfold. Why is that among aficionados of the Tour,

you have got a reputation for pushing the envelope to the very

edge? There was a time last year when a couple of fans, it seems,

took against the way that you had ridden and your style so much, that

one of them threw a bottle of urine at you during the race. You said, I

was not angry, I was depressed. I love cycling. I liked that you could

get in among it, whether you are a fan or a journalist, you can talk to

the athlete straightaway. It is not an arena like tennis or football or

athletics, where you are isolated. You are part of the surrounds, part

of the sport. People will always find things to hate or love, does

not matter who you are. If you are somebody who expresses their

opinion, people will love it, some people will say, he talks too much.

If you straighten up, a person who has had media training, some people

will say that he is a good inspiration to the children, other

people will say, I do not like it, he is too bland. People love to take

the negative comments about people, in the gossipy world that we live

in, where news is not news, people are blogging, they can come out with

anything and people believe it. There is a level of strong opinion.

It is the damage done to your sport by years and years of revelations

about doping. I wonder to what extent you feel that your sport is

tainted by the cheating that we have seen? It has been tainted. I cannot

do one interview without being asked about doping. It is frustrating.

That is entirely reasonable, given the figures. Since 1998, more than a

third of the top finishers have admitted doping or have faced

official links to doping. That is misleading. From 1998 to the

present. That is 15 years. A third of that could have been all of them

in the first five years. That could have been all the riders then, and

that leaves the next ten years. That is a misleading statement. Are you

suggesting that you are confident that the sort of scale of doping we

saw in the late 90s simply is not happening any more? Absolutely. One,

I would not be winning bike races. Two, the amount of testing there is

now, it has been stepped up, if you cheat, you will be caught. And the

thing is... If you are still cheating. The last three guys on the

Tour of Italy. And they get caught. It is like a kid, growing up, eight

years old. They take a chocolate bar from a store and walk out. They go

to school the next day, they steal lunch money. Then they are in exams,

they are looking over their shoulder. That kid is a cheat. He is

a cheat, he is going to be a cyclist. It does not work like that.

There will be cheaters in every aspect of life, in business, in

entertainment, anywhere where there is financial gain, they will keep

cheating. If you put the time and effort into catching them, you can

catch them. I tell you what cycling did in the past, it did not do the

testing, and if it did, it caught people. Then they say it will damage

the image of our sport so we will ignore it. That is not the only

sport that has ever done that. In ten years if you will see it in

other sports. I take the point but let's stick to cycling. You began

your rise to the top of elite cycling at the very time that Lance

Armstrong was finishing his extraordinary run of victories.

There were other people who were cheating with drugs. As a young man

entering this elite level, did you realise that a lot of your rivals

you were cycling against were cheating? No. I started after

Armstrong retired. My first year as a professional, I won races but I

was way out of my depth. It was hard. 2008, things came about...

Like the revelations from the 1990s. In 2008, the peloton was slower. It

got slower and then you noticed to a point, 2009 -2010, you could see the

individuals who were cheating and it was not long before they got caught.

Sometimes it sounds like you would rather not know the full extent of

how damaging to cycling it was. You said recently, "so what do we do

with the skeletons in cycling's closet? Mine might not be a popular

view, but sometimes I wonder why we insist on rattling them around and

whether the time hasn't come to simply concentrate on the present."

How does what happened in the 1990s affect me... It is a question of

credibility. There are allegations that the cycling body, the UCI,

colluded with the doping. Including understanding what was going on with

Lance Armstrong but doing nothing about it. That is why the new Chief

of the UCI, Brian Cookson, wants a thorough investigation of

everything. Including testimony from Armstrong. That is why I think... He

wants rid of the old image of the UCI. How can he do that without

getting to the truth about really being accountable for what happened

in the past? I guess you have a point. But then... What does it mean

about me having to answer questions about doping? You paid the price for

Lance Armstrong - that is the reality. You have to live with it,

don't you? I am here doing an interview, answering questions about

doping. You know, I am not standing up and walking off because you ask

about doping. I am sitting here trying to explain my views. There

are individuals and there is recycling. I feel the way you are

doing it, you are tarnishing cycling with this brush - everyone in

cycling is tarnished with this brush. Individuals... Like, a

corporation, a governing body is a set of individuals. There have been

individuals that were corrupted in the past. It could be the same as me

going into the allegations of media corruption... I understand your

point. The last question on Armstrong and the Armstrong issue.

As you say, you and others have actually paid a price in terms of

the scrutiny and intense concentration on the doping. I am

interests that recently you said that, on Armstrong, I cannot pretend

that I am eaten up with resentment or feel betrayed by it. I am

surprised you did not feel enormous resentment about what he has done to

your sport? It might be a selfish way to look at it but it did not

involve me before. Like... I was a pro. When he was riding... If he

used doped when he came back, then I would have resentment. I talk about

that. You can pick any quote you want to try to manipulate a story

but I say that. But before that, it was my sport but I didn't then go,

it's not like I sat there and did not care about it. It did not

involve me. Why should I think about something that I did not have any

emotion about at the time. I was young and naive. It did not change

my feeling for the sport. A final thought on your career as it stands.

You have had a most successful career -25 stage wins in the Tour.

You have won track titles as well. You have always had this belief that

in the end, you were the fastest. If it came down to that sprint, you

would win. But here is something very honest you said when you were

beaten by Marcel Kittel. You said: I was outgunned, I was outsprinted and

I was outclassed by him. When you have experienced that, what does

that do that sense of invincibility? It knocks it a little bit. But then

you find things to be fair... Can you ever be the same Mark Cavendish

after something like that? For a couple of weeks... I went to another

race... It wasn't the fact of being beaten, it was the sensation I had

in my legs. I thought, it will not affect me that much but three weeks

after it happened, the sensations were those I had of invincibility in

my legs. Not just who I would beat, by how far, but the feeling is

that... After eight years you know the feelings. You think those legs

of yours can still make you the fastest man on two wheels? I am

still the fastest man on two wheels. I will go next year and win bike

races, I can guarantee that. I will change things this winter because I

do not think I can be quite so blase about it. There are threats. You

know, I think, whereas I use to win 100% of every sprint, now it might

be 80%. Still, 80%... I am a victim of my own success. You care more

about the 20% you don't win. As we have said, it is a punishing sport

and every year you do it, you are taking something out of your body.

You have to think about the Olympics. You did not win the gold

you desperately wanted to win at the London Olympics, on the road. Are

you going to keep going and try to get that gold in 2016? Can you keep

going that long? For sure. There are riders still going at 40. I do not

know if the road race is an option but I would like to get an Olympic

gold medal. It is the only thing I have missing. Last year, in London,

it was things out of my control. The London Olympics, if it was tomorrow,

we would still have the same plan with which we went in last time. For

sure, I would like it. In cycling terms, the Olympics has only been in

the profession since 1896 so in the history and tradition of cycling,

the Olympics have not featured but as a British athlete, as a patriotic

man who is proud to put on a jersey representing the flag under which

was born, it's a thing... That is the last point I wanted to put to

you. Do you think the maturity that has come with all of that,

ultimately makes you a better cyclist and sportsman? It makes you

better person. Everything that has happened, it has made me a better

person for sure. Mark Cavendish, we have to end there. Thank you for

being on HARDtalk. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.