FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — Mark Cavendish must have a big circle around Monday’s third stage of the Tour de France.
The mostly flat 231-kilometer (144-mile) leg from Piacenza to Turin likely represents the race’s first chance of a mass sprint finish. That means it’s an opportunity for Cavendish to break one of the Tour’s most hallowed records.
Cavendish equaled Eddy Merckx’s mark of 34 stage wins during the 2021 Tour and went close to winning a 35th on the seventh stage in 2023. He crashed during the eighth stage last year, breaking his right collarbone. He then put off retirement by a year to come back to the Tour and try again at breaking his tie with Merckx.
There will be at least a handful of other opportunities for sprinters in this year’s Tour, too, after the race crosses back into France following the first four stages in Italy.
“It’s quite beautiful this year with the start in Florence, near where I lived for 10 years,” Cavendish said on Friday. “Starting here, then going to France is just perfect. I’ve got a job to do but on an emotional level, it’s very, very nice. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. I think I’m more ready now (for retirement) than I was last year. I’m happy but I’m also so happy I carried on.
“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think it was possible to win,” the Astana rider added. “Realistically there are five or six chances, so we’ve come here to try to do it. I think we’ve got everything in place to try to do it but so does everyone else.”
The 39-year-old Cavendish won his first Tour stage way back in 2008.
“I said before I started my career, if I could ever be in a book of names of riders that meant something, the big riders in the history of cycling, if my name is in that book, I would be happy.”
Merckx, the Belgian considered the most dominant rider in cycling history, won his 34 individual stages at the Tour from 1969-75.
Merckx was nicknamed “The Cannibal.” Cavendish, who comes from the Isle of Man, is known as “Cannonball” or “the Manx Missile.”
Cavendish won the Tour’s best sprinter green jersey twice and has also claimed stages at all three Grand Tours — the Tour, Giro d’Italia and Spanish Vuelta — and was the world champion in 2011.
“I understand I’m fortunate to be in a position of inspiring not just a generation but a few generations, adults and kids,” Cavendish said. “If I’ve left an impact on them that helps motivate them, then that’s what’s important.”
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