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Who is the best Tour rider of all time? (Part 2)
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Best Tour rider of all time?
In a previous article, we showed that Eddy Merckx can still be considered the greatest Tour rider of all time. By one fairly rational methodology, we came up with a top 10 that looks like this:
1. Merckx
2. Armstrong
3. Hinault
4. Anquetil
5. Zoetemelk
6. Indurain
7. Van Impe
8. Ullrich
9. Bahamontes
10. LeMond
But there are plenty of other ways to try to rank all-time preformers. Perhaps it’s time to take a hint from the Book of Google, and see how the race organizers, who are presumably expert at assessing the value of results in their race, have voted. A good way to do this is to calculate how much each rider would win if all their results were paid out according to the current (2008) prize structure. In the following table, the first row shows the payout (in Euros) for each finish category. The last column represents the total (virtual) prize winning each of the top 10 riders has accumulated in 2008 Euros. Lance fans, breathe a big sigh of relief - your hero is now number 1!
| (Euros)> | 450,000 | 200,000 | 100,000 | 70,000 | 50,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 | 8000 | ||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Green | Polka | Stages | Total(M) | ||
| 1 | Armstrong | 7 | 24 | 3.342 | ||||||
| 2 | Hinault | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 28 | 2.924 | |||
| 3 | Merckx | 5 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 34 | 2.847 | |||
| 4 | Anquetil | 5 | 1 | 16 | 2.478 | |||||
| 5 | Indurain | 5 | 12 | 2.346 | ||||||
| 6 | Zoetemelk | 1 | 6 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 1.990 | |||
| 7 | LeMond | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 1.690 | ||||
| 8 | Ullrich | 1 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 7 | 1.676 | |||
| 9 | Bobet | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 11 | 1.633 | |||
| 10 | Frantz | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 20 | 1.580 |
Now we’re getting somewhere! For the first time, Armstrong comes out on top. In addition, LeMond has moved up, and Bobet and Frantz, two other multiple-winners, have appeared. Joop Zoetemelk, with his incredible 11 top-five finishes, still has a prominent place on the list, based on the organizers’ view that two seconds are in fact nearly equal to a win. The big shock on this chart, one that borders on heresy to nearly everyone except Bernard Hinault himself, is the evidence that Hinault is a better Tour rider than Eddy Merckx!
Speaking of Google, maybe we should more literally apply the tenant upon which their search engine and multi-billion dollar business were predicated. Google’s founders believed that in ranking web sites, the Internet itself has already spoken. The more links from unaffiliated pages there are to a given page, the more pertinent it must be, or so says the first law of Google. Trying this approach (by searching for “Tour de France” plus the rider’s full name), we get the following rankings for the 10 riders shown in the previous table:
1. Lance Armstrong 1,360,000 hits (as measured in May, 2009)
2. Eddy Merckx
388,000
3. Jan Ullrich
244,000
4. Greg LeMond
72,700
5. Miguel Indurain 59,500
6. Bernard Hinault 59,200
7. Jacques Anquetil 46,700
8. Joop Zoetemelk 16,000
9. Louison Bobet
15,500
10. Nicolas Frantz 5,000
This somewhat whimsical approach doesn’t appear to be helping us converge on the ultimate ranking as we’d hoped. Rather, it seems to indicate two things: 1 – Lance Armstrong is the most popular bicyclist ever; and 2 - there was no Internet in 1928 when Nicolas Frantz won the last of his two Tours.
Trying to compare athletes from different eras in an absolute sense may be possible, but not necessarily meaningful. The fastest average speed for a Tour won by Eddy Merckx was 38.13 kph in 1971. Compare this to the average speed of 41.82 kph that Lance attained in 2005. A careless interpretation of these two facts would “prove” that Armstrong is the better Tour rider. But there are clearly factors that need to be considered before we use these isolated pieces of data to make such a smothering pronouncement. We know that equipment is better and lighter today. We know that nutrition, health care and training advances have been made. With careful study we might discover that newer road surfaces and support methodologies, along with a myriad of other factors, have helped modern-day riders attain speeds that were thought impossible in Merckx’s era. Lance himself has been known to complain that calling Eddy Merckx the greatest Tour rider is unfair because Merckx never had to face the quality of riders that are found in today’s peloton.
Next time we will look at some statistical methods to try to determine the best Tour rider of all time.
For more info: denvercyclingexaminer@ironmuscle.com
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