A year in numbers: The statistics that defined the 2024 road cycling season

Tadej Pogacar with data visuals overlayed.

(Image credit: Zac Williams/SWPix.com)

If you don’t know by now that Tadej Pogačar is the third male rider to do the Triple Crown of cycling by winning the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Road Race in the same year, then where have you been? Pogačar has emulated the achievements of Eddy Merckx in 1974 and Stephen Roche in 1987.

By also adding two Monuments, Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Tour of Lombardy, Pogačar has staked a reasonable claim for having just completed the greatest road racing season of all time. Every time he swung his leg over his bike he seemed to break several more records, doing things that we thought would never be doable in this era of cycling.

With 2019 Milan-San Remo winner Julian Alaphilippe also departing, there is now only one, Remco Evenepoel. Paradoxically, their one remaining Monument winner is likely the biggest reason for their cobbled Classics failure as they have been steadily crafting their entire squad around Evenepoel and his Grand Tour ambitions. Those ambitions give the team a bit of a silver lining on the Classics clouds of doom - Evenepoel is the first rider in the team’s history to finish on the podium of the Tour de France.

But this fact depends on how loose you’re willing to be with the definition of the ‘Tour de France’. There were several rather unofficial precursors to the present day Tour de France Femmes. One of which was the Tour de France Féminin created in 1984 which morphed into the Tour of the European Economic Community, organised by ASO. That race, 13 stages in 1991, was won by the Dutch rider Astrid Schop over her compatriot Leontien van Moorsel by just two seconds.

One of cycling’s unofficial records is the Ruban Jaune which notionally belongs to the rider who has won the fastest ever race which was ridden over more than 200km. Van der Poel’s speed over the Roubaix cobbles was not enough to take this record which still belongs to Philippe Gilbert who won Stage 17 of the Vuelta with a howling tail wind helping him to the win at an average speed of 50.63 kilometres per hour.

Van der Poel also became the first rider since Eddy Merckx in 1973 to win multiple Monuments in consecutive seasons (Pogačar has also achieved this since). One of the most surprising and impressive results of the year was that Van der Poel snaffled a podium spot at Liege-Bastogne-Liege where he finished in third. In a neat, familial, trivial way, Van der Poel was the first rider to finish on the podiums of Flanders, Roubaix and Liege in the same year since… Van der Poel in 1986. Not Mathieu of course, it was his dad Adrie.

Evenepoel’s Tour de France time trial stage win in the rainbow bands is relatively rare. He’s just the fourth rider to achieve this after Fabian Cancellara, Tony Martin and Tom Dumoulin. Evenepoel also came within 16 seconds of beating Filippo Ganna to a time trial stage win at the Vuelta. The last rider to win a time trial stage of the Vuelta in the rainbow jersey remains Abraham Olano in 1998, a surprisingly long time ago. It also means that Dumoulin remains the only time trial World Champion to have won a stage in two different Grand Tours as he added a Giro stage win in 2018 to his Tour de France stage win.

The winners take home the bacon and the Credit Lyonnais lions, but it’s also worth celebrating the ‘nearly theres’ and the ‘almost made its’. The male riders who finished in the top 10 the most times but didn’t win a race in 2024 were Enric Mas (24), Mikel Landa (23) and Egan Bernal (23). A bit of a theme there with a trio of Grand Tour GC riders trying to rediscover some fading form.