One is now Britain’s most decorated Olympian, the other his quarrelsome “younger brother” who is widely regarded as cycling’s best sprinter of all time and who has finally broken his medal hoodoo with a silver.
Yet even after correcting the one anomaly on his glittering CV, Mark Cavendish still had Sir Bradley Wiggins on his mind. Seconds after clinching silver in the omnium following an eventful denouement in which he caused a dramatic crash on Monday night, Cavendish was waiting to speak live to the BBC.
Unaware that the cameras were rolling, Cavendish quipped to the interviewer Jill Douglas: “They’d be straight on for Brad, wouldn’t they?”
By Tuesday morning, silver medal hanging around his neck, he was looking to smooth over his earlier suggestion that Wiggins had frozen him out of the team pursuit quartet that delivered him a fifth gold. “I just had a message off him now. It’s all right. Everything is fine. It was blown way out of proportion,” he told Sky News. “It was something said tongue in cheek but I’ve learned my lesson for other interviews now.”
Cavendish, who argued with journalists after they asked whether he caused the crash that sent South Korea’s Park Sang-hoon sprawling and led to him being taken away on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face, also hit back at suggestions he did so deliberately. “It was my fault. I really feel terrible. I messaged him this morning, the Korean lad. I felt terrible and really sorry for causing him hurt there,” said Cavendish on Tuesday. “It was a racing accident. To suggest something was done on purpose and deliberate, is not a very nice thing to say.”
Some put his spiky post-race demeanour down to the fact that he is a hugely focused winner and was disappointed with silver. Others thought it par for the course.
It all played into the impression that the complex, compelling, hugely talented Manxman still feels his achievements as a cyclist are undervalued by the British public.
With 30 Tour de France stage wins to his name, he is venerated in Europe as the greatest sprinter the sport has ever seen. But back home, where casual viewers tune in once every four years to marvel at Britain’s extraordinary dominance on the Olympic track, it is Wiggins and Sir Chris Hoy who are more widely known.
The twisted, overlapping histories of Cavendish and Wiggins have run like names through a stick of rock over British cycling’s most dramatic, successful period, one that has seen them again dominate the velodrome.
They also seem to represent the last huge personalities of an era where individual strength of character and instinctive genius overlapped with the systemic marginal-gains culture of British Cycling to produce a generation of fascinating sportsmen and women.
Others may eventually end up more decorated than the wave of Wiggins, Cavendish, Hoy and Victoria Pendleton but they are as unlikely to be as compelling. Jason Kenny, racking up gold medals at a rate that suggests he will soon surpass Wiggins, has gone under the radar by comparison.
Having first crossed paths in a corridor at Manchester velodrome when Cavendish was a teenager on British Cycling’s academy programme and Wiggins was an established rider but nowhere near the household name he is now, they have endlessly fallen out and made up.
Cavendish had not been in Rio’s Olympic velodrome to watch the team-pursuit final that delivered Wiggins his historic gold. He was a reserve after not doing enough in training to break into the quartet. Some sources said he had refused to come. In the middle of the track, the head coach, Iain Dyer, said that was “bollocks” and that he was back at the Olympic village resting up before the gruelling two-day omnium. Whatever the truth, the 31-year-old only had himself to blame for the intrigue.
On the opening weekend of the Games he gave a cheekily provocative interview in which he appeared to blame Wiggins for freezing him out of the team pursuit quartet, saying that Wiggins wanted “to be the hero” and was “super-stressed”. Now, both may have made a final appearance at the Games. Wiggins will definitely retire at the end of the year, while Cavendish has hinted that he is unlikely to be competing at Toyko in four years time.
In the afterglow of last Friday’s triumph Wiggins, who can at times be a tricky customer himself, tried to defuse any lingering tension. “All this Mark Cavendish stuff. He was telling me yesterday he loved me, that it was tongue in cheek and all that, and obviously that’s all got a bit blown up,” he said. “The reality is we gave Mark the opportunity in Newport [at a pre-Games training camp] to come into the squad and he didn’t deliver. I didn’t freeze him out and he knows that.”
Wiggins is the complex, decorated rock star of the outfit who is now venerated as the elder statesman having surpassed Sir Chris Hoy and taken his overall tally to eight medals, including five golds.
The pair have plenty in common. Both were comparative outsiders – Cavendish from the Isle of Man and Wiggins born in Belgium. Both are fiercely protective of their families and are single-minded, ruthless winners who, paradoxically but not unusually in a sport that is at once a selfish individual pursuit and the ultimate collective endeavour, speak warmly of their team-mates.
Cavendish experienced bitter disappointment at Beijing 2008, when he and Wiggins finished only ninth in the Madison, with Cavendish mostly blaming Wiggins for the poor showing. The pair turned in different directions after the race, and did not speak for six months.
Then, in the road race at the London Olympics, Wiggins was part of the team that had high hopes of delivering Britain’s first medal for Cavendish, who trailed in 29th. Days later, Wiggins won gold in the time trial.
“It’s just something we never, ever discussed,” said Wiggins in 2012, his annus mirabilis in which he became the first British rider to win the Tour de France and stormed to Olympic gold in the time trial at Hampton Court.
While most British riders have remained within a system that has been primed with more than £100m of National Lottery funding over the past 12 years, or alternated with its professional road-racing spin-off Team Sky, Cavendish has gone his own way.
He had a period with Team Sky but joined Omega Pharma-Quick Step then Dimension Data as he sought to make the most of his phenomenal talent. He has, at times, spoken witheringly of those who have chosen to remain within the British Cycling bosom.
But the pair have also shared in each other’s greatest triumphs. Wiggins was part of the “project rainbow” team that delivered Cavendish to the world road racing championship in Copenhagen in 2011. “I did it for Cav,” Wiggins later said. Cavendish went on to be named BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2011 as the first British man to become world champion on the road in more than four decades. And he was an integral part of Team Sky when Wiggins won the Tour de France on the Champs Elysées in 2012.
The following year Wiggins wrote that Cavendish was like his younger brother. “We fall out, we make up, we take the mickey out of each other, say this and that – but the relationship is never going to go away now.” Having delivered the denouement his glittering career deserved, at 35 Wiggins says he will take part in a couple more events before retiring to concentrate on his own road cycling team that will nurture the next generation of riders.
His professional career will end with an emotional six-day race back in Ghent where he was born. Alongside him will be Cavendish.
