Video: Cavendish vs Petacchi, who is quicker... at solving a Rubik's Cube?

If you thought the battle between Mark Cavendish and Alessandro Petacchi to be the fastest man out there came to an end when the Italian joined Omega Pharma-Quick Step midway through last season, think again - a video from the Belgian UCI WorldTour team shows them battling it out to be quicker to solve a Rubik's Cube.

The pair have amassed an astonishing 91 Grand Tour stages between them - currently, Petacchi leads Cavendish 48 to 43, but at 12 years the Italian's junior, the Manx rider certainly has time on his side - and both are former winners of Milan-Sanremo, which they will ride on Sunday.

So it's clear both are driven by the will to win, and that applies equally off the bike as on it. The video also reinforces something Cavendish highlighted when he won Stage 6 of Tirreno-Adriatico earlier this week - the team spirit makes it feel as if, age differences apart, "we really feel like a group of kids going out to ride our bikes."

It wasn't always like that. In the 2010 Tour de France, Cavendish won five stages to the then Lampre-Farnese rider's two, but it was Petacchi who took home the green jersey.

And the following year, on Stage 2 of the Giro d'Italia in Parma, Cavendish remonstrated with his future team mate, after a hard fought sprint - although the bonus seconds he got for being runner-up on the stage meant he did get into the race leader's maglia rosa.

Petacchi wins in Parma; picture Daniele Badolato/LaPresse

We won't tell you who won the Rubik's Cub battle. But neither of them got close to the 11.84 seconds achieved by nine-year-old Chinese boy, Li Dongyi, shown in this BBC report.