Welcome - here’s our take on a ranking of riders with the most prestigious results in the world of road cycling.
Primarily, the purpose of Prestigelisten is to enable useful rider comparison over time. We’ve tried to create the point scale so that neither modern riders nor those from earlier generations are overly favored. The idea is to balance the growing number of prestigious races over the past 150 years with the steadily increasing level of competition in the sport.
Prestigelisten is based on data going all the way back to the first edition of Milano–Torino in 1876 - in total more than 30,000 prestigious results performed by more than 4,000 different riders.
ProCyclingStats and CyclingRanking are the main data sources. All rider names are spelled without special characters to prevent mistakes.
The point scale is largely based on subjective assessments, though for some older results we’ve followed CyclingRanking’s evaluations that consider the competitiveness of the races. Therefore, we believe our point scale is carefully considered and thoroughly debated.
And now, the elephant in the room - doping. In our opinion, there are three groups of doped riders: those who’ve been stripped of all results, those who haven’t lost any, and those who were never caught. To treat everyone as equally as possible, Prestigelisten is built on the premise that races are decided on the bike. Thus, we’ve assigned points based on the original results - and of course each and everyone can make reservations as they please.
Enjoy!
Mathias S. Jensen and Mathias Fisker Mundbjerg