After yesterday’s performance its a question that is on many cyclists minds.

With over 20 Tour de France stage wins under his belt, a win at Milan San Remo (one of the longest day races in the pro calendar) this years Green Jersey in the Tour and now his glorious World Championship win at the weekend (not to mention all his other victories on the road & track) its easy to forget he is only 26 years old!

Sure, Hoy and the rest of the track team have an impressive Olympic medal haul, Boardman has his records, Robert Millar was king of the mountains and Simpson will always be fondly remembered.

But to achieve what Mark Cavendish has in such a short space of time will go into world cycling history, not just British cycling history.

Just this year alone he has won two Giro d’Italia Stages, 5 Tour de France Stages, 2 stages of the Tour of Britain, the London Surrey cycle classic (which is a dry run of the London 2012 Olympic course) and now the World Championships.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to watch the action on Sunday it was a textbook team ride by GB, something that is difficult enough if its guys you train and race with throughout the year but lets not forget on any other day these guys would be racing against each other!

This year’s GB squad was mainly populated by riders from team SKY including Wiggins, Froome, Cummings, Hunt, Thomas and Stannard with the exception of team Garmin-Cervelo rider David Millar and of course HTC’s Mark Cavendish. For a predominantly SKY team GB to sacrifice their own personal gain for a rider on another team is something special – although reading between the lines its probably obvious where his new contract has been signed!

The team managed to control the race from the front of the pack for almost the entire 260km route, with Germany the only other team taking the front for any considerable length of time, a breakaway escaped early in the race containing some dangerous riders, notably Kazakh rider Iglinsky who had two Astana team mates with him, though racing for their own nationalities they seemed to be working together. As is often the case the breakaway gradually lost time on the peloton when riders started refusing to do any work for each other.

The critical point on the circuit seemed to be the feed station with attacks taking place on almost all of the final 4 laps. Wiggins and Millar who were doing the big turns at the front kept it cool though and pushed their steady pace instead of taking the bait and attacking. Tour de France favourites Voeckler and Hoogerland launched attacks but eventually ran out of steam probably expended attacking each other!

The feed station also caused a large crash with around 60km to go, this took out the current World Champion Thor Hushovd and Luxembourg rider Frank Schleck among others, Hushovd carried on despite being over almost two minutes down on the bunch but Schleck decided to call it a day.

As the still rather large peloton (90 riders were still in contact) reached the final corner it looked like the best laid plans of the British team were about to come to pieces, riders emerged from all sides and all nations with no obvious leadouts for sprinters, Cavendish was forced towards the barrier with only Stannard & Thomas left in front of him and totally surrounded by other riders, as the speed shot up from the race average of 45kph gaps were few and far between, suddenly with only 200m to go the Manx missile fired, shot through a non existent gap in the front and found some clear road, his HTC team mate, Australian Rider Matt Goss, was the only one who could follow, even at that it was clear Cavendish was going to get the win.

Third place was fiercely contested with both Greipel and Cancellara appearing to have clinched it (depending on what channel you were watching!) The photo finish was so incredibly close it was a mm measurement that was called in Greipel’s favour, a disappointment for Cancellara who earlier in the week lost his World Champion TT jersey to Greipel’s fellow German Tony Martin.

As the riders crossed the line the exhaustion on team GB’s faces was replaced with elation, after 3 years of planning they had done it, ridden a 260km TTT to deliver the worlds fastest sprinter to his rainbow jersey!

Where now for Cavendish?

Well if the rumours are true then SKY will have a rainbow jersey in the team next year and the Olympics will surely be a focus, Cav has already hinted that he would like to do the Olympic/Worlds double. The question is will this affect his tour riding?

Whatever Cavendish decides to do next season you can bet that at just 26 he will continue to electrify the world of bike racing for a good while to come!

If you want Cavendish kit check out the pages below

In celebration of Mark Cavendish’s World Championship win we have extended our 20% off Vouchers for another week – the codes are here -

20% off List prices

as well as Adidas Team GB clothing, Oakley Radar Sunglasses, Continental tyres,Fizik Arione saddle, Zipp wheels & Shimano Di2, Cavendish also has a PRO signature series Handlebar and Stem.