Cavendish has been described as confident, even arrogant. In 2008 he said "When journalists at the Tour de France ask me if I am the best sprinter, I answer 'Yes', and that's seen as arrogance, but if they don't ask me, I don't say I'm the best sprinter in the world." Cavendish has a "photographic" memory for the details of race routes. In a 2013 interview with Jonathan Liew, he said, "If I do a circuit then after three laps I could tell you where all the potholes were." As a test Jonathan asked him to recount the close of his win in San Remo five years earlier. It took him five minutes to recite every detail of the last . This is an obvious asset to Cavendish in planning and timing his races.