We sift through the numbers of two of cycling's most prolific stars
Tuesday 10 November 2015 16:03, UK
When it comes to consistency in professional cycling, Peter Sagan takes a lot of beating.
A brief glance at his numbers in the six years since he exploded on to the scene in the spring of 2010 shows 69 career wins and a deeper inspection reveals an astonishing podium rate regularly hitting 40 per cent.
In 2013 alone, he racked up 27 wins and 43 podiums and although he has fallen short of that super-human standard in the two campaigns since, his claim to being the most competitive rider in the sport has gone unchallenged.
Except by one man.
Over the past two seasons - and this year in particular - Alexander Kristoff has not only emerged as a rival to Sagan, but statistically he has been his superior.
The two are very similar riders in terms of style - fast finishers who can also get over climbs, cobbles and flourish on rolling terrain - but crucially, Kristoff is the better sprinter, which has meant that while Sagan has been collecting an almost embarrassing number of second and third places over the past two years, Kristoff has been ticking off wins at will.
In 2014, for example, both riders visited the podium 21 times - a 25 per cent podium rate for Kristoff and 23 per cent for Sagan - but Kristoff celebrated twice as many victories as Sagan: 14 to the Slovak's seven.
This year the void has become even greater. The pair were still neck and neck in podiums - Kristoff had 31 (38 per cent of his race days) and Sagan had 32 (40 per cent) - but while Sagan claimed only eight wins, Kristoff made a substantial jump to 20, the best season of his career.
He was the most prolific rider of 2015 - comfortably eclipsing Andre Greipel and Mark Cavendish - and although it cannot be overlooked that the majority of those wins came in sprints in second and third-tier races, you also cannot ignore the fact that one of them came in the Tour of Flanders, one of the hardest, most prestigious and multi-faceted events on the calendar.
Sagan rolled home a distant fourth that day, having been unable to follow the decisive attack, and while he is still searching for his first victory in one of cycling's five Monument classics, Kristoff is now on two, having previously won Milan-San Remo in 2014.
It was largely with a view to winning classics and Monuments that Oleg Tinkov made Sagan the highest-paid rider in the sport when signing him for Tinkoff-Saxo last winter, so the sight of Kristoff taking out Flanders and then Scheldeprijs three days later could justifiably have left him wondering if he had poured millions into the wrong rider.
In fairness to Tinkov, Sagan has since won the world road race title in exhilarating style, and more pertinently, it is only recently that Kristoff has reached Sagan's level. The biggest win of his career prior to his Milan-San Remo triumph had been a stage of the 2013 Tour de Suisse and, of his 42 professional wins to date, 34 have come in the past two years.
Aged 28 and now nine years into his pro career, he is not so much a 'new kid on the block' as a late bloomer extraordinaire, matched only in the current generation by Chris Froome, who famously went from economics student to Tour de France winner in little more than six years.
Whether Kristoff can keep up his remarkable rate of wins and podiums and stay at Sagan's level in the next two or three years remains to be seen, but for now at least, based purely on results, he is the better of the two.
