Giacomo Agostini
Wayne Rainey
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 Wayne Rainey at #9.
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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 Wayne Rainey
Three consecutive 500cc world championships from 1990 to 1992, with 24 wins and 65 podiums from 94 Grand Prix starts, all achieved in what is widely regarded as the deepest premier-class field ever assembled, against Kevin Schwantz, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Gardner, Mick Doohan and John Kocinski. Rainey's Yamaha YZR500 was rarely the fastest bike; his method was relentless consistency and a refusal to make the error his rivals eventually would. He was leading the 1993 championship by 11 points from Schwantz when he crashed at Misano in September, breaking his spine and losing the use of his legs. He was 32 and had won three of the previous four titles. He returned as a team owner and later raced hand-controlled machinery, and the sport's modern safety standards owe much to what happened to him.