If you’re wondering how Mark Cavendish will celebrate his record-breaking Tour de France stage win, his coach, Vasilis Anastopoulos, already knows the score.
“A huge party tonight,” he told the press gathered outside the Astana-Qazaqstan bus. “A Greek party, that’s for sure. We’re going to smash a lot of plates at the hotel tonight. Vino [Alexandre Vinokourov, team manager] is going to pay a lot tonight, I can guarantee that.”
A Greek party might seem a bit off the wall for a Brit on a Kazakh team, but it shouldn’t.
This year, the sprinter has spent so much time in the country that Anastopoulos’s children have given him an adoptive name. “His name is Markos Cavendishopolous,” the coach said, triggering a ripple of laughter from the journalists.
“At the beginning of April, he came to Greece with me. We spent three months in Greece in between [the Tour of] Turkey, [Tour de] Hungary and Tour de Suisse. We trained every day together, believed in the process – I can tell you that it was not an easy one. But we never stopped believing that this would come true.”
The belief, in the end, was not misplaced. Outside an uninspiring industrial estate on the outskirts of the village of Saint-Vulbas, Cavendish made history as the all-time stage win record holder of the Tour de France. He now counts thirty five victories, from his first in 2008, to his latest on Wednesday afternoon.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The plan for breaking the record was hatched in December last year. ‘Project 35’, as it became known inside Astana-Qazaqstan, promised to deliver one of the sport’s crowning moments. Anastopoulos was put in charge of leading it.
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“We started with our training camps already from December,” the coach said. “I think in December, generally, he spent only four days at home.”
That number has since only expanded to “maximum 15 days”, Anastopoulos estimates, meaning Cavendish has spent more time with his coach than his own family this year. “I hope he doesn’t hate me for that,” the 48-year-old smiled.
After a lengthy spring stint in Greece, Cavendish travelled to last month’s Tour de Suisse, where he kept a low profile, building his climbing legs through the Alps. Afterwards, he returned once again to Anastopoulos’s home country.
“We spent the whole week doing sprint work, because of all the climbs we did before,” the coach said. “The data I had told me that he was capable of doing it.
“You saw today why he’s such a big champion. He’s 39 years old. Most of the guys said he’s not going to make it. He proved them wrong in 2021, and then he proved everyone wrong again in 2024. He’s just phenomenal.”
It was in 2021 that Anastopoulos and Cavendish first struck up a relationship and began working together at Quick-Step. That summer at the Tour, having gone five years winless at the race, the sprinter won four stages and equalled the all-time record, drawing level with Eddy Merckx.
He returned to the race in 2022, his mind focused on one more victory. That chance, however, was cruelly pulled away from him halfway through day eight, when he crashed, broke his collarbone, and abandoned the race.
“I told him, ‘Mate, if you continue, we are together, we’re going to make it’,” Anastopoulos remembers. “On the night that he was at the hospital, after he had the surgery, we promised each other that we would just go for one more.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
This year’s route brought eight flat stages, so the pair knew they would have multiple cracks at the record. “Our biggest challenge was those three days in Italy,” Anastopoulos said. “We saw the first day he was suffering because of the heat, but we were never in a panic. We controlled things.
“Yesterday, I think we made a perfect plan on arriving just in the time limit, without spending too much [energy]. When the grupetto went away yesterday on the last climb, we told him to stay calm, follow his own watts – the watts we had already predicted before – in order to arrive today as fresh as possible.”
So fresh, in fact, that Cavendish’s turn of speed in Saint-Vulbas was staggering. Darting across the road, he held off last year’s green jersey winner, Jasper Philipsen, a man 13 years his junior, considered to be the best sprinter in the world.
What’s the secret to Cavendish’s longevity? “Hard work,” replied Anastopoulos. “He’s phenomenal. He can do the work like nobody else. That’s what makes him such a big champion.
“He was under pressure. Everybody was talking about it; 35, 35, from the start of the season, when he announced that he would continue for one more season. You cannot imagine how much pressure this guy was under. But he’s a great champion, and only champions can handle this pressure.”
Now, Anastopoulos continued, the plan is for Cavendish to “win as much as possible” in his farewell Tour. “We’re not going to stop,” he said. There could be more Greek parties to come, and a plate shortage across rural France.
