Double Rainbow: What Would It Mean?
Following van der Poel and Pogačar, can Evenepoel make more history?
For all this season failed to deliver in the competition and excitement categories, it will nonethess go down in the history books for all of the major milestones that were achieved along the way. Mathieu van der Poel started it off with a Classics. campaign that matched Fabian Cancellara’s magic 2010 season, sweeping E3, Flanders and Roubaix, and just missing the Boonenesque historic quad with 2nd at Gent-Wevelgem. His third career Flanders win tied him for the record, with six of the greatest Classics champions of all time.
But that was a mere amuse bouche for the cycling historians and dedicated fans. You all know what happened next, Giro yadda yadda Pogačar yadda yadda Tour de France. The Grand Tour Ultra Double that Tadej Pogačar accomplished can hardly be put into context, having not been achieved since 1985 except by disgraced doper Marco Pantani and whatever you want to call Miguel Indurain. Cycling barely resembles the doping years version, thankfully, nor does it look all that much like 1985, for better or worse. For now, suffice to say Pogačar’s achievements are singular, and jaw-dropping. Nobody else is even entering that conversation. Qualitatively, they were downright dominant, enough to mute the critics who might have pointed to the diminished competition. Nobody was stopping Tadej, anywhere.
But... what if I told you... that a rider would win the Olympic TT-Road Race double? That would be literally be historic. There was no such possibility before 1996 — previous Olympiads included either the TT or the road race, not both. So when Fabian Cancellara came up short in the Beijing road race, taking silver by the Great Wall of China a day before he delivered the TT win as expected, he narrowly missed out on history.
That changed in July when the third character in this slow-but-sure-rolling drama, Remco Evenepoel, did what Cancellara couldn’t, in part because, in a victory for not totally insane race planning, they no longer schedule them on consecutive days. It’s an historic achievement!! But now... what if I told you that rider could also win the Worlds TT-Road Race Double?!? IT’S SO INSANE I’M USING ALL CAPS AND ITALICS!!!
It is kind of insane. Like the Olympics, nobody has ever won the elite men’s World Championship road race and ITT in the same year. The ITT began in 1994, joining the road race, so this is the 31st year in which a double has been possible. We could probably all think of several reasons why this hasn’t happened, with the time trial specialists and road race contenders rarely overlapping (Cancellara again, and alone, came within one position of success).
On Sunday, Evenepoel is not favored to accomplish this second round of historic, never-before-accomplished success. Betting markets heavily favor Pogačar, so much so that Remco is 4.5:1, and our third megastar van der Poel at 8:1. [I never actually bet money, not my thing, but I find their odds-making interesting.] If Evenepoel did this, won all four ultra-prestigious national team competitions, in a year, it would be truly breathtaking. If Pogačar held form and won, he would join only Eddy Merckx (1974) and Stephen Roche (1987) in winning cycling’s Triple Crown — not just breathtaking but an impossibly high degree of difficulty. Should van der Poel defend his rainbow jersey... that would be less historic, in the way that a perfect plate of puttanesca is maybe less awesome than a perfect plate of carbonara. But it would put him in his own increasingly unfathomable level of success in one-day mass-start events, road or mud.
2024 wasn’t exactly the year we had in mind. It wasn’t the mega-throwdown on the cobbles with Van Aert, van der Poel, and whoever else could insert themselves. It wasn’t the Pogi-Vingo-Rogla-Remco chess masterclass across France in July. It was partly “crashes suck, part the infinity.” But it is also very much one for the record books, with a final entry on tap for Sunday.