Will There Ever Be Another Merckx?

Fans of cycling are lucky in a way.

Sure, the sport can be tough to root for, as races come and go and traditions evolve. At any given moment older fans can say that the sport doesn’t “look like it used to.” Apart from a few institutions, teams are as ephemeral as a cool desert stream. And even the most ardent fan, outside of western Europe at least, has friends who ask why they wear tight shorts and who taunt cycling for its doping scandals, as their own pet sports bury their skeletons. It’s annoying, at various turns, to be a Cycling fan.

But in addition to its obvious merits, Cycling is pretty unique in that it can say without hesitation who its all-time greatest hero is: Eddy Merckx. For reasons I’ll get into shortly, he doesn’t face any real argument against his overarching legend status, as compared to riders past or present. When we get super excited about an up-and-coming rider, we will say “he’s the next Merckx,” but almost nobody actually means that, and virtually everyone hears this as just “he’s a really glittering talent.” Actually trying to make that argument, or the career comp, will cost you your standing among your cycling fan peers. For a rider to address the subject out loud is well-known heresy. Eddy Merckx is the sport’s sun, and if you try to approach it, you can guarantee that your wings will melt, like a bunch sprinter’s resolve as the race hits the lower slopes of the Passo del Mortirolo.

Do you realize how unique this is? In all of the major ball sports, there are arguments to be had as to the greatest performer. I could go through them all (insert angry how can you say Messi is better than Pele? content) but for brevity’s sake, most ball sports have different jobs, to go along with the typical evolution of the athletes, such that no one person can define the sport in any significant way. Even trying to identify someone who comes closest will yield too many choices. Individual sports are different in that you can often point to records which seem unreachable, until they aren’t, but more often than not you will get bogged down in arguments about sports science and cheating and the like.

Setting sports aside, how many other endeavors have such an iron-clad GOAT, as the kidz say? Rock Music has the Beatles... but what about Elvis, the Rolling Stones etc etc?? Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa... how can you compare that to the Sistine Chapel? Or the Gent Altarpiece? Even fans of religion generally (apart from adherents to a specific faith) would acknowledge the need for a series of All Time Greats trading cards, where a mint condition Buddha might be valued higher than the Muhammad rookie card, or not. If you want to get technical, religions do tend to have a hierarchy. Most would admit that THE God is, by nature, above the rest, nullifying comparisons. But then we would just argue about the human-form religious figure GOAT. Oh, and which mortal does the Supreme Omnipotence get compared to more than anyone else? Yes, you guessed it: Eddy Merckx.

Merckx Can Never Be Matched

Cycling greatness can sometimes be in the eyes of the beholder (don’t get me started on Pippo Pozzato’s smooth pedaling stroke), but at the end of the day it is defined by the bottom line: how much did you win? To be hailed as one of the greats rider, you have to not just win a lot, but across the sport’s varying terrain. Hyper-specialization is cheating, at least for the purposes of this argument.

And whatever set of records you look at, one name dominates the list.

Grand Tours? Merckx is among the few holding the Tour de France record of five wins... and the Giro d’Italia record of five wins. He completed his trilogy with a lone Vuelta a España victory, but even this was kind of bad-ass: back then, the Vuelta started in late April and conflicted with Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Merckx only entered the race one time, in 1973, and won six stages, the points competition, and the GC. His 11 GT titles are the most ever, just ahead of Maître Jacques Anquetil’s 10, but his other records blow away any hint of an argument as to who was the best three-week racer:

• He is one of eight riders to win the Giro-Tour Double, the hardest race pairing in the sport. For good measure, he did this three times.
• His 64 stage wins are 9 more than Mario Cipollini’s sprint-only total. Stage types aren’t as easy to characterize from that era, but those 64 victories are spread across sprints, mountains, and time trials.
• His 34 Tour stages was only just topped by Cavendish and his 25 Giro stages are fifth-most, after four Italians.
• He spent 96 days in the maillot jaune and another 78 days in the maglia rosa, both of which are miles beyond what anyone else has done.

One-day races? More of the same:

• His 19 Monument wins lap the field, ahead of De Vlaeminck (11).
• His 7 Milano-Sanremo titles is the highest total for any one Monument.
• He is one of three riders to win all five Monuments (De Vlaminck, Van Looy), and the only rider to win all of them more than once.
• He holds the record for MSR and LBL
• Want to expand “Monuments” to include the World Championships? Only he and Van Looy won all of them. Merckx shares the record for most rainbow jerseys (3). And of course he won the first-ever “Triple Crown” (Giro-Tour-Worlds) in 1974, joined only by Stephen Roche and Tadej Pogačar.
• Merckx shares the most-wins record at Gent-Wevelgem (3), and won multiple editions of La Flèche Wallonne (3), Amstel Gold (2), and Het Volk (2).
• He won a total of 69 time trials, tops ahead of Anquetil’s 63.
• Oh, and he set the Hour Record in 1972 on a typical steel-framed road bike. That record would stand until Francesco Moser put on a set of disc wheels and topped it in 1984.

Want more? He has six statues or monuments to him in Belgium, and a Metro station in Brussels bearing his name. The Velo d’Or trophy for cyclist of the year is named after him. He is an Officer in the Order of Leopold, a Knight in the Italian Order of Merit, and both a Knight and Commander in the French Legion d’Honneur. His name has been officially changed to Édouard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) granted him an honorary doctorate, obviously. And with due respect to the learned world, even the doofuses at Bleacher Report recognized him as one of the 20 greatest sports figures ever. He appears in 74 books, 6 songs, 9 films, and a volume of Asterix.

I could go on and on, but I will stop with this: in his career, spanning about 11 productive years and a couple extra ones, he had 279 professional wins. Second on the list is Van Looy (161), then Moser (147), followed by... it doesn’t matter. Wikipedia has Merckx at 525 to Rik I’s 379. It doesn’t matter. Merckx was ranked #4 in the world in his first full season, then second for two years, then #1 non-stop for seven years.

Of course, all cycling records require some amount of doper-vetting, and Merckx had a few run-ins with the law, most notably a positive for an amphetamine in the midst of what would surely have been another Giro triumph in 1969. There were two other positives, in 1973 and ‘77, which suggest that he played the game to some degree. In a vacuum you could see him as tainted, but in the context of his times it was not seen as anything major. And frankly, his records just drown out any sort of moral dissent now. Maybe they always did. Such is the nature of sports fans being confronted with this subject. Anyway, to put this in context, he owns another historic “Double”: the first rider to be both ejected from the Giro d’Italia and accepted into the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Merckx Will Someday Be Matched

Records were made to be broken, right?

OK, that is rather thin gruel, but forever is a long time (hopefully), and what is unimaginable now becomes imaginable later. So we should at least do this argument the courtesy of a breakdown.

Most of Merckx’s race records are up for grabs. The most precious of all, his five Tour de France wins, he already shares with Anquetil and Hinault. He only owns two Monument records, and his LBL mark will probably come under threat. He was consistently the best, but this is cycling — the sheer number of amazing athletes you have to overcome is always immense. Merckx won a lot, but there are, what, a couple hundred race days a year? His single season record is 37 victories. Even after Eddy ate, there was a lot of food left on the table.

Tadej Pogačar”s amazing season, just concluded, gives us something to consider. I am not arguing that Pogačar is the new Merckx, but he did just have a rather Merckxian year, and the reason for this is notable. As mentioned above, Pogačar matched Merckx’s Triple Crown success, winning the yellow, pink and rainbow jerseys. In 42 stages of the Giro and Tour, he ended 39 of them in the lead. He added two wins in the three Monuments he contested. We are all still recovering from what we just saw.

For Pogačar to approach Merckx’ level, he would have to produce a string of seasons like the last one for the rest of the 2020s. But here’s the thing: he did what he did this season because of Merckx. Pogačar won the Tour at the youngest age in the race’s history, and while he’s had his ups and downs, he got to and stayed at that rarified level early enough to start yearning for more. He rode (and won) the Ronde van Vlaanderen in 2023 because he could, just like he targeted the Giro-Tour Double this season. I have no doubt Pogačar will continue expanding his horizons, because that is what Eddy did. Merckx’s records will forever beckon riders of the rarest talents to chase them.

One key development is the rejection of the hyper-specialization that characterized (OK, ruined) the previous three decades. The surge in international interest in the classics revived our collective sense of what a great rider is— namely, someone who can win a lot of ways, on varying terrain, a reflection of the classics themselves. Cycling being primarily entertainment, the riders themselves have disdained hyper-specialization, even ditching their road bikes to play around at cyclocross or gravel or mountain biking. Kids today... are kind of awesome. I suspect it will be a long time before this trend is reversed.

The other big change is that cycling has cleaned itself up from the Bad Old Days. Whatever doping exists, and it’s never zero, is dialed down enough so that differences in talent are not drowned in a test tube. Those differences are being turned up or down in the wind tunnel, at the dinner table, and wherever else marginal gains can be found. But the top guys can afford the best trainers and nutritionists, the strongest domestiques, and the fastest equipment. Talent reigns supreme.

For the first time, Eddy Merckx will be eligible to race in the Masters 80+ category in 2025. He will embark on his ninth decade in mid-June, and with good health he will continue to serve as a living reminder to what is possible. Every great professional road cyclist alive has met Eddy Merckx, I should think, given his regular presence at the sport’s biggest events since his retirement in 1978. If his successor does not come along during his lifetime, the Merckx presence will be felt anyway, thanks to information, video and the rest. Eddy will most likely never be forgotten as long as humans tread the Earth’s terrain on two wheels.

But whether his looming presence will have company ... that is a question for the Ages.