Born and raised on the Isle of Man, Mark Cavendish became a world track champion as a teenager in 2005 and a Commonwealth Games gold medalist a year later. In 2008 he regained his world title on the track with British teammate Bradley Wiggins. After switching his focus to the more glamorous world of road cycling, Cavendish set a new record of four stage wins in the 2008 Tour de France. He won six stages of the 2009 Tour de France and the prestigious Milan-San Remo one-day classic then went on to win the green points jersey and become the winningest Tour sprinter in history.

Widely regarded as the most exciting and charismatic young rider to join the sport in years, Cavendish will be the most closely watched sprinter in the pro peloton in 2013.

Prologue

“Dave, I’m going to win the worlds tomorrow.”

Dave was Dave Millar and I was already the world champion in my own imagination. It was midafternoon on Saturday, September 24, 2011, and we’d just watched Giorgia Bronzini from Italy win the women’s world championships road race on a TV in our hotel room. Before Bronzini, the previous day, a 20-year-old Frenchman named Arnaud Démare had taken the men’s Under 23 race, and before Démare, Lucy Garner of Great Britain had been the first of the junior women to cross the line.

Rod Ellingworth, my coach and the British team’s that week, had stuck his head out of the car window and broken the good news about Lucy while we, the senior men, were on a tough final training ride. When Garner had got back to the hotel where the whole GB squad was staying, I’d been with an old teammate, the Swede Thomas Löfkvist, tinkering with my bike, but stopped to applaud Lucy as she walked in. As I clapped, my eyes had wandered toward the rainbow stripes of her new world champion’s jersey—then I’d quickly averted them out of superstition. That jersey—maybe the most sought-after in professional cycling, more than even the Tour de France’s yellow jersey—was one thing that Bronzini’s race, Démare’s, and Garner’s all had in common. Another was a course circling a leafy suburb to the north of Copenhagen. And another was the way that the races had all ended: in a sprint. Twice could be coincidence, but three times was a pattern.

I turned in my single bed to face Dave. “Dude, I’m going to fucking win this. We can’t lose.” Dave later told me that this was the moment when he knew as well. No sooner had I said it than I was already diving between gaps on a finishing straight tarmacked across my mind’s eye, already ducking for the line and feeling the elation of victory hit me like an ocean wave. I’d been complacent about winning races before in my career but I’d also, gradually, learned the difference between healthy and unhealthy confidence: one energized and sharpened your instincts, your muscles, even your eyesight in the race; the other dulled, muffled, and slowed everything. This was definitely the first kind.

Almost a year earlier, I’d gone with my old mate and HTC-Highroad directeur sportif, Brian Holm, to take a first look at the course. Brian is just about the best-connected man in Denmark and also the fourth-best-dressed according to GQ (though I’m not so sure). We’d done a lot on that trip besides ride our bikes, but the time we spent doing loops of the circuit with donors to Brian’s cancer charity convinced me that this wouldn’t be another Melbourne.

The Australian city had been the venue for the 2010 worlds, which had taken place a few weeks before my visit to Copenhagen. Melbourne had not gone well. I was coming off a successful 2010 Vuelta a España, having won three stages and the points jersey, and I was flying. Therein lay the problem and the excuse I gave myself for pushing too hard in pre-race training sessions that were intended to put the icing and a cherry on my form. I thought I could win it, but my overzealousness in training jeopardized my chances in the race proper. Dave, one of only three British riders who had qualified for the race, knew I was overdoing it, as did the rest of the team and the staff, but it took that mistake and the resulting, massively disappointing performance to teach me what proved to be an absolutely vital lesson.

All week in the run-up to the Copenhagen race, the atmosphere in the British camp had been fantastic. Everyone was rallied around the same cause—namely, making sure that the peloton was bunched together as we came into the last 200 meters of the 266 kilometers, whereupon it’d be handed over to me. It was a measure of my confidence, not only in the nature of the course but also in the guys, that I could only foresee one outcome.

The evening before the race, Brian came to our team hotel. I was getting my massage when he arrived, so Brian chatted to Dave and Brad Wiggins while he waited.

“I saw the races today. You’re going to win this, aren’t you?” Brian said when I finally appeared.

“Yeah, I am. I’m going to win,” I told him.

Brian paused. “Shit, I’m nervous.”

Nervous, I think, was the wrong word. I think he meant that he was excited. Brian always says that when I’m sure I’m unbeatable, as I was that day. It’s been the same ever since we met at the Tour of Britain in 2006, when I was a mouthy, 21-year-old stagiaire—cyclingspeak for an amateur getting a tryout with the big boys—and he called me a “fat fuck” for disobeying his orders to get to the front midway through the very first stage.

Over the years, Brian had become a kind of father, brother, and mentor. I was lucky to be rooming with another one of those that week in Dave. There are some riders, like Brad, who will always room alone given the choice, but it drives me absolutely crazy. If a roommate goes home early from a race or training camp, I’m climbing the walls within hours, pestering the management to be put with someone else.

Dave and I woke to sunshine the morning of the race. We ate breakfast, got ready, and then climbed onto the bus. I was quiet—quieter than usual. I rarely get nervous because I keep my mind too busy. Sudoku, logic puzzles, visualization. All full gas. Every pro bike rider trains his legs but very few train their minds, the only muscle they use to make decisions in races. It mystifies me; the more you keep your brain active, the more it’s whirring away and the less likely it is to get sabotaged by the kind of anxiety that can cause mistakes and compromise a performance.

Winning the worlds, and before that ensuring it finished in a sprint, was also a logic puzzle that needed to be solved. To help us, in the days leading up to the race, we’d spoken to other teams who also had strong sprinters and might therefore want the same kind of finale—the Americans, the Australians, and the Germans. They’d said they’d give us a hand, but we all knew that the main responsibility would fall to the team with the fastest sprinter, unanimously acknowledged—namely me. For that reason, it was better that we were prepared to lead the race for all 266 km, something that for any other team would be an impossible task, but that this one was going to relish. It took a special group of guys to achieve that; there would be no personal glory for my teammates, only sacrifice for the benefit of a rider who, for most of them, was an opponent in every other race of the season.

That was the inherent contradiction of the worlds: For one day, arguably the most important of the cycling season, allegiances to trade teams—companies to whom riders owed their livelihoods—were set aside in the name of patriotism. This was why a lot of national federations, though not British Cycling, put up a sizable bonus to be shared among the riders in case of victory; it was compensation for what those guys would have given up.

Before we’d got off the bus, I’d said it one more time: “If we do everything 100 percent right, we’ll...