A quick recap in case you missed all the fun. It has been an eventful few days for Mark Cavendish, which seems rather odd considering he has yet to compete. An unused reserve on the triumphant men’s pursuit track team, on Wednesday he spoke to the Sky cycling reporter Orla Chennaoui and conveyed the impression he was extremely frustrated at being frozen out of a team he considered to be a closed shop. Sir Bradley Wiggins, he said, was “super-stressed”, adding the 2012 Tour de France winner wants “to be the hero and all that”.
British Cycling subsequently denied there was a rift between Cavendish and the team’s de facto leader and when the Manxman failed to show his face at the velodrome on Thursday or Friday, where Wiggins was “being the hero and all that”, it went on to dismiss stories emanating from within the camp that he had fallen out with the team coach, Heiko Salzwedel.
At their pre-Games training camp in Newport, south Wales, Wiggins and Cavendish, who were rooming together, appeared to be getting on famously as they laughed, joked and belittled each other with the easy air of good mates. However, in what might be construed as the kind of retaliatory swipe that seems to characterise the pair’s amusing bickering married couple schtik, Wiggins confirmed rumours that Cavendish had not been included in the team because he had not been good enough in training and was unable to keep up with the rest of the team.
“We gave Mark the opportunity in Newport to come into the squad and he didn’t deliver,” said Wiggins in the wake of Team GB’s thrilling pursuit victory. “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 that Orla woman.”
To be clear: Wiggins was grinning at Chennaoui – aka “that Orla woman” – as he jokingly mocked her. He also insisted that Cavendish had been hugging him the previous evening and “telling me that he loves me”.
Now Cavendish’s legs need to do the talking in the omnium, starting tonight. A contentious selection at the expense of the team pursuit rider Ed Clancy, who won bronze in London, the 31-year-old from Douglas begins his quest for the Olympic medal that has thus far eluded him, in the six-event discipline. Despite not being among the favourites in an event that is already something of a lottery compared to other track events, his fame and exploits on the road mean will be a marked man, just as he was in his unsuccessful bid to win the road race four years ago when the rest of the peloton ganged up on Great Britain.
“I’m not going to dwell on it,” he said of his London 2012 disappointment, during the training camp in Newport. “I haven’t got an Olympic medal again and here I am trying again. I know my form’s good, it’s about transferring that to the track. This is about making every single pedal rev count.
“I’m not just doing it to mill around in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve been to two Olympics. I don’t need to just go to the Olympics. I’m going because I want to win.”
An extremely successful road cyclist with Dimension Data, for whom he won four stages of the Tour de France this year before withdrawing from the race to concentrate on the Olympics, Cavendish is in Rio with Team GB and apparently unfussed about the potential perils of working as a slave to two masters.
“They’ve been fine with me,” he said of his South Africa-based paymasters. “They gave me time off for the [track] world championships and then to come back for the classics afterwards without optimal preparation for, say, Milan-San Remo. They’ve been supportive of my whole thing.
It’s a big thing for them to let me do [the Olympics] but it’s only one year. Team GB have been wicked too. We’ve got a stubborn East German coach and that’s probably the hardest bit of the whole thing. Heiko can be very stubborn and he’s the hardest person to make believe.”
To which the only obvious retort seems to be: Mr Pot, meet Herr Kettle.
