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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2947 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Then they go on to talk about Pogacar being maybe the GOAT, surpassing Merckx or Indurain, with no mention of Armstrong.

Even following your philosophy of just taking the result at the very second itvwas achieved at face value, Armstrong has to claim to being spoken in the same breath as Merckx.

Arnstrong cared only about adoration of normies, by focusing on the one race normies know. This is in total opposition to the old masters, who would race all year.

prestigelisten.dk follows your philosophy in treating Armstrong as a 7 Tour winner, and even according to it, he is merely 9th in the All-time list.

Edit: Armstrong is just the most-familiar-to-American-casual-fans-of-cycling of their memories of the moment of victory, not matching official records. Even the GOAT won his 3rd Il Lombardia on 13th October 1973, only to have it yanked from him on 8th of November 1973 when doping was discovered. Would have made it 20 total Monument wins, but nobody assigns him this win today.

If you want to apply your philosophy consistently, contemporeneous coverage cycling is key, not picking and chosing when to trust official results and when one's memory.

But examining primary sources is hard, thus Armstrong won 7 Tours (primacy of lived experience over post facto investigation), and Merckx merely 19 Monuments (few Americans today can say they saw Merckx win the 1973 Il Lombardia as it happened, thus they defer to edited results).

I don't actually have much of a position on who the GOAT of cycling is. I don't know much about the topic. I'm still not entirely sure what a domestique does that's so valuable exactly.

What I object to is that in trying to learn about the topic, most of the sources I would rely on for the question in any other sport, like Wikipedia tables or mentions in newspaper sports sections, they won't tell me easily that Merckx won in '73. It makes for a complicated and politically correct universe.

And FWIW, Ninth is pretty high. In NBA terms that's what, Magic Johnson or Larry Bird? That's the kind of athlete that gets discussed by fans pretty consistently. Not one who is memory holed.

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