The road to Mark Cavendish’s record-breaking 35th stage win at the Tour de France ran through Greece. Vasilis Anastopoulos rejoined Cavendish’s entourage this season having previously worked with him at QuickStep, and the Manxman spent a hefty portion of his build-up to the Tour training on his coach’s local roads.
Indeed, Cavendish has spent much of the 2024 campaign away from home, with Anastopoulos introducing lengthy stints of altitude training to the Astana-Qazaqstan rider’s preparation, starting with a month-long stint in Colombia that incorporated the Tour Colombia.
“It’s been a lot of work,” Anastopoulos told reporters moments after Cavendish had won stage 5 of the Tour in Saint Vulbas. “We started with our training camps already from December, and I think in December and January, he spent only four days at home. We went to Colombia, and we worked really hard, and he had his first stage win there.”
Cavendish’s initial plans were interrupted by the illness he suffered at the UAE Tour, with rides in some Belgian Classics scratched from his programme in late March. The Tour of Turkey was added to his schedule, and he later raced at the Tour of Hungary and Tour de Suisse, as well as taking in a stint of training at altitude in Sierra Nevada. His basecamp, however, was in Greece with Anastopoulos.
“We had to completely change our plans and start again, but we were never in panic,” Anastopoulos said.
It surely helped that, unlike at his previous teams, Cavendish had no obligation to fight for his Tour place at Astana, who had built their team for July expressly around him.
“At the beginning of April, Mark came to Greece with me," Anastopoulos said. "He had three months in Greece in between Turkey, Hungary and Suisse. We trained every day together, believing in the process. I can tell you it was not an easy one, but we never stopped believing that this could come true.”
Cavendish’s nous brought him into position during the frantic finale of stage 5, but the 39-year-old also produced a remarkable turn of speed to claim stage victory ahead of Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck), the man favoured to hoover up sprint victories on this year’s Tour.
Anastopoulos insisted that he expected as much after poring over the data from Cavendish’s final training bloc ahead of the Tour.
“The data I had told me was capable of doing that,” he said. “He came back to Greece immediately after the Tour de Suisse, and we did sprint work for the whole week because of all the climbs he had done before.”
The bigger worry, Anastopoulos admitted, was how fresh Cavendish would arrive at the bunch sprints of this Tour after a most demanding initial phase in Italy. Cavendish suffered from heatstroke on the tough opener to Rimini and he also had to negotiate the Col du Galibier on stage 4.
“Our biggest challenge was those three days in Italy,” Anastopoulos said. “The first day, he was suffering because of the heat, but we were never in a panic, we controlled things."
"On the Galibier stage, I think we did the perfect plan to arrive in the time limit without spending too much, Even when the gruppetto went away on the last climb, we told him to stay calm and follow his own watts, the watts we had predicted beforehand, in order to arrive as fresh as possible for today’s stage.”
Cavendish won his first Tour stage in 2008, and he would clock up 25 victories in the race before his 30th birthday. By the age of 31, his running tally was up to 30 Tour victories, but illness would blight his career in the years after his four-stage win haul in 2016.
After appearing on the brink of retirement in the winter of 2020, Cavendish was handed a lifeline by QuickStep. When Sam Bennett’s knee injury unexpectedly opened up a slot in the Tour selection, Cavendish responded by winning four stages and the points classification.
He equalled Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 Tour stage wins in Carcassonne that year, but he missed out on the chance to surpass it on the Champs-Élysées. Left out of QuickStep’s team in 2022, Cavendish joined Astana last season, later announcing it would be his final year as a professional. He walked back that decision after crashing out of the Tour, opting to come back for one last tilt at that elusive 35th win.
“He was always under pressure,” Anastopoulos said. “Everybody was always talking about 35 once he announced he was riding for one more season. You cannot imagine the pressure this guy was under. Enormous pressure. But he’s a great champion and only champions can handle this pressure.
“You saw today why he’s a big champion. He’s 39 years old. Most of the guys thought he wasn’t going to make it. He proved them wrong one time in 2021 and then he proved everybody wrong again in 2024. He’s a phenomenon.”
Although Cavendish has achieved his stated goal, Anastopoulos dismissed any notion that the remainder of the Tour would be a lap of the honour for the Manxman as he bids farewell to the race.
“No, we’re not going to stop,” he said. “Tomorrow is another chance. We want to win as much as possible. That’s why we cannot stop. Our goal is to reach Nice – not Paris, unfortunately – and celebrate there. We want two or three more wins before he can stop.”
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