The story of how Mark Cavendish came to ride in SA has been told many times, but it deserves retelling. Cavendish didn’t really want to come to SA, to be honest, but the owner of his Etixx-Quick-Step team had other ideas.
Zdenek Bakala, the US-Czech billionaire who is also a shareholder in the Klein Constantia wine estate, was asked by the team management what races he wanted to target at the beginning of 2015. He told them the Cape Town Cycle Tour. The management scratched their heads. Where and when was that? Oh, and Bakala wanted Cavendish to ride the Cycle Tour. Bakala rides the Tour regularly. He wanted his superstar to do the same thing.
And, so, Cavendish was packed off to Cape Town where, by all accounts, he had a grand old time. He didn’t win the Cycle Tour, which was shortened due to the fires on the peninsula, but he discovered the passion for cycling in the country. Eight months later, Cavendish was back in the country having signed for the SA Dimension Data team.
SA has had a strong part to play in the career of Cavendish. His mechanic for some years was Gary Blem of Pretoria. Blem was my first spinning instructor many years ago. That’s where the comparisons between the cycling careers of the Manx Missile and myself end.
At Klein Constantia in 2015, Cavendish sat down with some local media for a natter. There was wine on the table and a tough nut to crack in Cavendish. He can bristle, but he is unflinchingly honest and blunt. After a few softball questions I asked him to tell me more about Blem the man as well as the mechanic. He stopped, looked at me, then the PR beside him. “Don’t tell [his current mechanic], but Gary is probably the best mechanic I have ever worked with,” he said. “But, more than that, he is a wonderful human being, an incredible man. He’s done so much for me. He’s become a really good friend.”
Blem and Cavendish met in 2010 when the South African was a mechanic at HTC-Colombia. When Cavendish joined Sky in 2012 he included Blem as part of his contract.
“Cav was definitely a challenge because he was very demanding,” Blem told Peloton magazine. “He knows what he wants and I have learnt to give him exactly what he wants,” Blem told Sky Sports.
“His thinking is that his body is changing on a regular basis. You know that you’re taller in the morning than you are in the evening, that’s his theory, his body changes, he becomes more supple, or he gets fitter. He sees his body as being different every day so he wants to change his bike.
“In the mountains he’ll ride his handlebars one centimetre higher than in the flat stages or the sprint or flat stages. He likes to ride with his hoods raised, more like a chopper style. He’s got the [Shimano] Sprint Shifters on the handlebars for quick shifting. He tries to go as low as possible in the front and if you look at him in the sprints, he’s very, very low. We’ve got him as low as we can get him.
“He changes his position on a regular basis. I’d say maybe two or three times per week. He’ll change his saddle up to one and a half centimetres up or down before a 200km stage without a problem. Some riders will feel one millimetre, he can change it by one and a half centimetres.”
Cavendish’s SA connection returned in 2016 with Dimension Data. He was a surprise signing by the SA team, brokered by Brian Smith, the team’s general manager, with his salary paid for by the addition of a new sponsor.
“We have a training camp in SA every November and my highlight of it is doing a bike handover in rural SA, it’s amazing,” Cavendish said of the Qhubeka charity that was such a huge part of the team.
Cavendish won four stages of the 2016 Tour de France, wearing the yellow jersey for the first time in his career and putting him on 30 Tour stage wins, four short of the record of Eddy Mercx. His time with the team ended in a less charitable way when he was left out of the Tour team, a decision that split the team’s management and was handled badly in the media.
Cavendish was 34 at the time and some started speaking of it all being over for him. But, he has kept on keeping on. We’ll never see him at the Tour again, but, then again, we never thought we would see him in SA.
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