Why they rank here
The greatest sprinter in cycling history, the Manx Missile rewrote the record book at the discipline he mastered. In 2024 Cavendish won his 35th Tour de France stage, surpassing Eddy Merckx's long-standing record of 34, and across all three Grand Tours he took 55 stage victories. He won the 2011 World Championship, the 2009 Milan-San Remo, and roughly 165 professional races. His peak, built on the flawless HTC lead-out train, saw him beat every rival of his era in the bunch sprints, and his 2021 comeback to equal Merckx's record after years of illness and doubt ranks among the sport's great redemption stories. Where all-rounders are measured by Grand Tours and Monuments, Cavendish stands alone as the finest pure finisher the peloton has ever seen.
Career profile
Each bar shows how this athlete compares with the strongest in our all-time list for that metric.