Eisel: 'Mark Cavendish's Tour de France dedication is stupid but this is the sport we fell in love with'

Cycling should know better than to write Mark Cavendish off at this point. Time and time again, the Astana Qazaqstan sprinter seems to overcome outside doubt and come up trumps once more, the latest case in point being the Tour de Hongrie where Cavendish won stage 2 after months of illness had plagued his 2024 campaign.

DNF, OTL and DNS were the acronyms that seemed to define the early months of his season after a bright start yielded a stage victory in Tour Colombia, and as Cavendish struggled to overcome an undefined illness, it seemed as though his final season and final assault on a 35th Tour de France stage victory might be at risk of coming undone.

But on the second stage in Hungary, a pitch-perfect lead-out from his Astana Qazaqstan teammates was finished off with aplomb by Cavendish in the sprint, with the 38-year-old punching his way to a 164th career victory on what was his 100th day of racing with the team. We caught a word with Cavendish’s former lead-out man Bernhard Eisel at the Giro d’Italia not long after and asked whether the Austrian had seen the Manxman’s latest win.

“Yes, of course!” Eisel told GCN outside the Bora-Hansgrohe team boss, with the 43-year-old now a sports director with the team gunning for Giro success through Dani Martínez.

“It was good to see Cav, he showed the power is there. It wasn’t really about speed or anything, it was pure power and it seems like he is back on track.”

Read more: Tour de Hongrie stage 2: Mark Cavendish claims second sprint victory of the season

In the Tour de Hongrie sprint, Cavendish beat Dylan Groenewegen (Jayco AlUla) to the line in Kazincbarcika and later spent almost 100km in the final-day breakaway as he looked to usurp Thibau Nys (Lidl-Trek) in the points jersey. The young Belgian was able to hold on in spite of Cavendish mopping up the intermediate sprints on stage 5, but for the Manxman, it was a much-needed return to form as he finished just his third stage race of the season.

“In Turkey already he wasn’t bad, he just wasn’t contesting the sprints in the end because it was a tough course every day on grippy roads," Eisel pointed out, referring to the Tour of Türkiye from late April. “He paid for that a little bit but it seems like the fitness and speed is there now, and he’s still got a few weeks to go [until the Tour].”

Read more: Encouragement from Mark Cavendish as Thibau Nys’ road breakthrough gathers pace

Now in his final and 18th professional season, Cavendish’s latest success brought him up to second in the all-time list of winners in the men’s sport, with the Manxman’s 164th success bringing him above Mario Cipollini in third, who finished his career with 163 wins to his name.

These days, it is only against Eddy Merckx, with his 277 professional victories, to which Cavendish compares. The pair both sit level with a record number of 34 stage victories at the Tour de France and, having postponed his retirement following last year’s abandonment, the 38-year-old will return to the Tour this summer to have one last crack at taking the record outright.

It is a feat that Eisel, the Manxman’s lead-out extraordinaire for so many of those victories, says his former teammate will thoroughly deserve.

“It is just nice to come together for him. We are all joking around that we better make him win this stage of the Tour otherwise he’ll do another year,” he quipped. “I think it will be well deserved and for cycling as a whole, the whole story is just incredible. He doesn’t have to prove anything anymore and he knows it.

“If we look at the numbers and the Tour stages, he is the best sprinter of all time. At the same time, the span of his career - we’re talking about two decades now dominating the sprints - what else should we discuss? There is nobody else who has done this.”

‘This is the sport we fell in love with and we give everything for it’

We took Eisel’s rhetorical question at face value and asked him how tough it is for an ageing cyclist to continue to find motivation after so many years at the top. The Austrian enjoyed a lengthy career himself, starting out with Mapei-Quick Step in 2001 and riding until his retirement with Dimension Data at the end of 2019.

As alluded to, Cavendish’s ability to return to winning ways has been doubted many times throughout his career, be it after Dimension Data didn’t select him for the Tour de France in 2019, when Cavendish left Scheldeprijs in tears for Bahrain-McLaren in 2020 or in the early months of this season when it all looked to be going wrong for the 38-year-old.

But through it all, Cavendish’s motivation to return to the top has never waned. His powers of recovery even surprised Eisel at one point.

“People didn’t believe in him anymore, the newspapers were really harsh on him and look, it is a game, he knows it. But how many times did I say ‘ok, that’s it, he’s not going to come back’? I was always sure he was going to win stages again when I was with him and when he was with Quick-Step, but at the time he left Bahrain I thought, ‘this will be a tough one, it is almost impossible now.’ He proved us all wrong, me especially at that point.

“We have happy faces just to see him do that and now he’s on track, he knows how much it means now to do it.”

Read more: Mark Cavendish: I never lose motivation, I love this sport

Between the Tour de Hongrie and the Tour de France, Cavendish will line up at the Tour de Suisse in June and also enjoy another training camp in Greece with his Astana Qazaqstan head of performance and longtime coach, Vasilis Anastopoulos. It will be one more summer of sacrifice for the Manxman before he hangs up his cleats at the end of the year.

“It is not just about dedication, it is about leaving the family, going out there every day smashing yourself in training and going to altitude training camp as a sprinter - all just for one success in the Tour de France. I mean, it is stupid, at the end of the day, it is stupid. But this is what we are all driven by,” remarked Eisel.

The 43-year-old’s parting words were rather charming, with Eisel still clearly as passionate for the sport as he has ever been. His job will continue in the Bora-Hansgrohe team car at the Giro d’Italia, but he will no doubt be a keen-eyed observer when his former teammate guns for a 35th stage victory this summer at the Tour.

“This is the sport we fell in love with and we give everything for it. It is good to see that can still has that drive after three decades, because we have seen many sprinters who have been on top and it is easy to be on top. But to hold the top and to come back there, that is the tricky one - and most of them are retired, but he keeps going.”

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