Mark Cavendish was fighting for his Olympic future in the Lee Valley VeloPark last night. The Manxman has nothing left to prove on the road, with 26 stages of the Tour de France and a world title to his name, but an Olympic medal remains the one glaring omission from the great sprinter’s CV.
While the Great Britain team has been working hard to put an abject first day at the Track Cycling World Championships behind them, with Laura Trott and Jon Dibben leading the way and a promising return from injury for Becky James another tick in the box, Cavendish has been involved in his own private battle for redemption in the men’s omnium, the event he hopes to contest in Rio this August.
It would be a huge gamble by Shane Sutton, the GB head coach, and the selectors to take Cavendish to the Olympics, not least because he will have to fit in his track training with the demands of his new road team, Dimension Data, who are paying his considerable wages.
So far, relations between the professional team and the GB team have been reasonably amicable, but it could begin to get tense in high summer. If Cavendish completes the Tour de France, he will have just 18 days to adjust before the start of the track cycling in Rio and the issue is further complicated by the rules which demand that competitors in the omnium ride at least one round of the team pursuit at the Olympic Games.
Cavendish finished 13th here in the individual pursuit, the second event of six in the omnium, way off the pace set by the British quartet in the final of the team pursuit earlier in the week. Heiko Salzwedel, the GB endurance coach, said that Cavendish had a “long way to go” to be a contender for the pursuit squad in Rio. The pressure was further piled on Cavendish late on Friday night by Dibben, one of the eager new faces in the GB squad who took Britain’s second gold medal of the week — and his second after silver in the team pursuit — in the non-Olympic points race.
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In the moment of victory, Dibben confirmed that he would be “massively” happy to take the sole GB place in the omnium for Rio and would be intensely training to give the selectors no other option. If there was some hint of sentiment in the selection of Cavendish for these world championships, no quarter is asked or given within the team.
Told by Sutton that he would have to win a medal to have a realistic chance of going to Rio, Cavendish kept his hopes alive by finishing fourth in the flying lap yesterday with a time of 13.211sec. After five of the six events, the Briton was lying in fifth place, a massive 44 points off the leader, Fernando Gaviria Rendon of Colombia, but just eight points off a medal place. Clearly, even before he forms one half of GB cycling’s dream team for the sling-shot Madison this evening, “Cav” is not going to break the habit of a lifetime by going quietly.
The reunion of Bradley Wiggins and Cavendish, two of Britain’s greatest road racers, will provide these five-day world championships with a raucous climax. The Madison is no longer an Olympic event, a source of huge frustration to Cavendish himself and to the track purists, but this is a reprise of the team that won the world title all of eight years ago, and, though neither will be in the field to make up the numbers, Wiggins has always viewed it as a crowd-pleaser rather than a serious challenge for gold.
“The Madison is just a bit of a fun thing,” said Wiggins last week. “It was just a natural partnership for both of us.”
Many milestones have swept by since the pair fell out at the 2008 Games in Beijing after Wiggins gave rather less than his best with Cavendish in the Madison. Wiggins had already won two gold medals — in the two pursuit events — and had nothing left for Cavendish, who was not amused to be the only member of the GB track cycling squad to leave Beijing without a medal.
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The pair, both proud and headstrong, have made up since, but it took a while and with both now past their 30th birthdays – Cavendish at 30 and Wiggins 35 – time is running out to right the original wrong. A gold medal would certainly bring the house down and, if he does not gain selection for the GB track team in Rio, give Cavendish one last memory to take out onto the road.
With five months to go before the Olympics, meanwhile, the president of cycling’s world governing body UCI has said getting the velodrome ready for the test event from April 29 will be “a challenge”.
A new company has been appointed to finish it but Brian Cookson said: “We are assured by the organising committee that the dates 29th April to 1st of May will still be deliverable but I think that’s a challenge.” The track is yet to be installed.