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

Following Mark Cavendish’s career has gotten complicated with all the noise flying around about what actually happened after the record, the knighthood, the farewell race. Everyone’s got the broad strokes right. But the headlines missed what it genuinely felt like to watch this thing unfold — as someone who spent years convinced Eddy Merckx’s 34 Tour de France stage wins were untouchable. I had written Cavendish off. Completely. Embarrassingly. And then I watched him go from a broken collarbone in the French countryside to a ceremony at Windsor Castle, and I had to rethink basically everything I thought I understood about what’s possible at 39 in professional cycling.

So here’s the complete story. Not just the stage. All of it.

The 2023 Crash That Should Have Ended Everything

Stage 8 of the 2023 Tour de France — Libourne to Limoges, 201 kilometres of French countryside. Supposed to set up a sprint finish. Cavendish had come into that race carrying enormous weight: he’d equalled Merckx’s record back in 2021 with 34 stage wins, missed the entire 2022 Tour due to illness, and returned in 2023 for one specific reason. Nobody was pretending otherwise.

Then, 61 kilometres from the finish, he went down hard.

A mechanical triggered a chain reaction through the peloton. Cavendish hit the tarmac at speed. Broken right collarbone. He was 38 years old — a man whose career had already survived more than most riders encounter in a lifetime, including a near-fatal Epstein-Barr virus diagnosis back in 2017 that left him unable to get on a bike at all. This felt different from those earlier setbacks. It felt like the actual end.

He abandoned. Went home. And within weeks, word came that he’d be retiring at the close of the 2023 season.

I believed it — honestly believed it. The math was just too clean: broken collarbone at 38, record still one win out of reach, a career that had already defied probability more times than anyone had the right to expect. Astana Qazaqstan, his team, seemed to be preparing accordingly. Sports media shifted into obituary mode — retrospectives, tributes, the kind of careful editorial farewell that appears when everyone’s quietly agreed a chapter has closed.

I read one particularly thorough career piece in late July 2023 and thought: yeah, that’s it. Done.

It was not done.

The Decision to Come Back for One More Season

October 2023. Cavendish announced he wasn’t retiring. One-year contract extension with Astana Qazaqstan. The 2024 season had a single stated purpose — return to the Tour de France and win stage 35. He didn’t dress it up. Neither did the team.

Reactions split immediately. Fans like me felt that slightly embarrassing surge of hope. The more measured voices — former pros, people who’d watched his health struggles up close — pointed out that recovering from a collarbone break at 38, with that recovery eating into early-season race time, wasn’t exactly an ideal launchpad for a summer record attempt at the hardest bike race on earth.

Both camps had a point. But here’s what the sceptics missed — what made this different from the average veteran’s farewell lap — was how specific the mission was. Cavendish wasn’t coming back to collect appearance fees and gradually fade. He was coming back for one measurable thing. The entire 2024 programme was structured around arriving at the Tour de France in condition, with a team built to deliver him to sprint finishes. Astana rebuilt his lead-out train. His race calendar was selective, targeted, almost surgical.

He got some early form in 2024. Stayed healthy enough. Arrived at the Tour having given himself a genuine shot — not guaranteed, but genuine.

I made a note in my phone that first week of the 2024 Tour listing the stages that looked sprinter-friendly. Stage 5 was on there. 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 — Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Saint-Vulbas, 177.4 kilometres. Cavendish finished third. Promising, not decisive. Stage 8 came and went without the win. The race kept moving, the sprint stages kept disappearing, and the window was narrowing.

Then: 11 July 2024. A stage finishing in Gevrey-Chambertin, right in the heart of Burgundy wine country. Mark Cavendish crossed the line first.

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

He was 39 years old. Astana had driven the final kilometres with the controlled aggression that proper sprint lead-outs require — a timed sequence of riders pulling off at precisely calculated intervals, leaving Cavendish just enough open road and velocity to launch. Michael Morkov, a key part of his lead-out across multiple teams and multiple years, was there when it counted. The positioning into the final 200 metres was close to perfect. He went. He won. The margin over Jasper Philipsen was small but clean.

I was watching on GCN — £39.99 a month at the time — on a laptop that had been overheating for three straight days in the July heat. And I genuinely didn’t process it immediately. The French commentators understood before I did. Then the camera found Cavendish’s face, and there was this expression that appears sometimes on athletes when something that has cost them enormous, specific pain has finally resolved. Not joy exactly — relief isn’t quite right either. Something quieter than both. More complete.

He crossed himself. Pointed skyward. Cried.

The peloton gave him a guard of honour the following day. Merckx — who had handled the entire situation with genuine dignity throughout — sent congratulations. The reaction from inside the sport was almost uniformly generous, which isn’t always guaranteed in professional cycling. The sport can be quietly brutal toward aging champions. This time it wasn’t.

Frustrated by nearly a decade of near-misses and mounting doubt, Cavendish had simply refused to let the story end the way everyone including me had written it. That’s what makes him endearing to us cycling fans — the absolute refusal to accept the version of events that seemed most logical.

Knighthood and Final Race

The record came in July. By autumn, it was obvious the accolades were arriving at a scale that matched what he’d actually done.

Cavendish received a knighthood in the 2025 New Year Honours. The investiture took place at Windsor Castle — Prince William, the Prince of Wales, doing the honours. Sir Mark Cavendish. The photographs showed a man who looked, by any visible measure, at peace with the shape his career had taken.

That put him alongside Sir Bradley Wiggins and Sir Chris Hoy in British cycling’s very short list of knighted riders — a list that reflects just how rare sustained success at this level actually is, even within a generation of British cycling that was unusually decorated by historical standards.

Before Windsor, Cavendish had already taken his final bow as a professional. The Singapore Criterium — an invitational that has historically served as a showcase send-off for departing champions — was his last start. Criterium racing suits everything about how Cavendish operates: 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 built for him, in front of a global audience, after 165 career victories across all competitions.

165 wins. Don’t make my mistake of glossing past that number. For context: plenty of professional cyclists who complete full ten-year careers never win a single professional race. Not one. Cavendish won 165.

The Singapore send-off felt right. Cycling handles retirement ceremonies inconsistently — it doesn’t do formal farewells the way football or tennis sometimes manages — so the Criterium filled that gap with appropriate weight.

What Is Mark Cavendish Doing Now?

But what is Mark Cavendish now? In essence, he’s a retired champion in the middle of figuring out what that actually means. But it’s much more than that.

He’s remained active in commentary and punditry — appearing on cycling broadcasts with the specific authority of someone who has personally suffered through the experiences he’s describing. That’s different from the generalised expertise of a studio analyst who retired comfortably at 32. When Cavendish talks about what a sprint lead-out actually feels like in the final kilometre of a Tour stage, he’s not reconstructing it from memory. It’s still recent.

He’s been involved in youth cycling development — which tracks with where British cycling figures tend to go when they want to contribute structurally to what comes next. The specifics of any formal coaching or ambassador role were still taking shape as of mid-2025, but his presence at youth-facing events has been consistent and apparently genuine rather than ceremonial.

His autobiography, Sprinter — published in 2023, covering his life up to that point — picked up renewed attention after the record and the knighthood. It’s worth reading if you want the fuller picture: the mental health struggles, the Epstein-Barr collapse, the Giro d’Italia years with Dimension Data, the specific difficulty of being a sprinter in a sport that structurally rewards climbers and treats flat stages as interval training between the mountains.

One thing I’d push back on, having followed his post-retirement presence reasonably closely: the assumption that Cavendish will quietly disappear from cycling’s conversation. He has opinions. He shares them. His profile generates genuine public interest that doesn’t depend on whether he’s still racing. The knighthood formalises a cultural status that was already established.

The lesson I took from watching this whole arc — and I genuinely misjudged the October 2023 announcement, thought the comeback was more sentimental than strategic — is that specificity of purpose is a genuinely underrated competitive asset. Cavendish didn’t come back to “see how things went.” He came back because he had identified precisely what he needed to do, exactly what resources he needed, and approximately how much time he had to do it. That clarity produced the result. This new idea of a one-season targeted comeback eventually evolved into the model that cycling enthusiasts know and reference today when these conversations come up.

Most sporting comebacks fail because they’re driven by a general reluctance to stop rather than a specific objective. Cavendish’s worked because it was the opposite — a targeted mission with a measurable outcome. He got the outcome. He left. The arc from that 2023 crash in the French countryside to the Windsor investiture is about as complete a sporting narrative as modern professional cycling has managed to produce.

Sir Mark Cavendish. Thirty-five Tour de France stages. One hundred and sixty-five professional victories. One knighthood. A retirement that arrived on his terms, after achieving the one thing most of us had quietly agreed was no longer possible.

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