"To think the first stage is in Yorkshire and finishes in my mother's home town; it's really exciting," Cavendish replied, sounding entirely unmoved. But there are 200 bike riders on the start line almost and every one of those would like to win the yellow jersey.
"It just so happens the media attention is going to be more around me because my mum is from Harrogate."
But surely, it was put to him, all those holidays to Harrogate in his youth, the breakfasts at Betty's tea room in Parliament St, up which the peloton will come roaring, provide a stirring emotional backdrop to his bid for glory?
"I remember being here in Harrogate many summers," he conceded. "My grandparents, my uncle still lives here. It's nice to look around places I knew when I was young."
No one was fooled by the laidback demeanour.
Cavendish can veer from prickly to engaging in press conferences, but when racing he has only one setting: all-out attack.
He has been noticeably quiet in the run-up to this race, however; declining interview requests, keeping his head down. Perhaps it is the pressure of being home favourite.
Almost certainly he has unhappy memories of the hype that preceded the Olympic road race in 2012, which was billed as nailed-on for Cavendish but which ended in crushing disappointment as the Great Britain team failed to deliver him on that occasion to contest the sprint.
Or it might be the knowledge that he is now engaged in a fascinating struggle to hang on to his status as the fastest sprinter in the peloton, to halt the march of Father Time.
Giant Shimano's Marcel Kittel beat Cavendish four stages to two last year and is seen as the rising star of the peloton.
The heavyweight German, three years younger than Cavendish but 12.5cm taller and 15.8kg heavier, has made a habit of picking up wins at the start of grand tours. Kittel won a chaotic first stage in Corsica 12 months ago to pull on the maillot jaune and sprinted to victory in Belfast on the second stage of this year's Giro d'Italia following the opening team time trial.
In a straight-up drag race on a wide flat road, few out there would back against Kittel. But on a tough opening stage across the Yorkshire Dales, with narrow country lanes, a few decent climbs, showers a strong possibility, and an uphill finish into Harrogate, Cavendish has every chance. In fact, Kittel told the Daily Telegraph earlier this week that he thought the stage was so tough it might not even suit the pure sprinters and could favour instead the likes of Alexander Kristoff (Katusha) or his own teammate John Degenkolb.
What is certain is that Cavendish, Kittel and Andre Greipel, the third big sprinter in the peloton, will be hugely dependent on their respective sprint trains over the next three weeks. Cavendish, who sits third in the all-time list of stage wins with 25, behind only Bernard Hinault (28) and Eddy Merckx (34), has his favoured lead-out man from his HTC days, Mark Renshaw, back alongside him and that could make a difference.
Cavendish did say one mildly controversial thing yesterday, which was that he would have liked to have seen fellow Britons Sir Bradley Wiggins and David Millar riding on home roads this weekend -- Team Sky principal Sir Dave Brailsford later defended his decision to drop Wiggins, describing the call as "horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible" -- but otherwise he played it very low key, keeping his powder dry.
The only time he looked animated was when he glanced up at one point, beyond the hundreds of faces crammed into the media tent in Leeds, and spied his wife Peta, stepson Finn and daughter Delilah at the back of the room.
]Suddenly his face lit up and he began blowing kisses.
Cavendish is a family man now, no longer the fiery young sprinter of old.
But he still has a few years at the top left, and whatever the body language yesterday you know he is in the mood to take care of business.
