Greg LeMond
Mark Cavendish
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Greg LeMond at #9 and Mark Cavendish at #11.
Head-to-head FAQ
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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.
The case for Mark Cavendish
The greatest sprinter in cycling history, the Manx Missile rewrote the record book at the discipline he mastered. In 2024 Cavendish won his 35th Tour de France stage, surpassing Eddy Merckx's long-standing record of 34, and across all three Grand Tours he took 55 stage victories. He won the 2011 World Championship, the 2009 Milan-San Remo, and roughly 165 professional races. His peak, built on the flawless HTC lead-out train, saw him beat every rival of his era in the bunch sprints, and his 2021 comeback to equal Merckx's record after years of illness and doubt ranks among the sport's great redemption stories. Where all-rounders are measured by Grand Tours and Monuments, Cavendish stands alone as the finest pure finisher the peloton has ever seen.