MARK CAVENDISH: I started cycling
without knowing what the pros did.
I started cycling for the love of riding a bike.
I can remember the race that got me kind of hooked on racing.
It's what I wanted to do.
That was when I seen Paris-Roubaix when
Servais Knaven won in 2002.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
I remember it was just raining, and they were filthy.
And guys were crashing.
Knaven went a fair distance from the finish.
He just had this low position, never out of his drops.
And he came in to the velodrome and he
rubbed his jersey to display the sponsor, which is my team now.
That wasn't Etixx Quick Step then but it's still Quick Step.
And he won and that was pretty cool.
From then, I was like I want to be a classics rider.
I can win Roubaix one day.
I really believe it's a race I still dream of.
It's only ever been one rider that when I was riding,
I imagined that I was him.
And that was Johan Museeuw.
And if I was ever on a little bit of cobbles,
I would always pretend to be Johan Museeuw.
Three, four years ago he came up to me
and he's like, my son's racing now but you're his idol.
And I was like, that's strange, and I told him that story.
I think different areas they bring up different sentiments,
different reasons why they become iconic.
I think the view of cycling right
now is that it is advancing but you just
keep this traditional element to it.
You see iconic images of Moser in Roubaix
with the three colori jersey.
This kind of jersey is up and he's
got his wool shorts held up by braces.
To me that was when cycling was--
it was the commonest kind of global sport in a sense.
Most of the iconic memories of the cycling across the ages
comes from those kind of years.
And these are stories-- obviously we're in Tuscany now
and stories of Coppi and Bartali, they're historic,
they're iconic.
I think that's a lot to do with a life more
than actually the sport that's all the way back.
Yes seventy years ago now.
There's so much to take from everything.
When Eddy Merckx was riding he wasn't thinking,
now I've got wool shorts.
That was just how it was then.
But when you look back there, they were pretty hard.
The one thing that the majority of riders across the years
can take in common is the fact they just
like riding their bike.
There's ways you can push yourself on a bike
that I don't feel you can do in any other kind of pastimes
or sport.
When I started, cycling it was more than niche.
Not many people did it at all.
And now in the UK there's been this kind of rise of cycling
that's incredible to see.
It's incredible to feel part of it.
People do it from a young age.
People follow the sport.
It's still seen as a working class sport,
which people can relate to.
And yet here in Italy, you get the old men they come up
and they say you should have done this you should have now.
It's quite amusing.
One thing you get from people who do it,
they can respect what we do as professionals.
People-- someone doesn't ride a bike or watch it on TV,
they have no idea how hard cycling is.
But it doesn't matter if you do even commuting to work
or doing it with your family.
To appreciate pushing pedals around you
can appreciate what it's like to ride
3,500 kilometers around France.
You get 200 guys in a bike race, not in a controlled
environment.
The amount of variables is close to infinite.
If you can control the variables of anything, if it's in life
or if it's on a bike, then things are going to your way.
If I do everything right preparing for a race,
as much as we can, then it puts you
in a better chances of being successful.
There's quite an ongoing debate about what
the future of cycling is.
As a cycling fan, you don't really
want to see things change.
You want to see the grand tours as they are.
You want to see the classics, run these races that
have been going for 100 years.
But ultimately, other sports, the most
of it kind of World Series, is this easy to follow.
And I think it does have to go that way.
It would be what moves cycling forward.