"If I don’t win here, I don’t lose 34 Tour stages" - Mark Cavendish insists he has 'nothing to lose' in final Tour de France

With 34 Tour de France stage wins already on his palmares, the sprinting G.O.A.T. Mark Cavendish, needs just one more win to edge ahead of the legendary Eddy Merckx and take sole ownership of the Tour de France stage win record. At the 2024 Tour, 'Project 35' is a go!

On the eve of the final Tour de France of the soon retiring 39-year-old's career however, Cavendish cut a relaxed figure at the team presentation. “I don’t have anything to lose,” the Astana Qazaqstan Team sprinter explains. “It’s not playing roulette where if I don’t win here, I don’t lose 34 Tour stages. I know it makes a nice story to say that, but it is simple as that.”

Last year was supposed to be the swansong of the Manx Missile, but at the 2023 Tour de France ended in heartbreak, as he exited the race in the back of an ambulance following a collarbone break in an innocuous crash, Cavendish is back for one last Tour de France and one final opportunity to secure himself as the sole greatest stage winner in the history of cycling's most iconic race.

“I’ve won 34 stages in the Tour de France. I’ve won the most stages in the Tour de France along with the great Eddy Merckx,” Cavendish said at the team presentation on Friday evening in Florence. “I just try to get more. If it’s one more, two more, ten more, it doesn’t matter. We have a job to do which is to try and win.”

“We will just take every day like that and approach it like any other bike race,” he continues. “We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think it was possible. Of course I don’t think any other team would be here with a sprint team if they don’t think it was possible to win. Fundamentally, our job as cyclists are to try to win.”

Although the hype around Cavendish is starting to reach fever pitch, the Brit is insistent that he takes to the start line on Saturday without pressure. “Our job is to try to win. When big stories are made, that’s not from us. That’s from you guys,” he laughs to the media. “We just try and do it. Opportunities come around to make history… you try and make history, you try to make more history.”

“I think realistically there are five or six chances. It’s hard the other times, but also the other sprinters have got those same opportunities as well. So we come in, we try to do it," the former world champion concludes. “I think we have everything in place that we can do it. But as I aid, I think everybody else in a place where they can do it. So that is the nature of sport. We try. If I said before I started my career that if I could ever be in a book of names of riders that meant something, big riders in the history of cycling, if I could be in that book I would be happy.”