Already a legend of the sport, whether he ever wins a bike race again, Mark Cavendish showed how hungry he is to continue racing by finding an investor for Deceuninck-QuickStep so the team would sign him.
The Manx rider – a former world champion who has 48 Grand
Tour stage wins in his palmares, including an astonishing 30 wins at the Tour
de France – approached Deceuninck-QuickStep boss Patrick Lefevere and told him
he wanted a place on his team.
Having ridden for Lefevere’s team from 2013 to 2015, he told the team boss he wanted to go back there and continue racing as he didn’t want to fade out of the sport. He had just weeks earlier broken down with emotion after Gent Wevelgem over the prospect of not racing again.
Lefevere had already said months ago he would consider bringing Cavendish to the team for next year but by the time the rider approached him about it the team’s budget was already gone for 2021.
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That didn’t stop Cavendish, who went off and secured an investor for the team, which helped pay his salary and meant his return to the prolific Belgian WorldTour outfit was completed.
Now aged 35 years, Cavendish rode 2020 on a one-year deal with Bahrain McLaren. When the team did not re-sign him his prospects of getting a ride for next year looked uncertain, though that has now been swept aside.
"After the last race in De Panne he was at the hotel in Kortrijk,” Lefevere has told cyclingnews of Cavendish’s move back to the team.
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“I invited him to my office and he said: 'I don’t want to
stop like this. I want to come back.' I told him, 'Mark I really don’t have one
Euro. My budget is already done.'
"He said that if he could find someone to pay his
contract then he could ride. I maybe believed that he could join us but that it
would be difficult to find someone.
“But a week later someone called and said that they’d
spoken to Mark and that they were interested. We started talking and in the
end, it happened."
Lefevere said Cavendish was still a very famous rider and
that everyone seemed happy he was continuing to race and transferring to the
team.
One of Lefevere’s directeurs, Tom Steels, has already said Cavendish would be a great asset to the team and could help its sprinters, including Ireland’s Sam Bennett.
He added the main priority for Cavendish, who has not won a race since February, 2018, and has been hit by the Epstein-Barr virus in recent years, was for him to feel healthy and happy on the bike.
Steels said once he could achieve that, he believed he
could still win races but there would be no expectation that he would win
multiple Tour stages, for example.
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