Tadej Pogačar ended the season as he began it:
- With a win
- In a WorldTour race against a quality field
- Via a long solo breakaway.
His victory in Il Lombardia was his 25th win of the season and his fourth in a row at Lombardia, which puts him one behind Il Campionissimo himself, Fausto Coppi, for most all-time victories in the Race of the Falling Leaves. It was his second Monument victory of the year, and was the capstone of a season when he became the first rider in 26 years (Marco Pantani) to win the Giro d’Italia-Tour de France double and the first in 37 years (Stephen Roche) to accomplish the so-called Triple Crown, winning the Giro, Tour, and World Road Championships in the same season.
What’s more, he was almost never challenged in any of his victories. He won Lombardia, the World Championships, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Strade Bianche with solo breakaways of at least 34 km. His margin of victory to second place at the Tour was more than six minutes, and almost 10 minutes at the Giro, and each included six dominant stage wins.
Certainly, it was a fantastic season. But how does it stack up against the all-time greats? Roche, for instance, won “only” 14 races (stages and overalls) in that fabled 1987 season, so as impressive as it was it falls just short of an all-time best ever campaign. There are male riders – not many, but a few – who have won more races in a single year, and in comparing Pogačar’s 2024 campaign to their high-water marks, we can get a sense of where his feats stack up.
A quick note of methodology: this analysis is limited to racers after World War II, when racing began to modernize, and there were no more multi-year interruptions of events. It also counts individual race wins – one-day or stages – and overall stage race victories, but not intra-race competitions like the King of the Mountains. And as hinted at above, this analysis only considers male riders – comparing male riders across eras is hard enough; comparing male to female riders is another challenge altogether.
Pogačar’s – and his team’s – extraordinary season
Last year, that Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates outfit slightly outpointed Jumbo-Visma in the UCI teams rankings was something of an oddity, considering the Dutch superteam swept all three Grand Tours. This year, UAE left nothing to chance, taking a dominant win in the rankings (with a couple of races yet to go). The team has 81 victories by 20 riders, meaning two-thirds of its roster took a victory. The result: UAE far outpaced every other team, even second-place Visma-Lease a Bike.
The standings underscore two things. First, Pogačar’s stunning dominance this season. If we part out his points on their own, then Team Pogačar, a one-man operation, ranks 11th in the UCI standings, outpointing half the teams in the WorldTour all by himself. Second, even without Pogačar’s points haul, UAE still tops Visma by a comfortable margin. That’s team depth, folks.
Superlative seasons in history
But, again, we’re interested in historical comparisons. Since 1946, a total of 18 riders have won 20 or more races in a single season, led by none other than the GOAT, Eddy Merckx, who did it eight times in a row. Merckx even won 30 or more races four seasons in a row from 1970-1973. While Eddy has said complimentary things about Pogačar, the Slovenian does have some way to go to catch Merckx on career numbers – although he’s off to a very good start.
Along with Merckx, eight other riders accomplished 20+ wins in a season more than once in their career and just five have done it three or more times. I focused this comparison on those riders. Side trivia: Pogačar’s 2024 is the first 20+ win season in 14 years (André Greipel, 2010), and the first 25-win season since Alessandro Petacchi in 2005. He is the only active rider I can find with 20 or more wins in a season, but Jasper Philipsen came close (19) last year.
Curiously, of the top 25 riders with the most career wins, Mario Cipollini, Alejandro Valverde, and Jacques Anquetil never cracked 20 wins in a season (nor did Robbie McEwen, Philippe Gilbert, or Joop Zoetemelk, although they got very close). Meanwhile, a few riders many of us have forgotten – like Miguel Poblet and Domingo Perurena – accomplished the feat and rank in the top 25 for all-time pro victories.
Here’s how those riders compare for career professional victories. Clearly, Pogačar has a bit of catching up to do, although there’s plenty of time for him. With 88 wins in six seasons, he’s averaging just under 15 wins a year, and his victories-per-season tally has climbed every single year he’s been a pro. Will his single-season total ever go past 25? Maybe not, but it’s entirely possible he’ll reel off a series of seasons with wins in the high teens, which will put him much closer to at least Saronni/Hinault territory by the time he does retire. If he racks up more 20+ win seasons he’ll be at Maertens/De Vlaeminck/Van Looy heights, and edge closer to Merckx.
A qualitative comparison
Here’s the toughest comparison: rating riders from different eras. As Merckx is fond of saying on the eleventy times he’s been asked his thoughts on any modern rider doing anything vaguely Merckxian, today’s sport is much different than in his era. There is more specialization, and also more selectivity in racing.
Merckx has rightly pointed out that he did more race days than most modern riders, and that’s entirely true: in his standout 1970 season, when he won 37 races, he did 82 days and 13,233 race kilometers, compared to 58 days and 9,959 km for Pogačar this season. But that comparison cuts both ways: counting both additional days and A/B split-stage days, there were 29 opportunities to win a stage at that year’s Tour de France.
When we look at win rate, Freddy Maertens, who won a stunning 44 races in 1977 on 83 race days, is the standout leader, winning 53% of his starts that season. But Pogačar’s 25 wins on 58 days clocks in at a 43% clip, which is fifth all-time behind Maertens, Merckx and Giuseppe Saronni (45%), and Roger De Vlaeminck (44%).
Another point of comparison is wins of a given race quality. Pogačar may have fewer race days and kilometers overall, but very few of those are what you might call “empty calories” – that is, he’s not filling up on wins at lower-ranked events. Just two of his 58 race days came at events not on the WorldTour calendar, and a whopping 42 of his race days were in Grand Tours, which included sprint stages where he did not contest the victory.
By contrast, Maertens’ 1977 season included one and a half Grand Tours (he bailed mid-way through the Giro) and 10 wins at lower-ranked events. Merckx won the Giro (plus three stages) and Tour (nine stages) in 1970, but 15 of his 37 wins came at events as obscure as the long-ceased Col San Martino and GP Union Dortmund.
When analyzed that way, Pogačar had the highest-quality season in modern history in the sport: 23 of his 25 wins came at WorldTour-level events. (For purposes of comparison, I included all wins in historic events that are today part of the WorldTour, or were top-level at their time, for example Sean Kelly’s 1984 win at Paris-Tours, then a premier event on the calendar.)
The latter two points of analysis in particular bring the significance of Pogačar’s season into proper frame as legitimately one of the five best seasons in the post-WWII history of professional road racing (two belong to Merckx, including his 1972 season, when he won 33 races in 73 starts including the Giro, Tour, and three Monuments). What’s more, Pogačar has plenty of time to continue that kind of production. He’s just 26 years old – a year older than Merckx, Maertens, and Saronni in their most successful seasons and two years younger than Kelly and De Vlaeminck for theirs.
One final point merits a note: there is understandable criticism that Pogačar’s dominance makes the sport boring, but the 1970s – today considered the final decade of the sport’s so-called golden era – saw riders eclipse 20 victories 17 times.
Then, as now, the sport was one made up of superstars: Merckx, De Vlaeminck and Maertens, but also Luis Ocaña, Raymond Poulidor and Bernard Thévenet, who between them won the lion’s share of races. Those riders slightly overlapped with and came on the heels of the ’60s and stars like Van Looy and Jacques Anquetil, among others. Want boring? Maertens’ 1977 Vuelta a España win included 13 stage victories (five in a row at one point) and a wire-to-wire win in the overall.
In that sense, the outsize role played in the current era by riders like Pogačar – with his overall victories and six stages apiece in the Giro and Tour – and rivals Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič is not an outlier. Eras are always defined by their stars, and only time will tell what history writes for this one.
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