Mark Cavendish will once again focus his 2015 season on the Tour de France, where he is more determined than ever to prove he can still win at the highest level. He talked to The Guardian newspaper in between the Six-Daye events in Zurich and Ghent.

Cavendish is riding the Six-Day events not only to win them, but because he believes they well serve him well when his season starts off on January 19 at the Tour de San Luis in January.

“I had to get riding again,” he says. “I had a forced three-week break where I should have been getting the fittest I can be in the season. Ghent gave me a short-term focus so that I’m not thinking I’ve got weeks and weeks to get fit. With Zurich, it’s a good block of work.”

Cavendish has had an unlucky season, first with the crash at the Tour, then he crashed again on stage one of the Tour of Britain, hut still contested two bunch sprints there. He was also ruled out of Ghent-Wevelgem with illness in the Spring after riding well to fifth in a horribly wet Milan-Sanremo just a few weeks before. Even so, the man from the Isle of Man recorded 11 wins this year, including stages in the Tour de Suisse, Tirreno-Adriatico and Tour of California, showing he is more than capable of returning to the top.

“[Crashes] happen to everyone, but this was the first Tour de France I’ve missed since I turned pro,” reflects Cavendish. “I’ve never taken [the Tour] for granted, it’s just given me a new lease of life. I just missed it so much, winning more than anything, the emotional rollercoaster, the spectacle that it is. It’s bigger than cycling. It’s something you can’t put into words. It’s made me not want to retire. I wasn’t ever thinking about retiring, but you start to think of the future, this has made me completely focus on cycling again. It’s not like I’ve lost any desire, but it’s made me more intense about it.”

The Tour crash was the worst, not only ending his chances of winning in his mother’s home town of Harrogate and taking the coveted Yellow Jersey, but it also ruled him out for most of the season with a broken collarbone.

“It was a grade four ligament separation – all four A/C joint ligaments were torn. The shoulder blade was sticking out. For a normal person the recovery is 12 weeks or something – six weeks in a sling before they can start physio. I was back on the bike on the turbo in 10 days – still in pain – and then it was just work, work, work trying to get to race again. It wasn’t difficult, it was just hard work. I had to work every hour of every day to get it back quick. It was time-consuming, but I had nothing else to do.”

While there has been no details of where Cavendish will race in 2015 aside from San Luis, it is almost guaranteed that all roads lead to Utrecht and the start of the Tour de France. But there are also rumours that he will lead the British squad at the next two World Championships, in Richmond, USA and Doha, Qatar.

“I’d like to win the Worlds again in the next couple of years [but] you have to remember that Copenhagen was four years to plan and it took a lot of everybody’s energy and time. I don’t know how it works now, especially with the majority of guys riding for Sky. I don’t know if it will work as well as it did last time.”

“We’ve definitely got the riders and I don’t think it’s just me who’s got the ability to be the winner out of the British team. I’d definitely like to give it a crack,” he said of the emergence of Ben Swift of Team Sky, who finished third in Milan-Sanremo this year, ahead of Cavendish.

Cavendish has had pressure from national coach Shane Sutton to ride the Omnium at the 2016 Rio Olympics, but Cavendish says he can’t focus on that as he and his trade team, Etixx-QuickStep, are focusing on still winning road races with his designated sprint train.

“I’m sure I could win it if I put myself to it, but I’ve worked hard with Omega-Pharma to build a team around sprint performance, the team really look after me and do everything they can to make sure that I have what I need to win; my job is about giving back [for] their investment,” Cavendish says. “I’d like to win it, being a British athlete and the Olympics being big in Britain, but the day job comes first. It can be easily talked about. I’d just have to call [OPQS head] Patrick [Lefevere].”

With the Milan-Sanremo course for 2015 being the same as this year’s, the Worlds may not be the only big one-day race Cavendish is looking to reclaim, having taken the 2009 Sanremo in a photo finish from Heinrich Haussler.

“It definitely interests me and I’m definitely in the best team to do it, the best environment to learn,” he says. “These are the races I grew up dreaming of, but at the moment we [Etixx-QuickStep] have so many guys who can win them that it doesn’t make sense for me to go in out of desire, unless I can go and do a job.”

But above all, Cavendish is hell bent on putting all of the pain of 2014 aside and replacing it with the joy of success at the 2015 Tour de France, regardless of who he is up against.

“It’s the same as always, regardless of who’s there,” he insists. “I just want to win. It doesn’t matter who I’m beating. I just keep looking at it like that.”