A 100% win record?

Have any riders, as Evenepoel can do today, won a monument classic the first three times they have ridden it?

Winning a monument classic is very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that for well over a year now, to win one you need to be one of the two best cyclists in the world - Tadej Pogačar or Mathieu van der Poel. And for the past three years, these two have won all of them, with two exceptions.

One is Jasper Philipsen who managed to win Milan-Sanremo last year. And the other exception is Remco Evenepoel.

For a long time I’ve been keeping a keen eye on riders who manage to win a monument classic having never ridden that particular race before. This is exceedingly rare.

We’re constantly told these are the hardest races and riders need to serve a kind of apprenticeship, they need to learn the roads before they can finally crack the code required to finally win. They need to learn how to be in position before the Arenberg forest, they need to learn when and how to be in the right place at the right time before all the major bergs of Flanders. Even Milan-Sanremo, the easiest one to finish, the sharp, subtle gradients of the Poggio need to be felt and committed to muscle memory before a successful attack can materialise.

Turning up on one’s debut and winning instantly is like an insult to the other riders who have completed their apprenticeships and are now awaiting their rewards. Riders shouldn’t be able to do this, but some do.

Remco Evenepoel did it at Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2022. He won it again in 2023. And he was absent last year due to injury. Which means he’s undefeated. Each time (so far) that he’s shown up in Liege, he has returned six hours later as the winner.

Today he has a chance to win it for the third time, which would mean he would join an exclusive club of riders who have won a particular monument each of the first three times they have ridden it. Knowing who is in that club is tricky, but let’s peel the onion…

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