Miguel Indurain
Greg LeMond
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Miguel Indurain leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Miguel Indurain at #6 and Greg LeMond at #9.
The case for Miguel Indurain
Big Mig was the first rider to win five consecutive Tours de France, from 1991 to 1995, an unprecedented run built on time-trial power that few could comprehend. A tall, powerful rider with a famously low resting heart rate, Indurain would demolish his rivals against the clock, then mark them in the mountains without ever needing to attack. He won seven Grand Tours in all, adding the Giro d'Italia in 1992 and 1993 to complete Giro-Tour doubles in both years. In 1994 he set the Hour Record at 53.040 kilometres, and in 1995 he took the World time-trial title before winning Olympic time-trial gold on home-continent roads at Atlanta in 1996. His calm, understated dominance made him a national hero in Spain and ushered in a new era of specialised Grand Tour riding.
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.