It is generally the norm to begin analyzing the historical place of a given athlete at the moment of his first major defeat. Cruyff became a legend after his '74 loss against Beckenbauer. Mike Tyson's legend grew after his Buster Douglas defeat in '90. And it wasn't until Mariano Rivera blew Game Seven of the 2001 World Series that people began seeing him as the greatest closer of all time. Who would have known at the time that he'd go on to dominate for another decade?
But I digress. I'll go back to my roots and write a little about cycling. The not-until-you-lose kind of love has been shown in cycling, namely to Greg LeMond, who was suddenly much more revered when he'd been doing his Dance Macabre in '92. And dare I say most cycling fans missed Miguel Indurain badly during the Armstrong years, and - not least - what followed?
What's all this got to do with Mark Cavendish? For one, we just saw the first Tour de France in five years that the British sprinter didn't thoroughly dominate. And the guy's still only just turned 27! That isn't to say he hasn't shown anything; he did win three stages, but his team, the all-dominant Team Sky, clearly had bigger fish to fry in the race.
Cavendish was either isolated and up against a focused and fine-tuned machine leading out Andre Greipel. Or, and this is perhaps the more crucial factor, crashes.
Maybe another factor has been other riders' strength. Greipel looks like he's having a breakthrough Tour. Sagan looks like a guy capable of so many things. But mostly, and I believe Cavendish would agree, it's been the crashes.
But in the wake of an Olympic Road Race which was clearly the story of Cavendish (how he could win, how to beat him, how to adjust the strategy according to him), where the Manx Missile actually did lose, let's look a little further into his place in the road cycling sprinters' Pantheon. Where does he rank on a historical scale? And why is it important?
I'll take the first question really quick to begin with. Because that's one of the things I love to discuss - sports history - and among the categories or types of cyclists, I don't believe anybody in the current field would rank among the best climbers ever (the last one to do that was probably Pantani, or maybe Armstrong), nor the best time triallist (though I might do a similar piece about Cancellara compared to other TT specialists). And forget about stage race riders - there's barely enough talent in the current field to man the top two spots on the Tour podium. But Cavendish has been so dominant over the past five years that you have to consider where he ranks all-time against former sprint kings.
So, the second question: Where does Cavendish rank? Numerically, he's right there at the top. He's already the fourth-winningest Tour de France rider in terms of stage wins (23), and he's taken a combined 13 stages in the Giro and the Vuelta. Heck, he's only five stages away from tying Bernard Hinault as the second-winningest stage winner in Tour history (and it is 'only' five when speaking of Cavendish!), and Eddy Merckx's total of 34 might even be within reach. No sprinter has ever been this effective at the top level.
Now, let's look at the nature of his type of rider. The Super Sprinter Era in professional cycling didn't start until the late eighties, early nineties, when riders like Jean-Paul van Poppel, Djamolidine Abdoujaparov and especially Mario Cipollini (plus, to a lesser extent, Olaf Ludwig, the young Dimitri Konyshev and the young Johan Museeuw) started - in blunt terms - not giving a damn about other types of stages than the blanket finishes, blatantly sacrificing versatility for pure speed. So the type of rider that Cavendish is is fairly recent in the history of cycling. Back in the Goodefroot and Maertens days, a sprinter was merely a very fast finisher, who could generally do other things (like winning Paris-Roubaix and the Vuelta, respectively).
With all the numbers of stage wins, who could possibly be a better sprinter in the history of cycling? It clearly requires a sustained dominance over a considerable amount of time - so sprinters who in the notoriously volatile game of bunch sprinting have had few dominant seasons cannot get much consideration here. Tom Steels was arguably the fastest man in terms of pure speed in the 1998-2000 seasons, but a bout with the mono ended his peak years very suddenly. Nicola Minali was said to be unbeatable when in the right position in 1996-1997, but he was demanding when it came to the position and an extremely streaky rider. So was Jeroen Blijlevens, whose form came and went very unpredictably, and many sprinters have been able to come out of the shadows and beat the frontrunners once or twice in the big races. I count Jan Svorada as maybe the best of these 'vulture' sprinter of the 90's, Andre Greipel the best in the current field, and Robbie McEwen probably the best of all time. Robbie Mac rarely dominated, but he does have as many stage wins in the Tour as Mario Cipollini.
And of course, there's the second division of sprinters. The ones that are either very strong finishers, but more versatile riders (Hushovd, Boasson Hagen, Sagan, Guidi - there are a lot of those), or who can dominate a race against weaker competition (step right up, Marcel Wust). Maybe the most interesting ones are the explosive sprinters who can deliver one or two perfect sprints, and that might be it for their careers. But I can still remember Wilfried Nelissen in 1993, Ivan Quaranta making both a very on-form Blijlevens and a Cipollini in his prime look silly in the 1999 Giro, and this year, a young Andrea Guardini out-jumped Cavendish fair and square and simply beat him.
To be fair, Guardini is 23 years old. No one knows yet what he'll become. But that's another story.
Finally, there are the bullies - the ones who ride the sprints like there's no tomorrow. And sometimes there isn't. This category includes the young McEwen, Abdoujaparov, Frederic Moncassin, Andris Naudusz, and, in the current field, Roberto Ferrari. They sometimes win because they have the speed to back up their wild behavior on that last half-kilometer. But true greatness isn't achieved by riding like this.
To me, only three sprinters can possibly stack up against Cavendish. Let's have a look at them:
Alessandro Petacchi
Ale-Jet, as he was called, probably had the most dominating run of anybody in the history of bunch sprinting when he tore apart all competition in the 2003-2005 seasons. Over that three-year span, Petacchi won four stages at the Tour (all in 2003), 14 stages at the Vuelta, and a staggering 19 Giro stages! Think about that for a second - over three seasons, Petacchi almost won an entire Giro worth of stages. And in 2005, he added Milan-San Remo for good measure, not to be outdone by Cipollini's 2002 masterpiece of a season. And all that doesn't include what he won tearing apart Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adreatico and similar smaller races. Petacchi was a rare combination of someone who burst onto the scene (his 11 wins in a debut season is a record that only Cavendish has equalled) and somewhat of a late bloomer in the big races (he was 29 when his dominant run started). He has won the points jersey of all three major stage races, the last of which came in the 2010 Tour, which added to his longevity as a sprinter, and he is the third-winningest stage winner at the Grand Tours with 48 W's. Most of these, as I said, were picked up over that magical three-year run, and he hasn't aged as well as Cipollini, losing much of his pure speed these past couple of seasons.
Erik Zabel
Longevity above all, Zabel was the toughest of the sprinters in the early 00's. He won classics (Milan-San Remo several times, even though he lost one he should have won against Freire, plus Amstel God Race) and points jerseys (nine straight seasons with a points competition won from '96 to '04). But he often failed to dazzle. Several of his Tour de France points jerseys were won without a stage win - something that was shocking at first, but became the mark of the Zabel over the years - and only in his debut year, 1995, and perhaps in 1996-1997, could he have been counted among the fastest. The numbers are there, over a long career, so Zabel has to be in the sprinters' pantheon, though.
Mario Cipollini
We're not debating endurance here, nor the ability to finish Grand Tours. Cipollini rarely did, which is why he doesn't figure high at all on the all-time leaders in points competitions won. But we are debating sprinting ability, and Mario Cipollini not only was a pioneer in this domain, leading out his sprints with a ground-breaking 'train' strategy - i.e. he made his entire team prepare his own work in a meticulous and very precise manner. He was also a sprinting icon. For more than a decade, it was a point of reference for any sprinter if he had beaten Cipollini. Minali made his name like that. So did Quaranta. Tom Steels, too. And Petacchi at first. Cipollini's Tour record isn't impressive (12 stage wins), but his Giro record is an astonishing 42 stages, which is an all-time record, and when everyone thought the Lion King was over and done, he delivered his best season ever in 2002, when he took Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem, six stage wins at the Giro - and the points jersey, and the World Championship. All at age 35. Nobody has ever had the relative versatility in a sprint that Cipollini had combined with his unique longevity. It's true Cipollini - in the years between 1998 and 2001 - had to rely a lot on his Saeco troops with strong leadoutmen such as Gian Matteo Fagnini to deliver him in the sprints, but over his career he could win sprints in many ways, and 2002 was a testiment to his ability to win races on his own. Especially Gent-Wevelgem.
Cipollini's personality deserves a chapter on its own, of course, with the glamour, the controversial statements, the larger-than-life presence which made him the most interesting sprinter even when there were faster men in the peloton. In many ways, this man, who's won more Grand Tour stages overall than anyone not named Eddy (at 57; Merckx has 64, and third-placed Petacchi has 48), is the definition of what a Super Sprinter should be like.
So compare these three guys to Cavendish. I count Zabel out from the get-go - he was never a point of reference for speed and ability the way the other guys were. Petacchi, too, as I believe his peak was too short for all-time superiority. Cavendish has been dominating for longer already, and he's much younger. Age comes into the picture when comparing Cavendish and Cipollini - where was Cipollini at 27? He had just started winning consistently in other races than the Giro, and his best years were clearly ahead of him. If the same holds true for Cavendish, all the other present sprinters are in big trouble. And so are all existing records of stages won. But who says it will?
Historically, it is really rare that a bike rider is a superstar at a very young age and keeps his performance level high for the duration of a long career. I believe Eddy Merckx is the latest rider to do that. Others who have kept a continued high performance level have either had more or less voluntary breaks in their careers (Armstrong, Pantani) or they have changed rider type altogether (the list is long, but counts legends like Jalabert and Museeuw). What I'm saying is that what's unique about Cipollini is that he has been a pure sprinter almost from day one of his career. Cavendish might very well do the same. But maintaining his performance level from the '09-'11 Tours for another decade - that seems not only unlikely, but downright ridiculous.
Technically, though, I like Cavendish's chances against Cipollini with both men at their peaks. A lot has been written about Cavendish's ability to avoid giving the guy behind him too much shelter, his fearlessness, and his extreme acceleration (something Cipollini lost right around his age 27 season....just saying). The way I see it, Cavendish in his prime is indeed the most dominant sprinter of all time. If you take away differences in lead-out conditions, it's not even close. Cavendish would annihilate Cipollini. Will he also go down as the most successful one? It is likely - though Cipollini probably still has the edge there.
I believe this is the only field in which cycling has been truly interesting in recent seasons. Considering Cavendish's status in the all-time Pantheon of sprinters. This, sadly, says even more about the sport of cycling than it does about Cavendish's tremendous performances.
