Mark Cavendish may be a household name to most Europeans, but the 24-year-old, winner of six stages in last July’s Tour de France, including the grandstand finish on the Champs Élysées, will not be joining Team Sky.

As the team’s new squad held their initial get-together in Manchester last week, Cavendish, the most successful British rider in the professional peloton and winner of Milan-San Remo and countless other prestigious races, confirmed that he is staying put.

“I’m in the best position at Team Columbia,” he told The Times. “I’m not looking for a contract. I want to win and I want to be in the best place to do that, and that’s Columbia.” Yet with Sky still battling to extricate Bradley Wiggins from his contract with Garmin-Slipstream, Cavendish remains on the shopping list of David Brailsford, the Sky team director.

“If Sky’s the best team in five years, I’ll be at Sky,” Cavendish said. “If Radioshack [Lance Armstrong’s new squad] is the best team, I’ll be at Radioshack. I’m going to get paid the same wherever. But there was never a formal offer made to me by Sky.”

Cavendish, who now spends more time in Italy than on his native Isle of Man, was in Central London last week signing copies of Boy Racer, his autobiography, with his new Italian girlfriend, Fiorella Migliore, in tow. A few years ago, a book about sprinting in cycling might have drawn a motley crew of anoraks and eccentrics to meet the author; now, however, the suited and booted queue around the block to meet “Cav”.

“To be honest, I thought it would be more cycling people — bike pervs — but that shows how cycling’s changed,” he said. “I think the whole sport has changed since Chris [Sir Chris Hoy] in Beijing and then Brad and me have had our successes.”

Despite returning empty-handed from the Beijing Olympics — the only member of Brailsford’s track squad to do so — Cavendish has played no small part in popularising a sport that for years was deemed the province of geeks and eccentrics.

In two seasons, Cavendish has established himself as the young star in European cycling. Forget that misfiring Madison in the Laoshan Velodrome in Beijing, to the millions who flock to the European roadsides to watch the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and one-day Classic races, Cavendish is already a legend.

Finally big in Britain, Cavendish is huge in Europe and — like Mario Cipollini and Tom Boonen, his fellow sprinters, before him — is seen as a demigod in the cycling heartlands of Italy and Belgium. In 2009, his clutch of wins in July’s Tour were preceded by four victories in the Giro (plus a spell in the race leader’s jersey) and victory in the most prized Italian one-day race, Milan-San Remo.

His continued success at Columbia is another reason why he is wary of jumping ship to a new sponsor. “At Columbia, I have a team built around me,” he said. “That’s how we won Milan-San Remo — we had eight guys riding just for me.”

But he acknowledges that success in the Tour de France is his holy grail. “The emotions you get from the Tour — I get goose bumps talking about it even now. It’s not a job to win at the Tour, it’s a dream.”

Since July, Cavendish has become one of the foremost names in European road racing alongside Alberto Contador. He dominates the demented dash to the finish line as effortlessly as Contador soars through the Alps and Pyrenees.