Bernard Hinault
Greg LeMond
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Bernard Hinault leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Bernard Hinault at #3 and Greg LeMond at #9.
The case for Bernard Hinault
The Badger was the last great patron of the peloton, a rider who ruled by force of will as much as by his legs. Hinault won 10 Grand Tours, five Tours de France, three Giri d'Italia and two Vueltas a Espana, along with the 1980 World Championship and five Monuments including Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastogne-Liege and Il Lombardia. He remains the last Frenchman to win the Tour, in 1985, a drought stretching four decades. A fierce competitor with roughly 216 professional victories, he was equally capable in the mountains, in time trials and in the cobbled Classics, and his combative leadership shaped the tactics of his era. His feud and alliance with teammate Greg LeMond at the 1985 and 1986 Tours produced one of the sport's defining rivalries.
The case for Greg LeMond
The rider who made cycling global, LeMond became the first non-European to win the Tour de France in 1986, breaking the sport open to America and beyond. He won three Tours, in 1986, 1989 and 1990, and two World road titles, in 1983 and 1989. His 1989 victory over Laurent Fignon by eight seconds, the closest margin in Tour history, came on the final-day time trial where he used aerodynamic bars and a teardrop helmet to overturn a 50-second deficit, a landmark in the sport's embrace of technology. Extraordinarily, he did it after nearly dying in a 1987 hunting accident that left more than thirty shotgun pellets in his body, including near his heart. LeMond raced clean through the dawning EPO era, and his career stands as both a sporting and a moral high point.