Eddy Merckx is the greatest Tour rider ever

June 12, 9:16 AMDenver Cycling ExaminerGary Koenig

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Eddy Merckx

At first, it looked like Eddy Merckx was the best Tour rider ever.  Using different ranking criteria, Lance Armstrong deserves that title.  By at least one rigorous statistical measurement, former golden boy Greg LeMond could be considered the best Tour rider ever.  He certainly produced the best single-year effort ever.  But that very same measurement technique gave us Urs Zimmermann as the 3rd best Tour rider in history.  Clearly, one year wonders are not the 3rd best Tour riders of all time.

We need to take this analysis at least one step farther. Since 5 wins was the bench mark of extraordinary performance (before Lance’s 7th, of course), it makes sense to look at each 5(or more)-time victor’s winning performance, averaging them to come up with a single “average sigma” for each rider. But why limit this exercise to only winning performances? We’ve already seen in a previous post that some of the very best single year results came from 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishers in very competitive races.

With that in mind, let’s average the best 5 sigma results for every one of the 463 riders who had finished at least 5 Tours as of 2008. And, (ta da!) here is the answer: Wim Vansevenant, with an average sigma of -1.52, ranks last!

OK, maybe that’s not what you have been waiting all these tedious moments to hear. Glance a little lower to see the definitive list of the top 27 Tour riders of all time, as measured by the average of the best 5 standard deviations they posted in their careers.

Surprising, yes. Early year riders are not represented at all. The main reason for this is validation of Lance’s earlier mentioned claim: the races have become more competitive over the years, especially since resumption of racing after WWII. More competitive races means lower values for standard deviations, which in turn produces winning margins that don’t seem that large in an absolute sense but which result in high sigmas for the winners.

What the heck is Fernando Escartin doing in 12th place over all and why are Virenque, Escartin, Poulidor, Chiappucci, Hampsten, Moreau, Leipheimer, Mancebo and Mottet (non-winners all) on such an august list? And where is Marco Pantani?

Let’s take these questions one at a time.

Escartin had some excellent results from 1995 through 2000, finishing 7th, 8th, 5th, 3rd and 8th during that period. One of those years, 1997, was highly competitive, yielding sigmas near or over 2.0 for a number of riders. One of the keys to making the top 27 in the 5-best-years ranking methodology is consistency, and Escartin delivered that during his 5 best years.

Virenque’s top 5 results cover almost the same period as Escartin’s – 1994 through 2000. During that period he finished 5th, 9th, 2nd, 8th and 6th, and, similar to Escartin, he delivered great results in some competitive races.

Poulidor’s inclusion really needs no explanation. He’s the most famous rider in history to never win the Tour, holding the dubious distinction of finishing 2nd or 3rd 8 times. His 5 best (sigma) years were ’64 when he finished 2nd, ’65 when he finished 2nd, ’69 when he finished 3rd, ’72 when he finished 3rd and ’74 when he finished 2nd.

Chiapucci had great years in ’90, ’91 and ’92. Were it not for some lugs named LeMond and Indurain, he would have won two of those races. One of the years included in his best 5, 1995, saw him finishing 11th. Nevertheless, averaging his best 5 sigma results puts him number 15 overall.

The cases for Hampsten and Mottet are somewhat more problematic. One of the years included in Andy’s best 5 results was 1988 when he finished 15th at 1.53 sigmas. Offsetting this good but not great result was his 4th place finish in 1986, the most competitive Tour ever raced. The 2.18 sigmas he scored in that race, as you saw in a preceding table, is the 13th best single performance of all time. Mottet had great races in 1987 (4th), 1989 (6th) and 1991 (4th), giving him enough sigma points to offset a good but not great 1986 (16th) and a poor (by his standards) 1994 when he finished 26th.

Christophe Moreau has never come close to winning the Tour (his best finish was 4th in 2000), but he had sigmas of 1.6 or over in 2000 and 2003-2006. Levi finished a memorable 3rd in 2007, only 31 seconds behind Alberto Contador. His 6th, 8th, 9th and 13th in his other 4 Tour finishes helped him rack up some nice sigmas. Good enough to declare him the 22nd best Tour rider ever.

Francisco Mancebo, the man with the pained and crooked grin, had some good years between 2000 and 2005, including a 4th, 6th 7th, 9th and 10th.

Just to sanity-check these results, it’s worthwhile to look at all the riders who finished ahead of Virenque, Escartin, Chiappucci, Hampsten , Mottet, Moreau, Leipheimer and Mancebo in each of the races that were included in their respective best 5 calculations. A number of those riders, like Alex Zulle, Abraham Olano, Steven Rooks, Alexandre Vinokourov and Denis Menchov had 3 great years, but 2 so-so ones that brought their averages down. Some other prominent riders finished only 3 or 4 Tours, so did not have enough results to get ranked. The bottom line is this: the 9 riders ranked in the top 27 without having ever won a single Tour compiled consistent results throughout their careers and are statistically valid members of the elite group.

As for the star-crossed Marco Pantani, he only finished 4 Tours in his career. Had he been able to maintain his four year average (1.88) for one more year, he would have ended up just outside the top 10. Amongst current riders, Cadel Evans will almost surely be top 20 after this year’s Tour while Ivan Basso (should he ever be allowed to ride the Tour again) is on track for a high spot as well.

Agreed – enough with the tables already! But we’re right back where we started – Eddy Merckx IS the greatest Tour rider of all time. Still, when you look back over that list of 27, don’t you wish you could see them toe the line together? If we could somehow get them all together, in the kind of the shape they were in while fashioning the records that garnered them spots on that list, who would win the greatest Tour de France of all time? Just maybe, using statistics, such a Dream Tour is possible…