Quotes from Mark Cavendish

I learned from BMX and skateboarding how to take a fall.

I want to win wherever I race, the team's invested a lot in me.

It's so ironic that the better you get the easier it becomes to win.

I'm a fan of motorsport and a fan of McLaren and I was lucky to work with the company on a small scale across my career but to be able to race now with that brand on my jersey, it's pretty special. I still have to rein in my fanboy attitude sometimes.

Track and road cycling are very different things. It is easy to look at them both as cycling but going from the road to the track is like asking Andy Murray to play squash: yes, it's a racket sport like tennis, but it's not the same.

Yorkshire is a hard place to ride a bike.

If you're winning bike races ahead of guys who're older than you then they're going to get upset. When some young guy appears from nowhere, some people who are slower assume they ride dangerously.

I have a house in a small town in Tuscany where everybody knows and looks out for each other. That's a similar mentality to on the Isle of Man.

I constantly do puzzle books. Smash through them. My iPad's full of them. Logic puzzles. Bridges. Slitherlink.

I have a fondness for junk food - it still calls me, sometimes.

When I was younger, I didn't really train for the sprint - I trained to get over the mountains. I have to train it now I'm getting older. But the sprint is more born, rather than made.

The descents are quite fun - everybody has a sort of competition and tries to go for it and then you compare top speeds when you get to the bottom.

Once you can accept that you have a mental illness, that is when you can work on it.

I'm going to do the Commonwealth Games for no other reason than national pride. It's something special getting to ride for the Isle of Man.

Between 20km and 10km to go, you want the whole team at the front. You don't necessarily want to take control, and the speed will be dictated by how many surges you get from the other teams. You don't want to go so fast they can't come, but you want to be just ahead so you're in control.

My job in the Tour is to get the sponsor's logo in the most prominent place.

When you win sprints, you're a great sprinter, but when you win a great one-day race, you've proved you're a great rider.

I'm 100% a sprinter... an old school one, not one of these new guys that can climb and sprint.

Psychological edge is massive in sprinting.

If somebody had told me as a kid that I would win 30 stages of the Tour de France I probably wouldn't have imagined it. I probably imagined I could do it - I don't lack confidence - but at the end of the day one Tour de France stage win can make a rider's career.

The Giro's difficult to predict for the points jersey because there are so many mountain-top finishes and there are as many points on offer for mountain stages as for sprints. It's really for the most consistent all-round rider and it's pretty difficult for me to win it.

If you're on the top for 10 years it's going to seem like you have more crashes that someone on the top for three years. If you don't win as much in your ninth or 10th year it's going seem like you are on your way out.

The stronger you are as a unit, the more you can control a race. The strongest cyclist in the world isn't as strong as two guys, let alone nine.

I don't like being in London too long, because everybody's just looking straight forward, at nobody else. That freaks me out a little bit.