Giacomo Agostini
Kenny Roberts
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Giacomo Agostini leads 5 of 5 categories. Our all-time ranking places Giacomo Agostini at #1 and Kenny Roberts at #7.
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The case for Giacomo Agostini
Fifteen world championships and 122 Grand Prix wins, neither total seriously threatened in fifty years. Agostini won eight 500cc titles, seven of them consecutively from 1966 to 1972, and seven 350cc crowns, frequently taking both on the same afternoon. His premier-class record reads 68 wins from around 120 starts, a strike rate above 55 percent that nobody in the modern era approaches, and he once won 20 consecutive premier races across 1968 and 1969, including a clean sweep of the 1968 season. The standard objection is machinery: MV Agusta's multi-cylinder fours were often the only genuinely competitive bikes on a thin grid. He answered it in 1975 by leaving MV for Yamaha and winning the 500cc title on a two-stroke at 33, the first two-stroke premier crown and the end of MV Agusta's seventeen-year run. He also won ten Isle of Man TTs before refusing to return after Gilberto Parlotti's death in 1972.
The case for Kenny Roberts
Three consecutive 500cc world championships from 1978 to 1980, the first of them as a rookie, from a career of only 60 Grand Prix starts. Roberts took 24 wins, 22 in the premier class, and 44 podiums, having already won back-to-back AMA Grand National titles in 1973 and 1974 and completed the Grand Slam of victories across all five American dirt-track and road-race disciplines. His influence outweighs his totals. He imported dirt-track technique to Grand Prix racing, deliberately breaking rear traction to steer a 500cc two-stroke, and every rider since has ridden some version of that. Off track he was equally consequential: his threatened breakaway World Series in 1979 forced the FIM to improve circuit safety and lifted rider payments dramatically. He later ran his own team and built his own three-cylinder 500cc machine.