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[sunnybunny]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Money. Lance can afford to do it because of sponsorships. Most riders have to ride a lot of races to make money to help the team survive, and to ensure continued sponsorship.

The guy has a point. Depends on how you define "best" of course. He's won the world's most difficult bicycling race 5 times in a row, which has been done only once before. That has to count for something. If Tiger played in only the Masters (or U.S. Open) and won five straight years, I doubt people would be saying he's "not the best golfer." But the analogy isn't a particularly good one anyway, because golf is structured with a lot of similar-calibre tournaments with some considered more prestigious (but not necessarily harder) than others. Cycling has three majors, with one the biggest of them all, and then a huge bunch of other races that are shorter and less grueling. If the PGA had only the four majors, and then everything else was like the Nike tour, with multiple tourneys each weekend, and Tiger played only the majors, and kept winning them, you'd have a pretty good analogy.

As for time trials vs. the rest of the race, he's wrong on the facts. First, in any long tour the goal isn't to win each stage (well, for the sprinters it is, and the ones who have no chance of winning the overall race), it's to have the lowest total time. So he has to pick his spots. And it's not like he hasn't won both time trial and mountain stages. He's blown away nearly the entire field in at least 1 or 2 mountain stages each of the last few years. No one else has sustained that kind of record recently.

But, if you compare him to Freddie Merckx, who won multiple races each year, Lance comes up way short.

I"m never going to have a kid, but if I do, his or her middle name is going to be Merckx (and it's Eddie, not Freddie) in honor of the Cannibal.