Mark Canvendish will reportedly ride for Astana Qazaqstan in 2023, according a report from Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport. Cavendish—along with lead-out rider Cees Bol—were also spotted on Monday at Astana’s training camp in Spain, per VeloNews. Astana has not yet formally announced the signing.

The report comes after several weeks of speculation, starting when Cavendish suddenly found himself without a contract following last month’s implosion of the B&B Hotels cycling team.

Astana has also had its share of very-recent upsets culminating in the firing Miguel Ángel López last week. The firing occurred abruptly after the UCI WorldTeam team claimed it had uncovered “new evidence” of a connection between López and Dr. Marcos Mayna, who stands accused of involvement in a doping ring in Spain.

The uncertainty of Cavendish’s career status had us all watching so closely in part because his story has become somewhat of an underdog comeback tale, and the hero missing Tour de France in 2023 because he doesn’t have a ProTour team was not the plot twist any of us wanted. We want Cavendish to race the Tour and, let’s be honest, we want him to break the tie.

Cavendish has won 34 stages in the Tour de France, a record statistic that he shares with just one other rider: Eddy Merckx.

Cavendish’s professional cycling career began with a bang in 2005 with a whopping eleven wins on the road during his first professional season, along with a gold medal during the UCI Track World Championships representing his native Great Britain. He was 20 years old.

A year later, the Manx Missile, as he came to be known, signed with the T-Mobile cycling team and began to cement his place in cycling history as one of the greatest sprinters the sport has ever seen. Cavendish’s sprint speed of 48.47 MPH is hard to even conceive. Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme has gone on record to say he considers Cavendish to be “the greatest sprinter in the history of the Tour and of cycling.”

Beyond Cavendish’s palmares—a laundry list of 161 wins—there is something incomparably exciting to watching the explosive power, technical ability and style of his sprint. His palpable unwillingness to lose, his scrappiness, his defiance as he fights his way through impossibly small spaces to get to the line first.

The anticipation for next year’s Tour de France sprint stages ramped up a little with today’s announcement, and the appearance of Cavendish at the start line in an Astana kit are now hopefully assured—while the route for the 2023 Tour de France has been announced, the team rosters are still unknown.