saherring said:
While I admire Lance Armstrong for being able to win 6 Tours de France, he could not have done it without a very good team. Greg Lemond only won 3, but when he be Laurent Finyon by 89 seconds, he only had 2 team mates left in the race for most of the last week of racing. I wonder how Armstrong would have done if this were the case for him. Also, he is undoubtly the best Tour de France racer ever, but would he have been able to win 6 if he had riden at least one of the other tours several of those years. I believe that Eddie Mercxx won 2 major tours in the same season on several occasions, not to mention that he won 525 races in his career. While I am an Armstrong fan, I do not consider him the greatest cyclist ever, or even the greatest Grand Tour rider ever...Just the greatest TDF rider. WHAT DO YOU THINK ?
I belive that lance is the best cyclist of all time, but not the most accomplished, if you look at how he won the tours, with total dominance, and how much of a superior cyclist he was to his peers, that is the only conclusion I can draw. This is even more the case considering the new information that the racers he dominated were doping, something I assume Eddie Mercxx never faced. Many of the other cyclists mentioned in this thread have more overall victories than Lance does, but you can't compare Lance to them because he never attempted to win many of the races others on this forum use as proof that Lance was inferior. he simply didn't have the same goal. I'm sure that If Lance was to attempt to win as many races as he could, as opposed to focusing on dominating one race he would be inarguably the most accomplished cyclist of all time
If you want proof for his being the best cyclist of all time look to how he won the tours, never showing weakness except one time when he cracked.
also for those of us who like numbers, look at lances lactic threshold, his VO2 max, and wattage, ect.
You are free to disagree, but in my opinion, all of the things I listed above prove him to be the greatest of all time, bar none