Mark Cavendish is the most prolific stage winner in Tour de France history. Thirty-five victories, more than Eddy Merckx, more than any rider who has ever started the race. Behind that number is a coach most cycling fans have never heard of: Vasilis Anastopoulos. On episode 2108 of the podcast, Anastopoulos sat down to walk through exactly what it took to build and maintain one of the most explosive sprinters the sport has seen.
The conversation is one of the most detailed looks at elite sprint coaching that exists in public. Anastopoulos is precise, methodical, and uninterested in mystifying what he does. The work is hard, the planning is disciplined, and the results speak for themselves.
What follows draws on that episode and frames what Anastopoulos described into the broader structure that made it work.
The periodisation behind 35 Tour stages
Anastopoulos does not treat the Tour de France as one race. He treats it as a sequence of roughly seven to ten sprinting opportunities embedded inside three weeks of sustained physical punishment. That framing shapes the entire year.
The off-season for Cavendish looked conventional on the surface: high volume, low intensity, building the aerobic engine that lets a sprinter survive mountain stages and back-to-back racing days. Prof. Stephen Seiler's research on polarised training distribution supports this approach — the majority of volume at low intensity, with very little work in the moderate zone. For Cavendish, surviving the Tour was a precondition for winning it. A sprinter who blows up on the climbs never gets to use his legs in the final kilometre.
From spring, the plan shifted. Sprint-specific blocks entered the programme, targeting neuromuscular adaptation rather than cardiovascular capacity. These are different physiological qualities and they require different stimuli. Building one does not build the other. Anastopoulos was explicit about this distinction: aerobic fitness is the floor, not the ceiling, for a sprinter.
The load management approaching the Tour was equally deliberate. Volume dropped, intensity stayed sharp, and the final taper was calculated to clear accumulated fatigue without losing the neuromuscular sharpness built in the preceding weeks. Peaking a sprinter is not the same as peaking an all-rounder. The margin for error is smaller because the quality of a sprint — unlike climbing pace — is binary. Either the legs fire or they do not.
Across a long career, Anastopoulos also had to account for age. Managing the training load of a sprinter in his mid-thirties is not the same as managing a 25-year-old. Recovery takes longer. The stimulus required to maintain neuromuscular function stays high, but the capacity to absorb repeated high-intensity sessions shrinks. The periodisation had to adapt year by year rather than follow a fixed template.
Sprint power development
The sprint itself lasts between ten and fifteen seconds in a professional field finish. Most riders sprint for less than that. But the preparation for those seconds is structured across months.
Anastopoulos described sprint training in terms that any exercise scientist would recognise: short, maximal efforts, full recovery between reps, and strict limits on session volume. Five to eight efforts per session is a typical ceiling for genuine maximal work. Go beyond that and what looks like sprint training becomes something else — a fatigued effort that trains the wrong qualities and risks injury.
Recovery between efforts matters as much as the efforts themselves. The phosphocreatine system, which fuels a true sprint, takes three to five minutes to substantially replenish. Cutting rest short does not toughen a sprinter. It just produces worse sprints. This is one of the most common errors in amateur sprint training: the session is structured as repeated hard efforts with 60 seconds between them, which trains sustained power output, not explosive peak power.
Anastopoulos also emphasised specificity. Track sprinters and road sprinters use different muscle recruitment patterns. Road sprint training needed to account for the position Cavendish would hold on the bike, the cadence he would reach (Cavendish historically spins at very high cadence compared to many rivals), and the specific demands of launching from a bunch finish rather than a standing start.
Strength work formed a supporting layer. Not bodybuilding volume, but targeted neuromuscular sessions designed to improve force production at high pedalling speeds. The goal is rate of force development — how fast a muscle can reach peak force — rather than raw strength in the conventional sense. This is a distinction that gets lost when coaches simply tell sprinters to lift heavy.
Race-day preparation and tactics
Winning a bunch sprint at the Tour de France is not primarily a training problem. It is a positioning, timing, and decision problem. Anastopoulos was direct about this: Cavendish was not always the most powerful sprinter in the peloton on any given day. He was consistently the most effective.
Effectiveness in a sprint finish comes from arriving at the final kilometre in the right position, with the right amount of energy remaining, and from reading the race correctly in the final 300 metres. These skills are practised, not innate. Cavendish spent years developing the ability to follow wheels at very high speed in chaotic conditions, to identify the fastest line through a technical finish, and to time his effort so that it peaked exactly at the line rather than 50 metres before it.
Preparation on the day of a sprint stage had a specific structure. Anastopoulos described a controlled warm-up protocol, careful attention to nutrition in the hours before the finish, and a very clear tactical briefing. The HTC-Highroad train, and later the Astana lead-out, functioned as an extension of Cavendish's preparation — delivering him to the right spot at the right speed so that his own sprint was the only variable he needed to manage.
Weather, road surface, and rival teams' positioning all entered the pre-race calculation. A crosswind changes sprint dynamics entirely. A technical final corner can eliminate half the field before the sprint begins. These were not afterthoughts. They were variables Anastopoulos and Cavendish worked through in advance.
Managing the mental side
Coaching a sprinter who is chasing a historic record creates pressures that do not exist in ordinary race preparation. Anastopoulos was open about this on the podcast. The closer Cavendish got to Merckx's record, the more external attention the attempt attracted, and the more that attention had to be managed rather than amplified.
The approach was to narrow Cavendish's focus to the process rather than the outcome. Not "win stage 35 to break the record" but "execute today's race the way we have prepared for it." This is a well-established principle in sport psychology — process focus reduces anxiety and preserves performance under pressure. For a sprinter, anxiety that manifests as muscle tension in the final kilometre is directly costly. A tight upper body, a grip on the bars that is too firm, a sprint launched too early because the rider is overthinking — all of these are measurable losses.
Anastopoulos also described the importance of normalising bad days. A Grand Tour is three weeks. There will be stages where the legs do not respond, where the positioning goes wrong, where a crash eliminates the opportunity entirely. A sprinter who catastrophises a missed opportunity will carry that into the next sprint finish. The psychological reset between stages was as planned as the physical recovery.
The coaching relationship itself mattered here. Anastopoulos had built enough trust with Cavendish that difficult conversations could happen directly and without drama. When something was not working, they could address it without the communication becoming a problem of its own.
What amateurs can learn from sprint training
The specifics of Cavendish's programme are not transferable to a club rider with a 10-hour training week and a Tuesday night crit as their A-event. But the underlying logic is. For riders who want to get faster in bunch sprints or short punchy efforts, the principles Anastopoulos described apply at every level.
First: separate sprint training from aerobic training. Do not try to develop explosive power in the same session as sustained endurance. The physiological systems are different and they compete. A dedicated sprint session should be short, fully recovered between efforts, and done when the legs are fresh — not bolted onto the end of a four-hour ride.
Second: use full recovery. Three to five minutes between maximal sprint efforts. This is non-negotiable if the goal is true neuromuscular adaptation. Shorter rests produce a different stimulus — useful for some purposes, but not for developing peak power.
Third: practise race-specific positioning. Sprinting in a straight line on an empty road is a starting point, not an end point. The skill of moving through a bunch, finding gaps, and timing an effort to the finish line is acquired through repeated practice in race-like conditions. Group rides and local racing are where this happens. Lab numbers mean nothing if you can not execute in traffic.
Fourth: periodise the sprint work. Running maximal sprint sessions every week year-round is a route to stagnation and fatigue. Build it into the training plan as a targeted block, peak for specific events, and then allow a period of lower intensity before the next build.
The coaching framework at Roadman Cycling applies these same principles to amateur and masters athletes — structured, periodised, specific to the events and goals that matter to the individual rider rather than a generic template.
The training week of a sprinter
Anastopoulos did not publish Cavendish's full training files, but across the podcast episode he described enough to construct a credible picture of a typical training week outside of race blocks.
Monday was almost universally a recovery day. After a weekend race or a hard block, full rest or a very easy spin of no more than 60-90 minutes. No intensity. No sprints. The adaptation from hard training happens during recovery, not during the session itself.
Tuesday introduced the first quality work of the week: a sprint-specific session. Six to eight maximal efforts of ten to fifteen seconds, three to five minutes of passive recovery between each, done on a slight uphill or flat road in race-position. Total session time including warm-up and cool-down: 90 minutes to two hours. The efforts themselves account for less than two minutes of that total.
Wednesday was volume without intensity. Three to four hours at a genuinely easy pace. This serves two purposes: aerobic maintenance and active recovery from the neuromuscular stress of Tuesday.
Thursday brought a second quality session, usually structured around race-specific demands: lead-out practice, high-speed bunch efforts, or motorpaced work to replicate the speeds of a professional bunch finish. Motorpacing is largely inaccessible to amateurs but the principle — training at race speed rather than training speed — can be approximated through group riding and racing.
Friday was again easy. Volume without intensity. Legs ready for the weekend.
Saturday and Sunday in race periods were races. In training periods, these became the longer endurance rides of the week, sometimes with sprint work embedded at the end of Saturday when the fatigue of a long ride replicated the demands of surviving a mountain stage before a sprint finish.
The structure is simpler than most athletes expect. The discipline required to keep easy days genuinely easy — not edging them up toward moderate intensity — is where most amateur training programmes fail. Joe Friel has made this point consistently across his writing and coaching career: the polarisation that separates effective training from junk miles is about protecting the hard days, and you protect hard days by taking easy days seriously.
Vasilis Anastopoulos built a programme around one of the most talented sprinters who ever raced. The talent was Cavendish's. The structure was the coach's. Neither works without the other, and the structure is something every rider can learn from.
If you want that structure applied to your own racing, the coaching programme at Roadman Cycling is built around exactly this kind of periodised, evidence-based approach — personalised to where you are and what you're racing toward.