Ranking the best Tour de France champions is no easy matter. For cycling fans, however, there are few more enjoyable pastimes than arguing over the race’s exceptional talents.
Ordering the best in any sporting field usually leads to endless debate, bickering and emphatically made points. Add an almost unparalleled athletic history to the equation (this year’s Tour de France will be the 113th edition), and you begin to appreciate the complexity of the challenge.
It is fun, though, and this year, perhaps even prescient. For the first time in nearly a decade, the reigning champion is in quest of a record equalling fifth victory. That rider is Tadej Pogačar, already considered by many to be the greatest of all time. Another triumph for Pogačar would put the 27-year-old alongside Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin.
In this ranking, we’ve focused on GC riders: those who fought for – and won – the coveted maillot jaune. For all modern cycling’s obsession with data, ranking the Tour greats remains largely a matter of opinion, so here are 10 champions to start the debate.
10. Stephen Roche
To win the Tour once is an immense achievement, and this list celebrates its greats, all bar one of whom won multiple times. Our exception was an incredible talent, and his triumph was part of an incredible accomplishment. Stephen Roche arrived at the 1987 Tour after winning at the Giro d’Italia to the chagrin of his team’s nominal leader Roberto Visentini, several teammates and the Italian public.
His victory at the Tour, immortalised by his race-saving ride on La Plagne, demanded heroism of a different kind. Six weeks later, winning the World Championships placed Roche alongside Eddy Merckx as the only other holder (until Pogačar in 2024) of cycling’s Triple Crown, having won the Giro, Tour and Worlds in the same year.
9. Laurent Fignon
Among Tour de France champions, only Laurent Fignon, the winner in 1983 and 1984, is remembered chiefly for the edition he lost (1989 – see Greg LeMond). This is grossly unfair. Only the casual observer would regard ‘Le Professeur’ – bespectacled, ponytailed, Parisian – as a loser. He won his first Tour as a 22-year-old débutant, replacing his injured leader, the reigning champion Bernard Hinault.
A year later, when Hinault returned with La Vie Claire, Fignon beat him by over 10 minutes, an imperious victory achieved with six stage wins. In 1989, his supposed annus horribilis, he won the Giro d’Italia, a second Milan-San Remo and prestigious time-trial victories at the Trofeo Baracchi, Grand Prix des Nations and Baden-Baden.
8. Miguel Induráin
Affection is the dominant emotion inspired by Miguel Induráin, though his palmarès is awesome. Five consecutive Tour wins, achieved between 1991 and 1995, are more than sufficient to justify his inclusion here, and two of those (1992 and 1993) were counterparts in a Giro-Tour double. Why then only fondness and not fanaticism?
Perhaps Induráin’s dominance of the time trial prevents more passionate recollections of his reign. All but two of his 12 stage wins at the Tour came against the watch, but Big Mig could climb with the best (witness his memorable duel with Greg LeMond on Luz Ardiden at the 1990 Tour), and he first came to prominence as a domestique deluxe for 1988 champion Pedro Delgado.
7. Jonas Vingegaard
How great is the rider who beats a rival considered by many to be the greatest? Were it not for Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard would already have won the Tour five times.
He has never finished lower than second, but it's his triumphs in 2022 and 2023 that justify his inclusion here. His Tour-winning victories over Pogačar on the Col du Granon and Hautacam in 2022, and in the Passy to Combloux time trial and on the Col de la Loze a year later, are unforgettable.
Recovery from life-threatening injuries in 2024 and concussion in 2025 compromised his recent Tours, but as long as he contests the race, a third victory for Vingegaard can never be ruled out.
6. Chris Froome
Even now, the idea of Chris Froome as a four-time Tour winner (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017) seems paradoxical.
Gentlemanly and softly spoken off the bike, ungainly and even accident-prone on it (Froome jogging up Mont Ventoux remains a lasting image), he was, nonetheless, the leader and lynchpin of the remorseless winning machine then known as Team Sky.
Derided for riding to numbers, he was, simultaneously, an instinctive attacker, fearless racer and ruthless winner – qualities embodied by his extraordinary descent from the summit of the Col de Peyresourde to claim stage 8 in 2016. Professional cycling is rarely predictable, but we can say with some certainty that the Tour is unlikely to see a champion quite like Froome again.
5. Jacques Anquetil
No mere mortal would reveal before the world’s biggest bike race their intention to wear the maillot jaune from the first day to the last, but Jacques Anquetil, the first rider to win five Tours (1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964), and who, in 1961, rode in yellow from stage 1b to stage 21, was no ordinary rider.
‘Monsieur Chrono’ came to prominence as a 19-year-old winner of the Grand Prix des Nations, and his exploitation of the time trial at the Tour established a template for those who followed. Anquetil, a supreme stylist, was remarkable also for his consistency. He won eight Grand Tours in seven years – his five Tours, plus two Giri and a Vuelta.
4. Bernard Hinault
France’s last Tour victory was the fifth in a remarkable quintet (1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985) from the pugnacious Bernard Hinault, aka ‘Le Blaireau’ (‘The Badger’).
A winner of 10 Grand Tours, including two Giro-Tour doubles, five Monuments and a World Championship held on a course considered the hardest ever, Hinault displayed his greatness on many stages, but never seemed more the peloton’s iron-fisted patron than at the Tour.
A superb time triallist (the vast majority of his 28 stage victories came against the clock), he was also effective in the high mountains, and even won twice from sprints on the Champs-Élysées. Hinault dominated a magnificent era, even if he succumbed to Laurent Fignon in 1984 and Greg LeMond in 1986.
3. Greg LeMond
Three-time winner Greg LeMond (1986, 1989, 1990) would surely have joined the Tour’s exclusive “five club” were it not for a hunting accident that cost him two prime years.
He had it all – an exceptional VO2 max to underpin his athletic ability, the resilience to overcome a defiant teammate and a drive for innovation that made him an early adopter of carbon-fibre frames and aero gains.
LeMond won two of his titles in editions considered the greatest ever. His victory over incorrigible co-leader Hinault in 1986 contained more plot twists than a soap opera, while his final-stage time-trial triumph over Fignon three years later in Paris won him the Tour by eight seconds – still the narrowest margin in its 122-year history.
2. Tadej Pogačar
Now that we’ve come to accept “sensational” as Tadej Pogačar’s default setting, it’s worth remembering his electrifying first Tour triumph, achieved on his debut in 2020 when he shocked the world, and compatriot Primož Roglič, by obliterating the field in the penultimate stage time trial on La Planche des Belles Filles. Perhaps we all shared the shell-shocked expressions worn by Tom Dumoulin and Wout van Aert as they stared, dumbfounded, at TV monitors relaying the Slovenian’s time.
We’re no longer amazed by anything Pogačar does. Three further Tour victories (2021, 2024, 2025) are only part of his story. Monument Classics, World Championships and a Triple Crown prove that for Pogačar, like Merckx before him, the Tour is not enough.
But all that aside, there’s one rider who stands atop this Tour podium…
1. Eddy Merckx
Eddy Merckx’s five Tour titles (1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974) are only one theme in a matchless career that yielded an astounding 525 victories.
Since we’re focusing on the Tour, where he amassed 34 stage wins, let us say merely that in 1969, Merckx won every classification as well as the GC, that on three occasions (1970, 1972, 1974) he completed a Giro-Tour double, and that in 1975 he was on track for a record sixth Tour triumph until he was punched by a spectator while ascending the Puy de Dôme. He cracked the following day on Pra-Loup yet still finished the race in second place.
Sometimes, to quote Mathieu van der Poel, cycling is simple. The sport’s greatest rider is also the Tour’s.
