Eddy v Tadej: Who's the greatest and does it matter?

Plus details of a KM0 Live event with Daniel Friebe and Rob Hatch next week

This week’s episode, Lonely G.O.A.T, is online now and features Daniel Friebe, Richard Abraham and Fran Reyes on Tadej Pogačar’s win at Il Lombardia.

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by Lionel Birnie

On July 1, 1975, Eddy Merckx rode the fifth stage of the Tour de France wearing the rainbow jersey he’d won in Montreal, Canada, the previous summer. That was when he became the first rider to win the sport’s three most prestigious races – the Giro d’Italia, Tour and world championship road race – in the same season. No one called it the ‘triple crown’ then because it had never been done before.

The stage covered 222 kilometres and finished on the west coast of France, where Merckx was third behind a Dutchman called Theo Smit. Merckx ended the day lying second overall, just behind Francesco Moser.

Next day, Merckx won a short time trial to take the maillot jaune, the 87th of his career, and he held the race lead for another nine stages until that fateful punch from a spectator on the Puy de Dôme ended his hopes of a sixth Tour title and loosened the velvet cord that would eventually bring down the curtain on his extraordinary reign.

There would be a few more wins, including the 1976 Milan-Sanremo, but Merckx was 30 now and had begun his descent. In truth, the most remarkable thing about Merckx’s 1974 triple was that it came after the peak years of his career when he devoured everything before him. He had done the Giro-Tour double three times, in 1970, 1972 and 1974. Even in 1973, when he skipped the Tour, he still managed to win the Vuelta and Giro within a few weeks of each other.

What is the significance of July 1, 1975? Well, nothing, really, although it was the day I was born, which is why, for me, the Merckx era exists only as superlatives, grainy footage, still photographs, and stories from those who were there to tell the tale.

When I was getting into cycling in the mid-1980s, reading books and magazines about the history of the sport, Merckx was strangely unknowable. He seemed like Godzilla on a bike, just an unstoppable force that trampled everything in its path. There was little context or nuance to latch onto when it came to assessing his brilliance. Merckx was a ruthless winning machine and in the absence of hearing him speak, or watching any of his races live, or seeing any footage of him at all apart from the most fleeting of clips, he felt almost one-dimensional, nothing more complex than a list of race wins. First, first, first, first, the occasional second or third, first again – for years in a row.

Since Merckx, there have been dominant riders, of course, but no one has swept all before them in quite the same way. Riders have tended to specialise more, or their weaker areas were more obvious. The sport has evolved, the talent pool deepened and the idea of another rider like Merckx coming along capable of winning almost all of the biggest races, on a variety of terrain, seemed extinct. Riders might put together streaks at grand tours, or cobbled classics, but there wouldn’t be much cross-over.

Those of us who weren’t around when Merckx ruled the earth had to imagine what it must have been like to see one rider win race after race, with long-range attacks and big time gaps as standard. For someone my age and younger, Merckx was the sporting equivalent of seeing the skeleton of a T-Rex in the natural history museum. It proved the dinosaurs existed, gave you a of their scale, but it’s nevertheless hard to imagine them actually roaming around the place.

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This season Tadej Pogačar has given us some idea what it must have been like when Merckx was at his best. His results are astonishing and every attempt to contextualise them leads to a stream of statements and comparisons that sound Merckx-esque and end up merely as a list of achievements – race names and numbers that barely begin to convey the dynamism, aggression, courage and self-confidence of the performances themselves.

Pogačar won all three stage races he started – the Volta a Catalunya, the Giro and the Tour. He led the Giro from the second stage to the end, winning by almost 10 minutes, taking six stages in the process. At the Tour, he regained the yellow jersey at the end of stage four and held it all the way to Nice, with another half-dozen stage wins for good measure. There wasn’t a moment in either grand tour when he looked vulnerable.

He rewrote the template for one-day races with a series of long-range attacks – 82 kilometres alone at Strade Bianche, 101 kilometres (more or less on his own) at the World Championships, 48 kilometres at Il Lombardia, 34 kilometres at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. In the space of the season he has turbo-charged a trend for the sort of early attacks we’ve seen over the past few seasons and has reduced some of the biggest Classics to a test and spectacle similar to an individual time trial.

His worst results of the season were third at Milan-Sanremo and seventh at the Grand Prix de Québec. Even in the stage races the only time he finished outside the top 50 all season was when he cruised over the line at the end of the Giro in Rome, arms aloft in celebration. Only the torrential rain at Tre Valle Varesine could stop him.

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Earlier this week, I listened back to one of the first times we discussed Tadej Pogačar on the podcast. It was in February 2019, a dozen race days into his first season as a World Tour professional with UAE Team Emirates. He was 20 years old and had been on everyone’s radar because he’d won the Tour de l’Avenir the previous summer, but it was the manner of his first professional win, the uphill finish at Fóia in the Volta ao Algarve, when he made Team Sky and Deceunink-Quick Step look a tad pedestrian with his acceleration, that caught the eye. That victory set him up for the overall win and propelled him into our consciousness.

At the time another young phenomenon was garnering a lot of attention. Remco Evenepoel had just turned 19. He had won the junior road race and time trial at the World Championships in Innsbruck and skipped the under-23 category altogether, leapfrogging into the pro ranks with Deceunink-Quick Step. There was plenty of debate about whether a World Tour team was the right place for a teenager, but equally a lot of excitement at the prospect of what Evenepoel might be able to achieve despite his tender age.

In the podcast’s news round-up I was talking about Pogačar’s stage win and Richard cut in to say, ‘…and everyone is now saying, Remco Who?’

Daniel mentioned Matxin Fernandez, the man who scouted Pogačar for UAE Team Emirates, before adding: ‘Everyone is now predicting he will be the next Eddy Merckx – the latest in a long line. But there are plenty of cautionary tales, aren’t there.’

And while that was true – cycling history is littered with young riders who have promised much but wilted in the face of white-hot expectation – what was curious was how unusual it was for a rider as young as 20 to land a win ahead of elite competition.

We mentioned a few recent examples, including Thomas Löfkvist, the Swede who won the Circuit de la Sarthe a few days after his 20th birthday in 2004, and Wilco Kelderman, who won the Tour of Norway as a 20-year-old in 2011. But neither victory was anything like as significant as Pogačar’s Volta ao Algarve in terms of the size of the event or the level of opposition. Richard mentioned a Spaniard called Bernardo Ruiz, who won the Volta a Catalunya when he was 20, but that was going all the way back to 1945 when cycling was a different world.

Two of the most obvious precedents we failed to mention were Eddy Merckx, who won Milan-Sanremo in 1966 when he was still only 20, and Stephen Roche, who as a 21-year-old won the Tour of Corsica and Paris-Nice in his first six weeks in the professional ranks. Both those riders went on to win the Giro-Tour-Worlds triple, of course. Perhaps we were subconsciously steering away from comparing Pogačar to them after winning the Volta ao Algarve because it would have sounded hyperbolic. Comparisons with Merckx have always sounded ridiculous and over-blown. Until now.

Lionel cracks the great Merckx. ‘Who’s the second best of all-time, Eddy?’

Ten years ago at the Tour de France, a couple of hours before the riders rolled out of Ypres for their appointment with the mud, the cobblestones and the hell of the north, I was invited to a ‘press breakfast’ with Eddy Merckx. The event was organised by the good people at the In Flanders Fields museum but, like all press breakfasts, it was packed with people who were more interested in the breakfast bit than the press bit. It’s probably fair to say Eddy was in that category too.

There had been a lot of controversy about the cobbles being included in the Tour de France and the weather, which had been rainy in the days leading up to the stage, meant a nervous, heavy atmosphere hung over the team buses parked in the pretty town square.

Inside the museum, we stood in a raggedy line waiting for the GOAT to make his way along answering the same questions from everybody. Never mind the hell of the north, I thought, it must be a certain type of hell being Eddy Merckx in these circumstances, facing questions he’s answered before knowing that his word will be conveyed with the weight of being the greatest cyclist of all time.

As Merckx went down the line, I watched his expression grow slightly duller with each exchange and I could feel my predictable list of questions falling flat. Nevertheless, I dived in when it was my turn, asking whether the cobbles had a place in the Tour, which of the favourites he rated and so on. The answers weren’t earth-shattering, but they were Eddy Merckx’s answers so they meant a lot more than most.

Before he moved on, I decided to try to end on a high.

‘Lastly, Eddy,’ I said, ‘who is the second best cyclist of all time, in your opinion?’

For the first time, he looked at me. His expression changed and he cracked a smile. He even thought about it for a second, before giving a diplomatic non-answer.

‘There is no second, there is no first,’ he said. ‘I think the most important thing is to be the best when you ride, and I was in my career, but the others were also great riders.’

‘You’re too modest.’

‘Yeah.’

And, with that, he moved on to the next person to answer whether the cobbles had a place in the Tour.

Naturally, when Pogačar won the rainbow jersey in Zürich, someone was going to ask Merckx whether he was still the greatest of all-time. L’Équipe quoted him saying: ‘It is obvious that he [Pogačar] is above me. Deep down, I already thought as much when I saw what he did on the last Tour de France, but tonight there’s no more doubt about it.’

A couple of days later Merckx backtracked slightly, or at least qualified that statement, saying he was referring specifically to the manner in which Pogačar won the world title, with an attack launched a hundred kilometres from the finish.

Historical comparisons in sport are an interesting thought experiment but ultimately pointless. Fifty years have elapsed since Merckx won his triple. The sport has changed so much that if either man was transported to the other’s era in a time machine they might barely recognise their surroundings. Would Pogačar be better than Merckx if he rode 1970s races on 1970s equipment and roads, and a 1970s diet, training and preparation regime? Would Peak Merckx be better than Pogačar in the 21st century? It’s impossible to say, and so, we are left with a rather more one-dimensional comparison – one list of results versus another. In that regard Merckx will probably always have the edge, simply because Pogačar has to win another couple of Tours, four more editions of the Giro, one Vuelta, another 12 Monuments and two more world titles to draw level with the Belgian.

The challenge for Pogačar now is to find new ground to keep things interesting for himself and, to a lesser extent, the watching public before significant numbers tire of his domination and begin to root against him, which is as inevitable as night following day. It’s feasible to imagine him winning Milan-Sanremo and even Paris-Roubaix, even though conventional wisdom suggests he’s not built for it, to join Merckx, Rik Van Looy and Roger De Vlaeminck as the only riders to win all five Monuments. The Tour de France will presumably remain his primary goal and the Vuelta a España will probably be on his hit list too.

Pogačar is already the best of his generation, even if Jonas Vingegaard, Mathieu van der Poel and Remco Evenepoel can push him very hard in the right circumstances.

To be considered the best of all-time, Pogačar will have to do something to eclipse Merckx, such as winning more grand tours or Classics. There is an easier way that springs to mind, though, and that’s to win Paris-Tours, the only major classic to evade the Belgian’s grasp. What about it Tadej? It’s basically a flatter, French version of Strade Bianche these days anyway.

Join Daniel and Rob for KM0 Live on Tuesday

‘Home of Cycling’ – The 10-year reunion
A virtual live event on Tuesday, October 22 at 7pm UK time
with Daniel Friebe and Rob Hatch

Ten years ago this November an up-and-coming young multi-sport commentator named Rob Hatch moved into the also-then-still-relatively-young Daniel Friebe’s flatshare in West London. The, ahem, broadly harmonious cohabitation lasted a couple of years before they both fled (each other mainly), Rob to Spain and Daniel to Germany.

Now both familiar voices on The Cycling Podcast, Daniel and Rob invite you to join them on Tuesday, October 22, for KM0 Live, an evening of 2024 season-themed conversation and a chance to ask them questions about journalism, broadcasting… and perhaps what became of their beloved Yucca tree, ‘Marco Plantani’.

Our second KM0 Live event of the season will be hosted on Zoom and is exclusively for Friends of The Cycling Podcast subscribers and paid subscribers to The 11.01 Cappuccino. All eligible subscribers will receive an email before the weekend inviting them to the event.

The event will start at 7pm UK time on Tuesday, October 22 and will last approximately 90 minutes. If you can't make the event live, the audio will be released for Friends of the Podcast shortly afterwards.

KM0 Live: Tuesday, October 22
7pm UK time (8pm CET)
On Zoom

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Congratulations, Rose and Phil

Finally this week, congratulations to Rose Manley, host of The Cycling Podcast Féminin, and her husband Phil Sheehan on the newest addition to their family – a baby boy. Mother and baby are both doing well and we’re sure all our listeners will want to join us in offering our congratulations and best wishes. The Cycling Podcast Féminin will return in a few weeks but until then, enjoy the time with your family, Rose.

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