Cycling has a history problem
There’s a great page on the Pro Cycling Stats website which shows the riders who have the best record of never abandoning a monument classic. It lists the top 50 riders who fit the criteria and all of them have a 100% completion record. Every single monument classic they started, they finished. Considering the races involved are, by definition, the hardest on the calendar and also given the fact that these are all one-day races so there is no tomorrow, there’s no real benefit in continuing on if you don’t have to - the riders on this list should be considered the hardest most stubborn bastards that have ever raced a bike for a living.
The list includes rides like Walter Godefroot, Herman van Springel, Francesco Moser, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, Marc Madiot, Eric Vanderaerden.
Top of the list, top of the bastards, with 55 starts and 55 finishes is Sean Kelly.
Click through to the specific Sean Kelly/Monuments page and we can see that he started 12 Milan San-Remos, 12 Tours of Flanders, 12 Tours of Lombardy, 10 Liege-Bastogne-Lieges and nine Paris-Roubaixs and never abandoned.
Sean Kelly is, undoubtedly, one of the hardest bastards to ever race a bike. But he does not belong on this list.
Aha! Yes, the murky underbelly of cycling stats veracity. Is there a more competitive, cut-throat sub-genre of weird little people in all of sport? We are a breed of gollums stroking the precious ready to strike whenever anyone wanders into our damp cave of factual fishbones and dares to pick at the flesh.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In this case, the absence of a DNF for Sean Kelly in a monument classic is not evidence. It is an understandable mistake to make, although still unforgivable. This is not specific to Pro Cycling Stats. I defy you to find any evidence on any of the results websites that will tell you that Sean Kelly rode and abandoned the 1978 Paris-Roubaix. That fact, in the form of a neat entry in a table, does not exist on the internet. Pre-internet startlists do not exist. If a rider is listed as having started a race in the 1990s or before, it implies that they also finished this race, because all we have are results, not startlists. Riders who started but abandoned are lost between the cracks in the floorboards in the halls of history. Perhaps the startlist of the 1978 Paris-Roubaix exists in a hand-written lodger in the desk drawer of a gruff 80-year old Belgian ex-timekeeper. Perhaps. Best of luck to Google and all the algorithms in getting their hands on it.
I know that Sean Kelly started the 1978 Paris-Roubaix because he wrote about it in a book. A book which physically exists on my bookshelf in this room. A book which I had to have read to know that this fact was in it.
“Every month threw up a new experience but one of the hardest was when I rode Paris-Roubaix for the first time.... My job was simple. I was told to stay with Freddy Maertens for as long as possible. The first section of cobblestones came after about 100 kilometres and as we got closer, the pace increased until it became a furious stampede. It was faster than some of the bunch sprints I’d done. I was sprinting at full pelt and still there were riders coming past me on both sides. And then we hit the cobbles. It sounds like an exaggeration but it was like going over the top. There were bodies everywhere. I couldn’t believe we were expected to race over roads like this.
I crashed three or four times on the first few sections of cobbles, without doing any serious damage to myself or the bike. But I was miles behind the front of the race and we’d barely started....
Eventually I decided enough was enough. I punctured and couldn’t get a wheel for ages. There was not a team car to be seen so I finally got into the broomwagon... I sat in the back feeling pretty sorry for myself. There were still about 100 kilometres to the finish, so I was in for a slow, humiliating journey”
It could be the case that the algorithms can find a PDF of this book on the internet somewhere and discern this piece of information and lob it into the big sludge pile of knowledge for the bots to feast on. Kelly is but one rider in this one race. 141 riders started the 1978 Paris-Roubaix and only 40 riders were classified in the finishing results. Did all of the other 100 riders also write books or gave interviews in print in which they declared explicitly that they took part in but abandoned this race? Did they fuck.
It’s a specific but curious gap within the results spreadsheets of record. Swathes of info about who started in which race are gone and irretrievable. Grand Tours are a notable exception to this, particularly the Tour de France, where startlist information has been curated more carefully and considered to be of importance throughout the pre-internet days, but if you’re looking to find out which riders took part in the 1989 Four Days of Dunkirk, sorry, you can’t, you just can’t.
You probably think ‘big deal’, ‘so what’, ‘why would anyone want to know that anyway?’. And you would be right. It’s useless information.
But not to us. Not to the gollums. Not to the weirdos who crawl the dank banks of the river of curiosity waiting to find that most precious of jewels - WHEN EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG APART FROM ME
