British Cycling and Mark Cavendish were forced to deny the cyclist had fallen out with a coach and refused to come to the Olympic Velodrome to fulfil his position as team pursuit reserve.
Cavendish was nowhere to be seen at the track before the team pursuit final on Friday evening, with a well-placed source telling the Guardian he had fallen out with the coach Heiko Salzwedel. “He just couldn’t keep up with the other lads so they effectively self-selected themselves and he wasn’t happy about it,” the source said.
The sprinter’s absence could also be interpreted as a snub for Bradley Wiggins, with whom Cavendish has had a love-hate relationship dating back to Beijing in 2008. At those Games Wiggins won two golds but appeared to have used up all his energy by the time it came to race the madison with Cavendish, and the pair came ninth.
However, 20 minutes before Wiggins and company smashed the world record in their semi-final, Cavendish tweeted: “Some reports that I’m refusing to warm up tonight at the velodrome. A bit early when I’m racing Sunday! Good luck to my teammates! Smash it!”
Wiggins, after becoming the first Briton to win eight Olympic medals in the final, said his teammate – who will contest the omnium – “was hugging me yesterday and telling me he loved me”. On Cavendish’s omission from the team, Wiggins said: “We gave Mark the opportunity in Newport to come into the squad and he didn’t deliver. We saw how close it was and we couldn’t afford, having been together for 18 months and it wasn’t just me ... I didn’t freeze him out or anything like that and he knows that. Ask him about it after the omnium and he’ll tell you a totally different story to the one he told Orla [Chennaoui, from Sky].”
Most of the other four-men squads warmed up with their reserve on Friday night, if they had one. But Cavendish stayed in the Olympic village, effectively denying Wiggins and his team-mates Ed Clancy, Steven Burke and Owain Doull a backup if one of them fell ill. Under Olympic rules, teams can substitute their reserves up to an hour before race time.
Iain Dyer, British Cycling’s head coach, denied Cavendish had stayed away. “That’s bollocks,” he said, less than an hour before Team GB were due to defend their Olympic title in the first round. “Same as yesterday, Cav trained in the morning session for his omnium stuff, the same today. The plan has always been for him to remain in the village, on the phone. We had no plans to change the team, it would only have been in an emergency that we had to bring him in.
“So in order to make the path to the omnium as smoother as possible, we’d didn’t want to bring him in here – we’d rather have in the dining hall, eating his dinner and having his feet up. Given he’s only a few minutes away on the bike, if there was a problem he could be here.”
He added: “We wouldn’t be able to change him now anyway. The rule is an hour.”
Reporters pointed out that Andy Tennant, reserve for the team pursuit in London, came to the track in case he was needed. But Dyer insisted Cavendish’s absence was planned. “I’d say it was joint between Heiko and Rod [Ellingworth, Cavendish’s long time coach], looking after Cav. In an ideal world, he’d do that morning session and then go steady for the rest of the day. Having done that morning session for his omnium work, we didn’t want to drag him in and warm him up.”
Dyer said he understood that Cavendish was upset. “He is genuinely disappointed. Anybody who has been in selection for something and doesn’t make it is genuinely disappointed. I think that was true when we had other selections before. If you don’t make selection it’s going to be disappointing. Obviously he’s got the omnium but he’d like to have made the team pursuit if he could as well. I think you saw last night that this is a good team. They did all right, didn’t they?”
In an interview with Sky this week, Cavendish appeared cross that he was not going to get to ride the team pursuit.
“That’s the reason I left the Tour early, because of the team pursuit,” Cavendish told Sky. “[For] the omnium, finishing the Tour would’ve been a benefit. It’s a little bit [disappointing] but it’s how it works.
“Especially Brad, he has been super stressed. He wants to be the hero and all that. I’m kind of just doing the omnium stuff now. That’s what I was aiming for the whole time. The team pursuit’s a bonus to that anyway.”
