Cycling: Cavendish and Wiggins climb highest mountain

The profile of British riders has risen beyond all recognition, writes Alasdair Fotheringham

(AFP/ GETTY IMAGES)

When you watch Mark Cavendish thundering towards a possible sixth stage win today on the Champs Elysées, it's worth reflecting that as little as 10 years ago the Tour de France had become a virtual no-go zone for British cycling.

That year, the race had just one British finisher, Chris Boardman. Three times a winner of the Tour prologue, by 1999 the Wirral-born rider was edging towards retirement. His prologue was a near disaster after spending most of the previous night throwing up and feverish, and he completed the race a lowly 119th. He never competed in the Tour again.

Fast forward 10 years and it's a very different story, with British cycling on the point of concluding what is arguably its most successful Tour ever. Partly responsible for this success is the sport's top sprinter, Cavendish. For the second year running he is one of only two riders to have won multiple stages in the Tour.

Appropriately for a sprinter, Cavendish's progress in cycling's blue riband event has happened at lightning speed. After a rocky Tour ride in 2007 – he himself says he shouldn't have taken part – and four stage wins in 2008, the Manxman is now considered a main player in the race. "A Tour sprint without Cavendish is not a Tour sprint," one French newspaper editorial wrote recently.

To put his five stage wins this year – or perhaps six – into a UK context, his only real British predecessor, Barry Hoban, took eight sprints over a period of nine years. Cavendish has already taken nine in just three – a British record – and he may go one better in the final stage today.

It should be pointed out that neither Hoban nor Boardman nor David Millar, winner of the Tour's prologue in 2000 and Britain's sole representative in the race for the first half of this decade, had the team support that Cavendish can count on.

Cavendish regularly expresses his amazement that team-mates with their own overall aspirations, such as Luxembourg-born Kim Kirchen or Germany's Tony Martin, are prepared to work to raise the pace in the final kilometres so he himself is best-placed for a win. But Cavendish has had to earn that support, too. His win rate is so prolific that at the frighteningly young age of 24 he is already considered a Tour leader, with a swarm of yellow and black clad Columbia-HTC jerseys surrounding him for the final hour's racing on the flat stages. "I can't not win, with that degree of backing," he said. "I owe them too much not to."

Nor is Cavendish likely to disappear soon. He is one of the most consistent riders in the sport – he has been winning races since February – and sprinters tend to have a longer shelf-life than overall contenders. So barring accident or injury, for at least the next decade, whenever there is a 60kph charge for the line in the Tour, Cavendish is certain to be there.

If his presence has already mas- sively raised Britain's profile in the Tour, Bradley Wiggins' switch from time trial and track specialist to overall contender this year has had an almost equally impressive effect.

Wiggins' best placing in a major stage race of any desciption was 71st in the Giro d'Italia this spring, while in the Tour – in his only finish to date – he took 123rd in 2006. Three years later the Briton has raised his game to the point where he was among those who could drop Lance Armstrong at one Alpine summit finish, at Verbier.

Then when the race leader Alberto Contador charged away on the finale of the stage to Le Grand Bornand, he indirectly paid tribute to Wiggins by saying he needed to drop him because he could have been a threat in the final time trial.

Third overall on the race's second rest day and now fourth after yesterday's Mont Ventoux stage, the Garmin-Slipstream leader said he was not surprised by his performance, more that he should have been able to exploit his improvement so well.

Such fast, sudden progress at the age of 29 has raised some eyebrows, as Wiggins has been the first to admit. "To be honest, I think a lot of people think I'm on drugs. I'm sure of it. I know how the sport is," he said as early as the Pyrenees. "Lots of guys are going to be thinking: 'What's Wiggins doing?'

"That's unfortunate, but I'm not Stefan Schumacher or Bernard Kohl [two riders who showed radical improvements last year and then tested positive for EPO]. I've worked hard for this."

That work has included a rigorous weight loss programme since the Olympics in Beijing last year, cutting out all his track riding and focusing fully on the road for the first time in his career.

The reward for such sacrifices has been a whole new area of bike racing for the triple Olympic gold medallist to exploit – and one where Britain's last real contender was the climber Robert Millar back in the 1980s.

Cavendish's few detractors point out that his bid for the green jersey fell wide of the mark this year. But as his team manager Rolf Aldag says, Cavendish should be challenging for it for another decade at least. By finishing in Paris and leading the competition for more than a week, the young Briton has shown enormous progress in any case.

Added to the interest generated by Cavendish and Wiggins, next year's race should see the arrival of the first British-sponsored, British-based team in the Tour for more than 20 years.

Built in collaboration with the sport's governing body in the UK, British Cycling, Team Sky's professional outfit hope to reach the same levels of success that saw Great Britain rack up eight gold medals, four silver and two bronze in cycling in the 2008 Olympics. Sky's stated objective is to have a British winner of the Tour de France within the next five years.

A British rider in yellow – and Cavendish in green – would have seemed more than unlikely a few years ago. But after 2009, Britain finally appears to have broken its own glass ceiling in the Tour de France.

The Brits on Tour

Brian Robinson: The first Briton, along with Tony Hoar, to complete the Tour – in 1955 as part of Britain's first-ever team in the race – and the first to win a Tour stage – to Brest in 1957. Robinson then won a second stage by 20 minutes in 1959. He retired at the early age of 33, tired of the travelling, claiming later he would have been better off building a house than riding a bike.

Barry Hoban: One of the best sprinters of his generation, he turned pro in 1962 and was based abroad for most of his career. The Yorkshireman won eight stages of the Tour de France from 1967-75. He was the first Briton to win consecutive stages in the Tour – a feat that has twice been equalled by Mark Cavendish.

Michael Wright: He went to live in Belgium aged three after his father was killed in World War Two and his mother married a Belgian soldier, and grew up in Liège. Shy and unassuming, he had to take English classes when he raced for British teams. He was not a great climber but won three Tour stages.

Tom Simpson: After Robinson, he blazed the trail for British cycling abroad. Simpson was the first English-speaking global star, set the bar for all British riders after him, and even indirectly forged the path for English-speaking riders such as Lance Armstrong. He came sixth in the 1962 Tour and was the UK's first Tour leader, for one day. He was also Great Britain's first-ever World Champion, in 1965. He died on the Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour, from a combination of alcohol, amphetamines and heat exhaustion.

Robert Millar: The UK's best-ever stage racer bar none. He started riding a bike in order to get out of Glasgow and find what the reclusive Scot would call "green bits". He became Britain's first winner of a major classification, the King of the Mountains, in 1984, and was also the best-ever British finisher in the Tour, taking fourth place the same year. He won three mountain stages and finished 10th in 1989.

Chris Boardman: Britain's first winner of three Tour prologues, in 1994, 1997 and 1998. An Olympic gold medallist in 1992, he broke the Hour Record several times and was Britain's leading professional abroad throughout the 1990s.

David Millar: He won the Tour's opening time trial stage ahead of Lance Armstrong in 2000. Since then he has won a Tour stage from a break in Béziers in 2002 and the Tour's final time trial in 2003. The Scot was suspended for two years in 2004 after confessing to using the banned blood booster EPO, and since returning has been a key figure in the fight against doping in the sport. He is racing in this year's Tour, riding for Garmin-Slipstream.

Alasdair Fotheringham