Sir Mark Cavendish(1985–)

Mark Simon Cavendish was born at Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, on the twenty-first of May 1985, son of David Cavendish, an Isle of Man insurance salesman, and Adele Cunningham. He was raised in Douglas, was schooled at Manor Park Primary School and at the Castle Rushen High School in Castletown, and took up cycling at twelve as a junior member of the Manx Viking Wheelers club. He left the school at sixteen to take a bank-clerk position with Barclays in Douglas, continued the cycling at semi-professional level on the British junior road circuit, and at eighteen took the place at the British Cycling Olympic Academy at Manchester Velodrome in 2003 on the strength of his junior track-and-road performance.

He turned professional with the German Continental team T-Mobile in 2007 in his twenty-second year, took his first major professional stage win at the Tour of Catalonia in 2007, and across the 2008 season took four stages of the Tour de France (the first of the long Tour de France stage-win sequence), four stages of the Giro d'Italia and seven of the Vuelta a España. He took the Milan-San Remo Monument Classic in March 2009 (the first British rider since Tom Simpson in 1964 to win a Monument), the Points Classification (the maillot vert green jersey for the leading sprinter) at the 2011 Tour de France, and the UCI Road World Championship in the rainbow jersey at Copenhagen on the twenty-fifth of September 2011, the first British road-cycling World Champion since Tom Simpson in 1965.

His Tour de France stage-wins total is the central single benchmark of his career. He won four stages of his first Tour de France in 2008, fifteen further stages across the next five seasons to reach twenty by 2013, brought the total to thirty in 2016 and to thirty-four in 2021 (the season of his Astana team-comeback that took him to the post-Merckx-tying thirty-four), and on the third of July 2024 at the finish of the fifth stage of the Tour at Saint-Vulbas in eastern France took the thirty-fifth Tour de France stage win, surpassing Eddy Merckx's long-standing record of thirty-four set across 1969 to 1975. The thirty-fifth-stage finish was the central single moment of the 2024 Tour and is by every modern measure the high-water mark of professional road cycling sprint records.

He has won across his career a hundred and sixty-five professional victories including thirty-five Tour de France stages, seventeen Giro d'Italia stages, three Vuelta a España stages, the 2011 UCI World Championship road race, the 2011 Tour de France Points Classification, the Milan-San Remo (2009), and the silver medal in the Omnium at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. He was awarded the MBE in the 2011 Birthday Honours List, was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 2011 (the first British road-cycling winner of the award), was knighted in the 2024 Birthday Honours List, and was elected to the British Cycling Hall of Fame in 2024. He retired from professional cycling at the close of the 2024 season at thirty-nine. The Cavendish name in modern English sport carries the weight of the thirty-five Tour de France stage wins.