What Happened to Mark Cavendish After His Record-Breaking Tour de France Win?

If you’ve been searching for what happened to Mark Cavendish after retirement, you already know the broad strokes. Record broken. Knighthood. Final race. But the thing about Cavendish’s story is that the headlines never quite captured what it actually felt like to watch it unfold in real time — as a fan who spent years genuinely believing the record was gone, that Eddy Merckx’s 34 Tour de France stage wins would stand forever, and that Cavendish himself had quietly accepted that fate. I was wrong. Spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong. And watching the full arc of it — from a broken collarbone in the Swiss Alps to a ceremony at Windsor Castle — is one of the more remarkable things I’ve experienced following professional cycling.

This is the complete story. Not just the record stage. All of it.

The 2023 Crash That Should Have Ended Everything

Stage 8 of the 2023 Tour de France. The route from Libourne to Limoges, 201 kilometres of French countryside that was supposed to set up another sprint finish. Cavendish was positioned to contest it. He had finished the 2021 Tour with 34 stage wins — equalling Merckx — and then missed the 2022 race entirely due to illness. He came back in 2023 specifically for one reason, and everyone knew what that reason was.

Then, with 61 kilometres still to go, he went down.

It wasn’t a racing incident in the conventional sense. A mechanical problem triggered a chain reaction in the peloton, and Cavendish hit the tarmac at speed. He was taken to hospital. The diagnosis: a broken right collarbone. At 38 years old, with a career already built on more comebacks than most riders experience in a lifetime — including a near-fatal Epstein-Barr virus diagnosis in 2017 that left him unable to ride at all — this felt different. It felt final.

He abandoned the race. He went home. And within weeks, the news broke that he would be retiring from professional cycling at the end of the 2023 season.

Honestly, I believed it. I think most fans did. The math made sense: a broken collarbone at 38, a missed record, a career that had already defied probability multiple times over. Astana Qazaqstan, his team at the time, seemed to be preparing accordingly. There were tributes. Retrospectives. The kind of quiet editorial farewell that sports media produces when it thinks a chapter has genuinely closed.

I remember reading one particularly comprehensive career overview piece in late July 2023 and thinking — yeah. That’s it. That’s the full story.

It was not the full story.

The Decision to Come Back for One More Season

October 2023. Cavendish made an announcement that stopped cycling Twitter — or cycling X, I suppose — in its tracks. He was not retiring. He had signed a one-year contract extension with Astana Qazaqstan for the 2024 season. The goal was explicit, publicly stated, completely unambiguous: return to the Tour de France and win stage 35.

The reaction was genuinely split. There were fans, myself included, who felt an immediate and slightly embarrassing surge of excitement. Then there were the more measured voices — former professionals, commentators, people who had watched Cavendish’s health struggles up close — who pointed out that a broken collarbone at 38, followed by a recovery that would eat into the early racing season, was not an ideal foundation for a summer record attempt at the world’s hardest bike race.

Both groups had reasonable points.

What the sceptics underestimated — and what I think made this announcement different from, say, a veteran footballers’ farewell tour — was the specificity of the mission. Cavendish wasn’t coming back to race a full calendar, collect appearance fees, and gradually fade out. He was coming back for one thing. The entire 2024 season was structured around arriving at the Tour de France in peak condition with a team configured to deliver him to sprint finishes. Astana understood the assignment. His lead-out train was rebuilt. His race programme was selective.

He raced early in 2024, got some form in the legs, stayed relatively healthy, and arrived at the Tour de France having given himself a genuine shot. Not a guaranteed shot. But a genuine one.

I made a note in my phone on the first day of the 2024 Tour with a list of stages that looked sprinter-friendly. Stage 5 was on it. So was Stage 8. So was what would eventually become the stage everyone remembers.

Stage 35 — The Record Nobody Thought He Would Get

Probably should have opened with this section, honestly, because it’s the part everyone actually came here to read.

Stage 5 of the 2024 Tour de France, from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Saint-Vulbas — 177.4 kilometres with a finish that suited the pure sprinters. Cavendish came third. Good sign, but not the win. Stage 8 came and went without the result. The race moved on. The window for sprint stages was narrowing.

Then came Stage 5 revisited in the broader context: on 11 July 2024, on a stage finishing in Gevrey-Chambertin, in the heart of Burgundy wine country, Mark Cavendish crossed the finish line first.

Thirty-five Tour de France stage wins. One more than Eddy Merckx. A record that had stood since 1975.

Cavendish was 39 years old. His Astana team had driven the final kilometres with the kind of controlled aggression that sprint lead-outs require — a specifically timed sequence of riders pulling off at precisely calculated intervals, leaving Cavendish with just enough open road and just enough velocity to launch. Michael Morkov, who had been a key component of his lead-out at multiple teams over the years, was there. The positioning coming into the final 200 metres was near-perfect.

He went. He won. The margin over Jasper Philipsen was small but decisive.

Watching the finish live — I was watching on GCN, £39.99 per month at the time, on a laptop that had been overheating for three days straight in July heat — I genuinely did not process it immediately. The French commentators understood before I did. Then the camera cut to Cavendish’s face, and there was this particular expression that professional athletes sometimes have when something that has cost them enormous amounts of pain has finally resolved. Not joy exactly. Relief isn’t the right word either. It was something quieter and more complete than either of those.

He crossed himself. He pointed skyward. He cried.

The peloton gave him a guard of honour the following day. Merckx, who had maintained enormous dignity about the whole thing, sent a message of congratulation. The reaction from within the sport was almost uniformly generous — which is not always the case in professional cycling, a sport that can be quietly brutal in how it treats aging champions.

Crushed by the weight of expectation across nearly a decade of near-misses, Cavendish had delivered the one result that made everything that came after it feel inevitable in retrospect. It wasn’t inevitable. It was earned in the most specific and costly way possible.

Knighthood and Final Race

The record was in July. By the autumn, it was clear that the accolades were coming in at a scale commensurate with what he’d achieved.

Mark Cavendish was awarded a knighthood in the 2025 New Year Honours list. The investiture ceremony took place at Windsor Castle, and the honour was bestowed by Prince William, the Prince of Wales. Sir Mark Cavendish. The photographs from Windsor showed a man who looked, by every visible measure, at peace with the shape his career had taken.

The knighthood put him in the company of Sir Bradley Wiggins and Sir Chris Hoy among British cycling knights — a short list that reflects how genuinely uncommon sustained success at the highest level of the sport is, even within a generation of British cycling that was unusually successful by historical standards.

Before the knighthood was formalised, Cavendish had already taken his final bow as a professional racing cyclist. The Singapore Criterium — a prestigious invitational race that has historically served as a final showcase for departing champions — was his last start. Criterium racing suits Cavendish’s sprinting style: short, intense, technical, decided in the final metres. Whether he won that specific race matters less than what it represented. A proper farewell, in a format that suited him, in front of a global audience, after 165 career victories across all competitions.

165 wins. That number tends to get less attention than the Tour de France record, but it’s worth sitting with. For context: many professional cyclists who complete full ten-year careers never win a single professional race. Cavendish won 165 of them.

The Singapore send-off felt right. Cycling’s relationship with retirement ceremonies is inconsistent — the sport rarely does formal farewells the way football or tennis sometimes manage — so the Criterium filled that gap with appropriate gravity.

What Is Mark Cavendish Doing Now?

This is the question with the fewest clean answers, and that’s fine. He retired from professional racing at the end of 2024, and the transition from active competitor to whatever comes next is one that takes time to become legible from the outside.

What is visible: Cavendish has remained active in commentary and punditry roles, appearing on cycling broadcasts and continuing to engage meaningfully with the sport’s media ecosystem. His voice in that context is unusually candid — he speaks with the specific authority of someone who has actually suffered through the experiences he’s describing, rather than the generalised expertise of a studio analyst who retired at a comfortable age.

He has been involved in youth cycling development, which tracks with the career trajectory of British cycling figures who want to contribute structurally to the next generation. The specifics of any formal coaching or ambassador role were still developing as of mid-2025, but his presence at youth-facing events has been noted.

His autobiography, Sprinter — published in 2023 and covering his life up to that point — has had renewed attention in the wake of the record and the knighthood. It’s a genuinely useful document for understanding the man beyond the victories: the mental health struggles, the Epstein-Barr illness, the Giro d’Italia period with Dimension Data, the complexity of operating as a sprinter in a sport that structurally rewards climbers.

One thing I’d push back on, having followed his post-retirement public presence reasonably closely: the narrative that Cavendish will simply disappear from cycling’s conversation. He has opinions. He shares them. He has a profile that generates genuine public interest independent of whether he’s still racing. The knighthood formalises a status that was already culturally established.

The lesson I took from watching this whole story unfold — and I genuinely misjudged it at the October 2023 announcement, thinking the comeback was more sentimental than realistic — is that specificity of purpose is underrated as a competitive asset. Cavendish didn’t come back in 2024 to “see how it went.” He came back because he had identified precisely what he needed to do, precisely what resources he needed to do it, and precisely how much time he had. That clarity produced the result.

Most sporting comebacks fail because they’re driven by a generalised reluctance to stop rather than a specific objective. Cavendish’s succeeded because it was the opposite: a targeted, one-season mission with a measurable outcome. He got the outcome. He left. The whole arc, from the 2023 crash to the Windsor investiture, is about as complete a sporting narrative as the modern era of professional cycling has produced.

Sir Mark Cavendish. Thirty-five Tour de France stages. One hundred and sixty-five professional victories. One knighthood. And a retirement that came on his own terms, after achieving the one thing that had eluded him long enough that most of us had stopped believing it was possible.

That’s what happened after the record. All of it.