Double Rainbow: What Would It Mean?

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.

Photo by LUCA BETTINI/AFP via Getty Images

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…