Watch: The Time we Got Banned From Speaking to Mark Cavendish

Mark Cavendish remains one of the greatest sprinters ever to grace the sport. But he’s equally famous for his temperament, with a remarkable predilection toward kicking off in interviews because he refuses to suffer fools gladly. I’ve always admired that aspect of his personality. Here’s the time I fell foul of it:

A year on the road interviewing cyclists

2011 was a busy year. Cycling.TV was moving into producing ancillary content to supplement our live racing broadcasting. We began to produce serious interviews and long-form content with the best cyclists in the world. And, to complement this, we also syndicated Derailed‘s more comedic content for TV, scaled up from its haphazard anarchic origins (but, sadly, significantly tamed down too). We filmed both types of content with the exact same cyclists at the exact same locations.

In January, we spent nearly a week with HTC-High Road, pointing cameras at their riders, directeurs sportifs, and even mechanics, and asking them to either talk or do stupid stuff to make our viewers laugh. Only one rider was absent, but he was one of the greatest in the world: Mark Cavendish.

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From HTC-High Road in Palma we moved to Pollenca for Team Sky. I flew home, proposed to my now-wife, slept in my own bed for one night, then flew back out to Spain for the BMC and Garmin-Cervélo team launches. We spent most of the year on the road filming at events and races, returning only for live studio broadcasts.

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The Tour of Britain

The Tour of Britain was one of the last and easiest events on the calendar, since it was on home turf. Shaft texted me in the morning to say he’d meet me by the clock—Big Ben—and we went to work with good humor. We had specific questions written up for the riders we were expecting, and generic questions for any other riders we could grab. The generic questions would form vox pops within a couple of documentary features we working on.

We’d just finished up interviewing a couple of young Irish riders when Mark Cavendish rolled past. Shaft stepped our in front of him:

“Cav, can we have a quick word?”

Mark swerved past us with a glare. We ran over to the HTC-Highroad team bus, where Brian Holm, friendly with us since our week with the team back in January, was waiting outside. He talked to us for some time about subjects that were not wholly appropriate to say out loud in front of the crowd of children gathered to see their Manx hero, then climbed onto the bus. He came back a few minutes later with the news that Mark would be ready to speak with us soon.

Cav was visibly unhappy when he realized we were the journalists Brian had set him up with, and he immediately chastised us for stopping him in the street.

We hadn’t expected to interview him, and scrambled to match him to the generic vox pop questions we’d used so far. But instead of including him in our documentary about team sponsors changing, Shaft began reading from a different cue sheet, one for a tentative documentary about “a new leaf for doping in cycling.” We shouldn’t have hit him with doping questions, but I honestly don’t think there was any subject he would’ve been happy to discuss with us that day.

And beyond

After the cameras stopped rolling, he shouted to Brian that we could never interview him again, then wandered off to sign autographs. We didn’t flee. We apologised to Brian, who was equally apologetic to us, and then conducted an interview with him that included the exact same set of doping questions we’d tried to ask Mark.

I went straight from there to a pre-wedding appointment, and then on to my wedding. Several weeks later, I remembered this incident and shared the video to my personal Facebook. Matt Brammeier immediately commented that Mark had complained to him about the exchange. Oops.

A few months later, Team Sky invited us to their 2012 team launch at Syon House. Cav was at the height of his celebrity, and it was electric. He rocked up with a swagger, wearing jeans he must’ve been sewn into, and an entire entourage followed behind. He glanced over to us with a look of recognition, shared an overenthusiastic greeting, then moved on to more important business with his manager. For a few moments he strutted around the hotel like he owned it. We waited for him to finish getting the exact espresso he wanted and take care of various phone calls. Everything happened on his schedule.

And then he sat down with us and gave us an entire hour of his time. His schedule was his own and he’d decided to give us a huge part of it during one of the busiest promotional days of his season.

On Mark Cavendish

Mark Cavendish was a friend of a friend before he went pro. We were aware of each other and would share a nod and a smile out on the road. I chatted with him for a long time at the Tour of Britain when he was a stagiere with T-Mobile, briefly the odd man on the team since they saw him as the future backup sprinter to Gerald Ciolek (a ridiculous perception he obliterated almost immediately).

We continued to exchange casual small talk throughout his career. Even at the height of his fame, he found time to catch up with me. Mostly to ask me if I’d seen Tim Brammeier around. But still, that counts.

You don’t have favorite riders once you get deep into a career as a journalist and broadcaster. I’d already worked with pretty much everybody who’d ever been paid to ride a bike. It’s hard to have heroes when you work so closely with them on a daily basis. Still, Mark was a rider I’d followed through my career. Britain had produced some great riders, but they always came with caveats. Mark came with no caveats. He was unequivocally the fastest sprinter in the world. I jumped from my seat in the studio when he won Milan-San Remo, and had to stifle my cheers to avoid disrupting the broadcast.

Mark Cavendish was the perfect subject for media coverage at a time when cyclists were becoming saccharine media-trained personalities rather than unusual mavericks laboring in a brutal sport. I wrote and said all kinds of silly, hilarious things about him in my career. But he was always one of my favorites. He still is.