Mark Cavendish has no fewer than four wins in 2021 in the bag after a brilliant Tour of Turkey and his new coach at Deceuninck-QuickStep says his sprint is better now than when he rode for the team previously.
Cavendish spent three season with the Belgian WorldTour outfit earlier in his career. He left the team, then Etixx-QuickStep, at the end of the 2015 season.
He’s now back with the team this season, of course, on a one-year deal and his coach there, Vasilis Anastopoulos, says a comparison between Cavendish’s data back in 2015 and now shows his sprint is better now. Cavendish won 14 races with the team in 2015, including a stage of the Tour de France.
The Isle of Man rider is only just getting back to form having
seen his career derailed by Epstein Barr virus in recent years. And he is also
coming up to his 36th birthday next month.
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However, Anastopoulos has insisted Cavendish’s sprint is
superior now than it was six years ago.
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“We can see now that he has a slightly better peak power
and the duration of his sprint is better now than previously,” he said of 2021
data compared to 2015.
“So now he can also hold his sprint for a longer period
of time than previously,” he said, adding his lung capacity was almost as good
now as it was in the past. “He’s sprinting better right now.
“We all had a meeting in December and just after 10 minutes I saw I was dealing with a teenager rather than a guy who was almost 36-years-old and everyone thought was finished,” Anastopoulos told The Cycling Podcast.
“The way that he was expressing to me what he has been through;
the whole of the last three years… the mistakes that he thought that he had
done with the previous teams. The desire in his eyes, the fire in his eyes as
we say, was something incredible.”
Anastopoulos added from that moment he decided in his own
mind Cavendish was such “a big champion” he had to do everything in his power
to make him win again.
“I asked him to trust me 100 per cent and just to go for
it,” he said. “I saw some, in my opinion, some big mistakes he has been doing
in training so I just completely changed his training routine.”
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