Mark Cavendish wins “special” BBC Lifetime Achievement award after record-breaking final season

It turns out that all the online furore over Sir Mark Cavendish’s omission from the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist for 2024 was for nothing, after it was confirmed on Monday morning that the Manx Missile will be honoured with the broadcaster’s Lifetime Achievement award instead.

The 39-year-old will be presented with the award during the annual Sports Personality of the Year ceremony live on the BBC on Tuesday evening, after winning his record-breaking 35th Tour de France stage win in July, before retiring from the sport, his legacy cemented as cycling’s undisputed greatest ever sprinter.

And, with almost two decades in the professional peloton, 165 professional wins, 35 Tour de France stage wins, a world road race championship, 17 Giro d’Italia stage wins, a Milan-Sanremo title, and two points jersey victories at the Tour, to Cavendish this week’s Lifetime Achievement award represents the legacy he’s left behind in British sport.

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“Legacy is important. Most people would like to be remembered for something,” the sprinter from the Isle of Man, who also won an Olympic silver medal in the Omnium in 2016, told the BBC this week.

“It’s such an amazing feeling, what an honour. I’ve been riding for 20 years and I’ve done everything I can, so to be awarded this is something very, very special.

“I’m very fortunate I’ve done everything I wanted to do, and proud that’s more than many other people have done as well.

“I always dreamed of having my name alongside those greats I grew up watching.”

(Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com)

And, if it wasn’t already clear before this year, Cavendish’s sensational, throwback sprint in Saint Vulbas in July, his 35th stage victory at the Tour de France, finally taking him beyond the joint record he held with the legendary Eddy Merckx since 2021, made sure that the Manx Missile will be remembered as one of the true greats.

Now synonymous with the Tour de France, it’s apt that Cavendish’s relationship with cycling’s biggest race began in London, where at the 2007 edition the fresh-faced 22-year-old, who had just broken through near the top of cycling’s sprinting hierarchy following a debut win at the Scheldeprijs one-day race (which he would go on to win three times), would struggle with the expectation and pressure of the Tour.

When that first Tour stage victory came in 2008, however many followed, the then-Team Columbia rider winning four stages before leaving the race ahead of stage 15 to prepare for an ultimately anti-climactic Olympic Games on the track.

At the 2009 Tour, fresh from a heroic, last-gasp Milan-Sanremo win, Cavendish cemented his status as the undisputed faster sprinter in the world. The Manx rider won six stages and made it to Paris for the first time, beginning his love affair with the Champs-Élysées, the famous boulevard where he was victorious in four consecutive years between that edition and 2012, the final of those wins famously led out by Team Sky and the first British winner of the Tour, Sir Bradley Wiggins.

A carefully prepared and calculated bid to win the world road race title on Copenhagen’s pan-flat circuit in 2011 paid off spectacularly, as Cavendish became the first British man since Tom Simpson in 1965 to win the rainbow jersey – and in doing so, earning him that year’s Sports Personality of the Year gong.

However, the planned sequel the following year in London failed to materialise, a symptom of the Manx rider’s career-long love-hate relationship with the Olympic Games.

(Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com)

Back at the Tour, and with an astonishing 25 stage wins from his first six participations, the Merckx question has been understandably ever present throughout the second half of Cavendish’s career, often proving a source of irritation for the sprinter who had plenty practice in playing down his interest in beating the great Belgian’s tally of 34 Tour stage wins.

Fascination with the record was reignited in 2021, however, when Cavendish pulled off an incredible return to the sport’s pinnacle, overcoming mental health struggles and a prolonged spell recovering from Epstein–Barr virus to get back to the Tour and win four stages for Deceuninck-Quick Step (as a late call-up), hauling himself level with Merckx’s 34 stages and winning his second green jersey in the process.

A controversial omission from Quick-Step’s Tour line-up in 2022 was followed by a winter of discontent fuelled by uncertainty over his new choice of team (the B&B Hotels set-up would unceremoniously collapse after Cavendish had committed himself to the squad).

Cavendish was thrown a lifeline, however, when Astana came calling, and seemed on the brink of history at least year’s Tour, only for a bouncing chain and broken collarbone scuppering that hoped-for fairytale ending.

But after performing a U-turn on his retirement plans, that fairytale ending finally came through, on one of British cycling’s most momentous afternoons in Saint Vulbas in July, when, just like he did back in 2009, and in 2011, and 2016, Cavendish soared through a gap and accelerated his way into the history books.

(Zac Williams/SWpix.com)

Along with his Lifetime Achievement award, Cavendish also capped a fitting end to his storied career by receiving his knighthood from Prince William at Windsor Castle in October.

“As a sports person you have a goal and you put the work in to achieve that goal,” the 39-year-old said after becoming Sir Mark.

“As a cyclist it’s a race, it’s a win and you are generally in control of how you get there and it’s a process that comes. But to have something that is bestowed upon you and it feels different because it’s super humbling.”

He continued: “I never thought growing up that anybody in cycling would be knighted and to just see that in my career, that cycling was important enough, with Sir Brad [Wiggins], Sir Dave [Brailsford], Sir Chris [Hoy], Dame Laura [Kenny], Dame Sarah [Storey], it’s pretty special.

“Cycling as quite small and niche when I started, to know it’s big enough and successful enough in this country, it gets recognition, it gets rewarded, that’s special enough for me.”