History says the fifth Tour de France win is the hardest: can Pogacar match Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Induráin?

This July, Tadej Pogačar will look to join the elite group of riders who have won the Tour de France five times. That record was established by Jacques Anquetil in 1964, and Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin have since joined him in the five-time winners’ club.

Lance Armstrong, of course, was temporarily among their number. Indeed, the American wore the yellow jersey in Paris for seven successive Tours from 1999 to 2005, but the achievement was expunged from the record books in 2012 when he was banned for life for doping. Although Armstrong keeps those seven yellow jerseys framed on his wall at home, his name no longer appears on the Tour’s roll of honour. 

The record number of victories stands at five, and Pogačar – currently level with Chris Froome on four wins – is on the cusp of equalling that haul in July. 

There are some similarities between Pogačar and the record holders. Like Anquetil, Merckx and Hinault, he won the Tour at the first attempt. Like Anquetil and Hinault, he suffered Tour setbacks after his initial victories. Like Merckx and Hinault in their pomp, he has been remorseless in hunting stage wins. But a fifth Tour win is rarely straightforward, as a glance at history demonstrates.

When three-time winner Louison Bobet surprisingly announced during the 1957 Giro d’Italia that he was skipping that year’s Tour, French national coach Marcel Bidot was hastily forced to redraw his plans for the race, with a 23-year-old debutant called Jacques Anquetil entering the fray. 

Anquetil had already caused a stir by winning the Grand Prix des Nations as a teenager and then setting a new Hour Record, but he set out on his Tour debut as one option among many in a star-studded French team.

An early stage win in his hometown of Rouen pointed to the direction of travel, however, and Anquetil seized the yellow jersey definitively in the second week. He secured his overall victory by limiting the damage on the Col d’Aubisque. “Paradoxically, he won the Tour just when he came closest to losing it,” Bidot said admiringly.

Anquetil essentially set the template for modern Tour winners by dominating in the time trials and then defending himself sagely in the high mountains, and he had perfected the method by the time he won his second Tour in 1961, which led for three weeks after seizing yellow on stage 1b.

His dominance continued when the Tour returned to being disputed by trade teams the following year, with his Saint-Raphaël squad helping him to police the peloton. He became the first man to win four Tours in 1963, but his fifth and final victory was perhaps his quintessential triumph.

Still carrying the fatigue of Giro victory in his legs, Anquetil had looked strangely vulnerable throughout the 1964 Tour, and the race boiled down to a head-to-head with Raymond Poulidor on the Puy de Dome. Poulidor was the stronger, but Anquetil managed to bluff by riding elbow to elbow much of the way up the climb and then limiting his losses when he was eventually dropped in the final kilometre. 

When manager Raphael Geminiani told him he had saved yellow by 14 seconds, Anquetil’s answer was succinct: “That’s 13 more than I needed.” The jersey was the thing, and he sealed his fifth Tour by beating Poulidor in the final time trial to Paris.

To this day, even after Tadej Pogacar’s recent exploits, Eddy Merckx’s 1969 debut remains the benchmark for dominance at the Tour de France. The raw statistics tell their own tale. The Belgian won six stages en route to beating Roger Pingeon into second place overall by 17:54. For good measure, he won the points classification, the king of the mountains classification and the combativity prize, while his Faema squad won the team classification.

“There will only ever be one Eddy Merckx in the history of cycling,” race director Jacques Goddet wrote in L’Équipe after the 23-year-old – already with a commanding overall lead – had eviscerated the field with an 140 km solo raid through the Pyrenees to Mourenx. 

Perhaps fittingly, Merckx’s Tour win was sealed on the same day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon. He had taken cycling to previously uncharted terrain.

The shock and awe continued in the years that followed. In both 1970 and 1972, Merckx racked up eight stage wins on the Tour, though he endured a scare in 1971, when Luis Ocaña unseated him with a devastating solo attack at Orcières-Merlette. Merckx being Merckx, he flung himself into the attack on the next stage to Marseille and he retook the yellow jersey when Ocaña crashed out on the rain-soaked descent of the Col de Menté.

Merckx interrupted his sequence of Tour wins in 1973, when he settled for winning the Vuelta and Giro instead, while Ocaña belatedly claimed the yellow jersey. The Belgian was back with a vengeance in 1974, where he maintained his 100% record with another crushing display.

A year later, and still only 30, the expectation was that Merckx would surpass Anquetil’s record and it looked like business as usual when he took yellow after the Merlin-Plage time trial in the opening week. Enter Bernard Thévenet, who performed one of the greatest acts of giant killing in Tour history when he caught and dropped Merckx at Pra-Loup on stage 15, stopping the Belgian’s streak of Tour success at five wins.

Like Anquetil and Merckx, Hinault won the Tour at the first attempt after showing considerable patience in delaying his debut until his fourth season as a professional. The Breton had won the Dauphiné in dramatic circumstances in 1977, but his directeur sportif Cyrille Guimard had vowed not to send him to the Tour until he was ready to win it.

Hinault suggested as much by winning his debut Grand Tour, the Vuelta, in the spring of 1978, and he rode cannily in July, staying within striking distance of the yellow jersey until two days from Paris, when he snatched it from Joop Zoetemelk in the Nancy time trial.

A year later, an emboldened Hinault cut loose, winning seven stages along the way, including the finale on the Champs-Élysées, where he attacked the peloton and then dispatched Zoetemelk in a two-up sprint.

A knee injury forced Hinault out while wearing yellow in 1980, but he returned to annex two more Tours in 1981 and 1982. At that juncture, he looked destined to surpass Anquetil’s record, but injury would rule him out altogether in 1983, while he was soundly beaten by his former teammate Laurent Fignon in 1984.

Hinault, however, was a man seemingly inured to doubt and there is a strong argument for his case as the greatest Grand Tour rider of all time, given his 100% record at the Giro (three wins from three) and the Vuelta (two wins from two). 

The Frenchman had the rare ability to find a way to win even when he wasn’t at his best, and that stood him in good stead at the 1985 Tour, when he endured a heavy crash in Saint-Etienne and fended off his La Vie Claire teammate Greg LeMond to claim his fifth overall title in Paris.

That set the scene neatly for Hinault’s final Tour in 1986. Having already set his retirement date years in advance, Hinault insisted he would ride for LeMond in 1986, though his default setting of all-out attack saw him seize yellow when the race hit the Pyrenees.

Those same instincts proved costly at Superbagnères, where Hinault tried and failed to put the Tour beyond LeMond’s reach, and he would eventually cede to his young teammate in the Alps. Even so, a defiant Hinault still won atop Alpe d’Huez and added the final time trial. LeMond won the Tour, but Hinault, in his own inimitable way, somehow remained undefeated. 

Unlike the other five-time Tour winners, Miguel Induráin’s relationship with the race had an inauspicious beginning. He abandoned on his first two appearances in 1985 and 1986 and placed a lowly 97th in 1987, before helping Pedro Delgado to overall victory in 1988.

Induráin would remain in the role of domestique in the years that followed, though he began to show signs of his potential with a solo win in Cauterets in 1989. He would add another at Luz Ardiden in 1990, and there is a school of thought that Banesto missed a trick by not anointing him leader in Delgado’s place that year. 

By 1991, Induráin’s claims could no longer be ignored, and he was handed free rein in the Pyrenees, moving into yellow at Val Louron and then sealing his first overall victory in the final time trial in Mâcon.

Like a latter-day Anquetil, Induráin would build his Tours around making big gains in the time trials and then defending his lead in the high mountains. The clearest example came in 1992, when he scorched the field in the Luxembourg time trial and then calmly absorbed Claudio Chiappucci’s attacks in the mountains.

Two statistics tell the tale of Indurain’s Tour reign. During his run of five overall victories, all of them time trials, while five different riders occupied the second step of the podium behind him in that period: Gianni Bugno, Chiappucci, Tony Rominger, Piot Ugrumov and Alex Zülle.

Unlike Merckx and Hinault, Induráin ruled by consensus rather than decree, doling out stage wins like favours. When Laurent Jalabert and ONCE blew the race apart on Bastille Day in 1995, Induráin found a willing coalition of allies willing to help him limit the damage on the road to Mende. 

Much like Merckx, Induráin was widely expected to win a record-breaking sixth Tour in 1996, but there were shades of Pra-Lou when he suddenly cracked 4km from the summit of Les Arcs. Even then, few were willing to write him off completely, but Induráin’s challenge was definitively at Hautacam and he reached Paris in 11th place behind winner Bjarne Riis.

Although Induráin won an Olympic time trial gold in Atlanta the following month, he would retire the following winter.