The manager who oversaw Mark Cavendish’s most prolific spell of success as a sprinter believes that the Briton can come back and fight again for his 35th Tour de France stage win but argues that the Astana Qazaqstan racer should make it anything but a snap decision to do so.
“He’s got the talent and speed to do it, but he needs to think long and hard about what the implications are of sticking around for another season,” Rolf Aldag told Cyclingnews.
Now with Bora-Hansgrohe, Aldag was former head sports director at HTC-HighRoad, where Cavendish took 74 of his 162 career wins, including 20 of his 34 Tour de France stage wins. Aldag then worked again as performance director with Cavendish at Qhubeka/Dimension Data between 2015-2019, including the 2016 Tour de France where Cavendish took the yellow jersey and four stage wins.
Aldag is on the Tour this year, where Cavendish crashed out on stage 8 with a broken collarbone. That was less than 24 hours after claiming second at Bordeaux despite a late problem with his gears that could arguably have cost him the victory.
The question of whether the Briton will now postpone his retirement by a year, rather than quit at the end of the season as planned, is the subject of much speculation.
While Cavendish has as yet not discussed this publicly, even Eddy Merckx – with whom Cavendish shares the record of 34 stages – has weighed in and said the Astana Qazaqstan pro should continue. Astana team manager Alexander Vinokourov has already said they would like Cavendish to go on into 2024.
“My instinct is that he should take time, recover well, breath in and out,” Aldag said, “and then consider all the options.
“Then if he comes back, if I was him, I’d say that has to come with some conditions and some more support.
“He should be thankful to Astana for giving him that chance” – of racing in 2023 – “because you know how late his signing was. ‘I’m really grateful, guys, for you helping me out. But it’s like – if you want me to continue then there’s point 1, point 2, point 3 we have to work on and we really have to get the structures right.’”
Cavendish was fulsome in his praise of his Astana teammates during the Tour, saying they had ‘nailed it’ on one stage.
But by their own admission, the squad does not have any kind of tradition in supporting sprinters, and the one signing they made after bringing Cavendish on board was Dutch lead-out man Cees Bol.
“That’s what I would do. Can he come…
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