The greatness of Lance Armstrong

Lance Armstrong retired on Sunday afternoon after crossing the finish line in Paris wearing the maillot jaune. This marked the seventh straight year Armstrong wore the yellow jersey into Paris and his seven victories in the Tour de France are two more than anyone else has achieved in the race's 100+ year history.

When athletes like Armstrong retire, sports pundits and commentators rush to place him in some sort of historical perspective. We know Lance Armstrong's good, but just how good is he? Skip Bayless of ESPN stepped up and took a swing at this one yesterday. In the process, he simultaneously overrates Armstrong and fails to give him enough credit for what he accomplished. You might think this is a difficult assessment to pull off, but this is Skip Bayless we're talking about, so talking out of his ass is par for the course.

As Bayless sees it, Lance Armstrong is the greatest endurance athlete of all time, but not the "greatest all-around athlete because cycling doesn't test enough athletic talent or skill. And he doesn't qualify for greatest performer because his sport doesn't have the equivalent of last-second shots or throws or catches, of two-outs-in-the-ninth swings or of final-hole putts."

Here's the thing. Lance Armstrong isn't the greatest endurance athlete ever for the very simple reason that he's not even the greatest cyclist ever. That honor indisputably belongs to the Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx. In his thirteen-year career, Merckx won the Tour de France five times, the Giro d'Italia five times, and the Vuelta a España once. Merckx also captured a multitude of one-day races, including seven victories in Milano-San Remo, two in the Ronde van Vlaanderen, three in the Flèche Wallonne, five in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, three in Paris-Roubaix, and two in the Giro di Lombardia. Oh, and he won the world championship four times. One statistic sums up exactly how dominant a rider Eddy Merckx was: he won 35% of the races he entered.

Lance Armstrong, of course, has an impressive resume of his own. But it pales in comparison with that of Merckx. Armstrong's major victories are as follows: seven wins in the Tour de France, the 1995 Clasica San Sebastian, the 1996 Flèche Wallonne, and the 1993 World Championship. Almost every way you look at it, Eddy Merckx had a more impressive career than Lance Armstrong.

The one place where Armstrong comes out on top over Merckx is the Tour de France. Merckx won five Tours. He still holds the record for most days in the yellow jersey and is the only rider ever to have won the time, points, and mountain competition in a single Tour. But Lance Armstrong's string of seven Tour wins makes him the most successful Tour rider of all time.

It's the Tour where Lance Armstrong dominated the cycling world and revolutionized the sport. His ability to consistently win in both the mountains and in time trials set him apart from virtually every other cyclist of the past twenty years. From 1999 to 2005, the Tour de France belonged to Lance Armstrong. His win in 1999 was a surprise, but every year after that he entered the Tour as the favorite and lived up to those expectations. Miguel Indurain showed the same sort of dominance in the early '90s, but his unraveling in the 1996 Tour showed that he was human. Since his return to the Tour in 1999, Lance Armstrong has gone unbeaten.

Think about that for a moment. For seven straight years Lance Armstrong has come to France in July to face off against the best cyclists in the world. For the past six years, everyone has been gunning for him, attacking relentlessly in the mountains with the hope of softening him up and stealing time away. And he's won every time.

This is where Skip Bayless sells Armstrong short. Bayless claims that the pressure in the Tour is "constant, but rarely if ever acute." This is utter nonsense. It's clear to anyone that's watched a stage in the high mountains of the Tour that the pressure is intense and that one's performance at key moments dramatically effects the outcome of the stage. Or maybe Bayless doesn't think trying to respond to an opponent's attack on a 10% slope in 90-degree heat after 5 hours in the saddle with your heart rate at 180 bpm isn't a pressure situation. A rider, like Armstrong, who can perform in a situation like that is just as clutch as Michael Jordan or David Ortiz. The fact that Armstrong so rarely failed to respond makes it easy to forget just how impressive his accomplishments are. Armstrong’s performance in the mountains is akin to a hitter coming to the plate in late innings and getting an extra-base hit nine out of ten times. That just doesn’t happen. Bayless says that Armstrong has never been tested “under huge-moment fire” like Montana, Ali, or Nicklaus. But he has. And he’s succeeded so well that people don’t realize just how difficult those situations are.

Bayless continues to diminish Armstrong’s accomplishments by talking about how great his team and equipment are. Well, yes, but no player has ever won a championship by himself. Not Jordan. Not Gretzky. Saying that Armstrong isn’t that great because he had a great team is like saying that Michael Jordan wasn’t that good because, after all, he had Scottie Pippen on his team. And while Armstrong certainly benefits from a top-of-the-line bike, bikes don’t win races, cyclists do. Lance Armstrong won seven Tours not because he had the best team or the best bike, but because he has tremendous physical ability and made an unprecedented commitment to his training to win the Tour.

I tend to think it’s pretty silly to compare athletes across sports. There are probably fancy quantitative ways to do that, but they’re still bound to remain at least somewhat subjective. So I won’t presume to tell you whether Lance Armstrong is a better athlete than Deion Sanders or Bo Jackson. But I will tell you that Lance Armstrong was the greatest cyclist the Tour de France has ever seen and that he met the challenges of cycling better than anyone before him. We won’t be seeing anyone like him for a long time.