I'm Sorry, Dani Martínez. I Should Not Have Forgotten About You.

Anyone who puts Remco Evenepoel in the ground on an uphill finish is not to be messed with.

Winning a grand tour is hard enough all on its own. The physical and mental exertion required, the constant demand for performance with no room for error, would make most athletes’ heads spin.

But if you zoom out a little, there are so many strategic, career-based obstacles. Even if a rider has the raw ability to win a grand tour, he has to choose to pursue that as his primary career goal. One of the things I love about cycling—and I’ve said this what feels like 50 times in the past three months—is that every rider and team defines success on their own terms. You can have a long, successful, well-regarded career without winning a major race, or even trying especially hard to win a major race.

Riders with major GC chops can choose to go all-out to win the Tour de France at any cost, or they can choose a similar, slightly more specialized discipline. These riders can become great time trialists¹ or great puncheurs² instead. Some of them discover that the glory of finishing eighth at the Vuelta year in and year out is outweighed by the glory of helping someone else win the Tour, or at least the gobs of money a top team will pay its most important domestiques helps salve a wounded ego.³

In short, there are other extremely prestigious and lucrative avenues for a rider to pursue, even if he’s one of the dozen or so men in the peloton who might have what it takes to win the Tour de France at any point in his career whatsoever.

But even if a rider does take on that mantle, everything has to fall into place. He has to end up on a team capable of supporting his GC ambitions at the right place in time. He can’t crack in the third week of a race.⁴ He can’t crash every time he sees a sharp corner.⁵ And he can’t have the misfortune of being in his prime at the same time as a generational talent who locks out the top step of the Tour podium for years at a time.

Some riders fall afoul of one of those pitfalls. Some riders, like Dani Martínez, hit them all.