Neither in word nor deed does Mark Cavendish leave much room for debate. His sprinting is brutal rather than elegant and his interviews are akin to prefight press conferences, full of unadorned breast-beating and muscular home truths. But no one can argue with the facts laid down over the roads of France this past week.

Having missed out on an early opportunity to establish himself as the king of the sprint, Cavendish has won two stages in four days, matching the achievement of Barry Hoban, the only other British rider to win two stages on the Tour, 35 years ago. Hoban, now 68, lives quietly in Mochdre in mid-Wales, but he still rides his bike every day and he still keeps an eye on the Tour.

Hoban won eight stages in his 12 Tours, so Britain’s new star still has some way to go, but such has been his dominance in the bunch sprint over the past month, including the Giro d’Ita-lia, it would be no surprise if he added a third stage to his tally in one of the transitional stages between the Pyrenees and the Alps.

Cavendish had advertised his wellbeing quite unashamedly in the lead-up to the Tour, but the 23-year-old Manxman has more than justified the fanfares. He was helped immeasurably to both stage wins by the slick work of his team, formerly High Road now Team Columbia, brilliantly marshalled by Lance Armstrong’s old lieutenant, George Hincapie. But he had both the confidence and the intelligence to sense his moment, swatting aside the challenge of the giant Norwegian, Thor Hushovd, in the final 100m of the Avenue de la Chatre in Chateauroux on Wednesday and putting clear air between him and his pursuers by the line. It was merely a statement of intent.

Yesterday’s stage win in Toulouse, a classic sprinter’s haunt, was even more explosive as he was catapulted to the front by his lead-out man, Gerald Ciolek, ambushing Agritubel’s Jimmy Casper no more than 30m from the finish. In the sprinter’s measure, it may well have been a kilometre, so profound is Cavendish’s belief in his own finishing power.

”I knew last season that I was the fastest guy in the world,” he said before the race. “That’s not a belief, it’s proven, you know. I’m three or four kilometres an hour faster than anyone else in the bunch over the last 100m of a race. They know it and I know it. It was just that last season I wasn’t experienced enough.”

Being acknowledged as the fastest man on the road brings its pressures, but also its benefits. Where before his sudden rise, Cavendish was having to fight for the wheel of the best sprinters - men such as Tom Boonen and Robbie McEwen - this time his back wheel is the prize, which means more clear space in his eyeline and an easier set of calculations in his head. So busy were the sprinters watching Cavendish in one of the stages of the recent Giro d’Italia, they forgot to notice another High Road rider further up the line. Cavendish duly ushered his teammate to the stage win, a manoeuvre which required panache, humility and nous in roughly equal measure. The favour has been returned in Chateauroux and Toulouse as Cavendish hugged each and every one of his teammates in gratitude for their commitment to his cause.

The surprise was that anyone should be surprised. Like his High Road/Columbia teammate, Bradley Wiggins, Cavendish had agreed for much of last season to sacrifice the Tour de France for the prospect of winning Olympic gold in the Madi-son. But when a sprinter finds a rich vein of form, there can be no picking and choosing. You make the most of it and with 19 victories in 18 months, Cavendish has unearthed a seam beyond everyone’s expectations, bar his own.

In fact, so swift has been Cavendish’s rise to the top echelon of sprinters that a project to form a British national team for the Tour de France has been fast forwarded two years to the summer of 2010 by team manager, Dave Brailsford, in part as a response to the emergence of potentially the finest British sprinter for two generations. The publicity accompanying Cavendish’s heroics could not have been better timed. A provisional announcement on sponsorship for the team could be made before Beijing.

Speak to the coaches of the GB cycling team and they will tell you “Cav” does not like to overcomplicate matters, in life or cycling. His hopes of winning a home stage on his Tour debut last year evaporated when he crashed 25km from the finish in Canterbury after colliding with a spectator. His tears of frustration came from the knowledge that he might have won, not from self-pity or dashed dreams.

“What’s the point in dream-ing?” he asks matter-of-factly. “If you eat properly, live properly, train properly, you’ll get the results. People say, ‘Oh, so and so’s very unlucky’. That’s bull-shit. You make your own luck. I’ve done that my whole career.

“If you look at my power and momentum in the lab, I’m pretty pathetic at bike-riding. But I have great self-belief, which isn’t arrogance, it’s just I know what I’m capable of achieving.”

From his days as a BMX rider on his native Isle of Man, Cavendish, though, has been blessed with one great gift. Speed, pure, unadulterated, natural speed. He admits that is pretty well his only trick on a bike, but speed alone is not enough to make a great sprinter. As he has proved on the biggest stage of all, Cavendish relishes the high-speed chess of the closing kilometres of a fast stage and the pressure that comes from being the last carriage in an unstoppable train.

“About 50km from the finish, you think you’re tired,” he explains. “But when you get a sniff of the finishing line it changes. You’ve got a strong team working for you, which makes it so much more worthwhile, and, after all they’ve sacrificed, you have to win. Coming second is a massive failure.”

All of this is very blunt, very brash, very unEnglish, however broad the Scouse accent. Mario Cipollini, the ageing sprinter, was less than amused when Cavendish rocketed past him, one foot off the pedal, in a recent race and was accused of being “disrespectful” by the Italian sprinter, Filippo Pozzatto, during the Giro. Respect, in Cavendish’s world, has to be earned by riding hard but fair. His rivalry with McEwen and the Italian, Daniele Bennati, does not preclude respect and even friendship, the sort of camaraderie fostered by soldiers in a war zone.

In all likelihood, Cavendish will abandon the Tour before the Alps to give himself time to prepare for Beijing, though he feels strong enough to reach Paris. He had planned to stop halfway through the Giro, but pushed his body through the mountains to finish. It was a matter of pride that he did so, just as it is a matter of honour that he races drug-free. Nothing angers the British rider more than the tainted image bequeathed cycling once again by Manuel Beltran of the Liquigas team, who tested positive for EPO on the opening day of the Tour. “I want to be proud of what I’ve done and I want people to know that everything I’ve achieved has come through hard work,” said Cavendish recently. A double victory for Cavendish has been a glimmer of light, for Britain and the Tour.

Hoban remains best of British

- Mark Cavendish’s success in Toulouse ended a 35-year wait for a British rider to win two Tour de France stages in the same year. Barry Hoban, right, was the last man to achieve the feat with victories in 1969 and again in 1973

- Hoban competed in a record 12 Tour de France races - more than any other British rider - between 1964 and 1978 after leaving his native Yorkshire at the age of 21 to live in France and Belgium, where he raced for 20 years. Aged 68, he still regularly rides the quiet roads of mid Wales near his home in Mochdre, near Newtown

- Like Cavendish, he was a sprinter, although he showed early prowess as a climber. A star of the flat stages and one-day classics, Hoban’s first stage win came in 1967. Two years later, in 1969, he won successive stages - the only Briton to have done so on the Tour

- His eight Tour stage wins is a British record which also remains steadfast. Chris Boardman, Robert Millar and Michael Wright have come closest to Hoban’s number of Tour wins with three each. Wright had his successes all on the same Tour in 1965 - something for Cavendish to aim at