Roglic's DNF record in Grand Tours is awful

But is it the worst ever for a Grand Tour winner?

Another Grand Tour, another Roglic DNF. I’ve seen some suggestions that all of these crashes and abandons cannot simply be a coincidence. Or as Peter Sagan would have said, it can’t just be down to ‘unluck’. That it might be because of the whole ski jumping thing, that he’s not as good at handling his bicycle as most of the other cyclists are.

The same used to be said of Geraint Thomas (not the ski jumping bit, just the crashing) after a series of calamitous, seemingly avoidable crashes in the middle bit of his career. It’s easy for us to say as we sink further into our couches weighed down by the heft of our own opinions.

Numbers to the rescue though eh? Inarguable, cold, hard facts.

Roglic won his first Grand Tour in the autumn of 2019. Since then he was now ridden 11 further Grand Tours and he has abandoned five of them (and finished on the podium of the other six. It’s podium or bust for Rog). That’s a Did Not Finish percentage of 45%. Not great. But is it the worst?

This got my nerd cogs churning and I wondered what would we find if I compared this record with every other Grand Tour winner of the past 40 years. After each Grand Tour winner had won their first, after they had joined the greats and proven themselves as rider who can conquer three weeks of racing, does anyone have a worse DNF ratio than Primoz Roglic?

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