Everyone Agreed Mark Cavendish Was Finished. For a While, So Did He.
In May 2023, Mark Cavendish announced he would retire at the end of the season. He was 38, and tied with Eddy Merckx on 34 Tour de France stage wins, a record Merckx had held since the 1970s.
He had one more Tour to get the 35th.
On stage eight he crashed and broke his collarbone. That, by any sensible reading, was the end. He’d had a great career and he’d come up one short.
He changed his mind about retiring and came back for 2024.
The first day of that Tour was brutal. It was hot and hilly, and Cavendish was reported to have been sick on the bike as he fought to finish inside the time limit. Sprinters get eliminated on days like that. He made it.
Four days later, on 3 July 2024, in a small town called Saint-Vulbas, he won stage five, his 35th. The record was his alone, at 39.
It’s a lovely story, and you could stop there. But I want to put it next to another one.
Simone Biles walked away from her events at the Tokyo Olympics because carrying on would have been dangerous, and she was right. Cavendish refused to walk away when almost everyone thought he should, and he was right too.
So which is the lesson? Know when to stop, or never stop?
And this is the problem with most advice about resilience. “Never give up” and “know when to walk away” are both treated as wisdom, and they point in opposite directions. Each one is only proved right afterwards. If Cavendish had crashed again in 2024, we’d say he should have gone when he planned to.
I think the honest answer is that neither slogan helps. Something else does.
Look at what Cavendish actually wanted. He wasn’t chasing a vague idea of going out on top. He wanted one specific thing, he knew exactly what it was, and he was prepared to suffer for it and to risk looking foolish if he failed. Biles knew something specific as well: that she couldn’t trust her body in the air that week.
In both cases the decision came from knowing themselves precisely, and neither of them got it from a rule about persistence. That’s harder than it sounds. Most of us carry on, or give up, out of habit, or because of what other people will think. We rarely stop to ask what we want and what it’s worth to us.
If you’re trying to decide whether to keep going with something, a job, a business, a relationship or a dream, that may be the only useful question. Not “am I a quitter?” but “do I still want this, knowing what it costs?”
Setbacks, and how to tell whether one is a full stop or just a pause, get a chapter of their own in my book, Life’s a Mess: Finding Your Smile When Sh*t Hits the Fan.
Which would you find harder to live with: stopping one short, or going back for it and failing in public?
https://www.amazon.com/Lifes-Mess-Finding-Your-Smile/dp/B0DGDFX2FG/
#Resilience, #Perseverance, #MarkCavendish, #TourDeFrance, #Mindset, #PersonalDevelopment, #Motivation, #Setbacks, #Purpose, #PersonalGrowth, #KizziNkwocha
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