Last week’s route presentation for the 2025 Tour de France was conspicuous for the absence of the riders expected to be the protagonists of the men’s race come July. There was no Tadej Pogačar, defending champion and winner of three of the last five Tours; no Jonas Vingegaard, his eternal rival and winner from the previous two years; and no Remco Evenepoel, the man who completed the podium behind them, and perhaps the only rider with the raw talent to threaten them in the near future.
Instead, the headline attendee was a man who has said he won’t be riding the Tour de France next year — Mark Cavendish. Cavendish has not raced since completing this year’s edition, where he of course made history by winning a 35th career Tour stage to surpass Eddy Merckx as the race’s all-time record holder for most wins at the race. That years-long mission accomplished, a well-earned retirement looms once he has completed two final criteriums later this month, in Japan and Singapore.
Or does it? At the route presentation, Cavendish dropped a potential bombshell. Having previously dismissed the notion that he would return to ride another Tour de France, his answer upon being asked whether we’ll see next year for the Grand Départ in Lille wasn’t quite so categorical: “We’ll see.”
So could Cavendish really continue on for another season? That was hardly a committed statement, but kept the door open for himself. He went on to explain his feeling towards the Tour, how the exhausting effects of riding it leave him feeling done with it upon immediately finishing, yet its addictive qualities ultimately draw him back in. “Like every rider who’s ridden the Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, you finish it and think: ‘I’m never doing that again.’ And a couple of days later, you miss it and long for the buzz.”
Mark Cavendish when he won his record-breaking 35th Tour stage win in 2024
Such comments bring to mind another of Britain’s greatest athletes, the rower Steve Redgrave. Like Cavendish, Redgrave became one of the all-time greats of his sport partly through longevity, a resilient ability to keep coming back and performing at the highest level deep into a second decade. It seemed Redgrave’s career was over when, immediately after winning a fourth career Olympic gold medal in as many Games at Atlanta 1996, he famously declared that “anybody who sees me in a boat has my permission to shoot me”. Yet he,…