Who are cycling's best male sprinters of all time

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What distinguishes the greatest sprinters in cycling history? Surely, their palmarès. A massive amount of Grand Tour stages, a handful of points competition jerseys, a few Classic wins and possibly a World Championship victory or two make them the fastest men in professional cycling.

Our list was originally compiled in 2011, but much has changed since then. Sprinters like André Greipel, Marcel Kittel, Caleb Ewan, Sam Bennett, Elia Viviani and Michael Matthews have all won stages in all three Grand Tours. Are they the best of all time? It's tough to narrow down the list.

In 2023, the top sprinter appears to be Jasper Philipsen, who won multiple Tour de France stages. But in the grand scheme of things, he's still in the early stages and not yet among the greatest of all time.

That honour belongs to riders like Mark Cavendish - who was close to breaking the all-time Tour de France stage win record when Philipsen beat him on stage 7 of the 2023 Tour. Cavendish crashed out the next day but remains the greatest sprinter in Tour de France history.

More than 100 years have passed since the creation of the Tour de France and there have been quite a few brilliant and prolific sprinters around. 

For those of our readers who still remember André Darrigade or Rik van Steenbergen, we had to dig deeper in the history books - and discovered that the task of assembling an all-time top ten list of best sprinters would not be such an easy one after all.

Bearing in mind that the points competition was created only in 1953, we had to take into account that bunch sprint finishes actually are a recent phenomenon of modern cycling, and that teams were not organised to that effect during the first part of the last century.

And what about those riders who combined fast finishing speed with the strength to win even the hillier Classics, such as Rik van Looy or Sean Kelly? What about the legendary Eddy Merckx, whose all-encompassing palmarès also includes many sprint victories and points jerseys? Did they also fall into the sprinters category?

We decided to include only one of them in our ranking - Sean Kelly for his four green jerseys - and to concentrate on more contemporary stars such as Mark Cavendish, Peter Sagan, Robbie McEwen, Oscar Freire, and Alessandro Petacchi: the masters of fast finishing speeds, modern lead-out trains and perfect positioning.

Mark Cavendish

As of 2023, Mark Cavendish amassed 34 Tour de France stage wins - equalling the record set by Merckx and is the rider with the most road stage wins (excluding time trials) of all time.

Cavendish was heartbreakingly close to breaking the record in 2023 the day before he crashed out of the Tour with a broken collarbone.

The unfortunate circumstance can't dull the brilliance of the "Manx Express", who also has 17 Giro d'Italia stage wins and three in the Vuelta, two overall Tour de France points classification wins, the World Championship title in 2011 and a victory in Milan-San Remo in 2009.

Additionally, Cavendish won the most prestigious Tour de France sprint finish, the last stage on the Champs Elysées, four years in a row.

Peter Sagan

Peter Sagan claimed the points classification at the Tour de France seven times between 2012 and 2019 and won the World Championship title three years in a row.

The Slovakian was famous for his outrageous victory salutes, his public persona, and his signature no-hands wheelie.

Sagan won 12 stages of the Tour de France, two in the Giro d'Italia plus the points classification there in 2021, and four in the Vuelta a España.

A versatile rider, Sagan also won Paris-Roubaix in 2018, the Tour of Flanders in 2016, Gent-Wevelgem three times as well as the overall classification of the Tour of California in 2015. He held the record for stage wins in the latter before it went defunct.

Erik Zabel

Before Sagan, Erik Zabel was the King of the Green Jersey with six consecutive points competition victories at the Tour de France. Zabel also claimed three points jerseys at the Vuelta and a total the 20 Grand Tour stages (12 at the Tour, 8 at the Vuelta).

The German, whose most successful years were spent working for the Deutsche Telekom and later T-Mobile squad, also managed nine Classic victories, amongst which four times Milano-Sanremo. It should have been five at La Primavera, but an unforgettable moment in his career came when he was caught on the line of the Via Roma by Oscar Freire in 2004, having raised his hands too soon.

Zabel continued his career until 2008 with Team Milram, competing alongside Alessandro Petacchi, before becoming a tactical consultant at Team Columbia and helping Mark Cavendish to his 2009 Milan-Sanremo win.

Mario Cipollini

Love him or hate him, but only few would disagree that 'Super Mario' has changed the face of modern cycling forever: not only did he win the greatest amount of Grand Tour stages ever for a pure sprinter (57 compared to Merckx's 64), he also did so with a style and charisma that are impossible to imitate. Laughing in the face of the UCI with his ever-changing lycra dress-ups, Cipollini also won the Giro d'Italia points competition three times - but never finished one of the eight Tours he rode.

The tall Italian, whose greatest victories also include one Worlds title in Zolder 2002, as well as 'La Classicissima' Milan-Sanremo the same year, certainly never lacked the self-confidence that true sprinters need in order to battle it out in the final run to the line. Cipollini's explosiveness as well as his good looks made him an all-Italian hero, a star deeply worshipped by a crowd which needed him to show off his attitude as much as he did.

Freddy Maertens

Another record-breaking sprinter was the Belgian Freddy Maertens: 55 victories within the sole season of 1976 speak for themselves. That year, Maertens claimed eight victories at the Tour de France (tied with Merckx and Charles Pélissier for the most in a single Tour) and one year later, seven stages of the Giro d'Italia, before abandoning the event in the beginning of the second week. Add to those figures an unforgettable 13 Vuelta a Espana stages he also won in 1977 - which even made him a Grand Tour winner! - and his six consecutive stage victories at the Dauphiné Libéré in 1975, and you end up with certainly the greatest sprinter of the 1970s.

Maertens' top speed was legendary, and so was his open rivalry with fellow countryman Eddy Merckx. At the 1973 Worlds, Maertens and 'the Cannibal' both lost out in the final sprint - a perfect scenario for plenty of polemics. In 1976, Maertens takes his revenge and the rainbow jersey, which he surprisingly wins one more time in 1981 in a glorious but short come-back following several years of ill-luck in the late '70s.

Djamolidine Abdoujaparov

"The Tashkent Terror" - his sole nickname says it all. Djamolidine Abdoujaparov was a feared man in the peloton of the early '90s, not only for his raw power in the last few hundred meters of a race, but also for his unpredictable trajectories which saw him burst to the finish with his head down between his shoulders, elbows out, possibly eyes closed.

His willingness to risk absolutely everything brought him a total of 17 Grand Tour stages and five overall points competitions (three at the Tour de France), but also a dreadful crash on the 1991 Tour de France Champs Elysées when he first won the green jersey. However, this did not change the Uzbek sprinter's aggressive sprinting style in the years thereafter. "Abdou" made us dread every mass sprint finish he was involved in, secretly praying before our TV screens. He finished his career in the same excessive way he conducted it, by testing positive for bromatan several times during his last pro year, 1997.

Sean Kelly

One of the most versatile riders in history, Sean Kelly deserves his mention in this column for his four green jerseys won at the Tour de France (which makes him runner-up to Erik Zabel), a total of 16 Grand Tour stage wins and another four points competitions at the Vuelta - of which he was also a general classification winner in 1988. 

An Irish farmer's son, Kelly had the ability to suffer more than others, and a willpower than earned him a total of eleven Classic wins, encompassing all kinds: from Giro di Lombardia (three times), Milan-Sanremo (twice), Liège-Bastogne-Liège (twice) to even the cobblestone nightmare of Paris-Roubaix (twice, again), Kelly was able to shine on all terrains.

He even won a total of 26 stage races, including an astonishing seven consecutive wins of Paris-Nice and four overall victories of the Basque Country. Post-career, Kelly put his vast experience to the service of Eurosport race commentary and founded his own cycling team.

Robbie McEwen

One of several highly impressive sprinters of the beginning of the millennium, Robbie McEwen could arguably be labeled as the most cunning and independent of them all. The Australian never truly relied on a state-of-the-art lead-out train like some of his greatest rivals did, and still managed to sneak up to the line in the very last seconds, following his natural instinct for the best possible rear wheel. He won the Tour's green jersey three times, and a total of 24 Grand Tour stages.

McEwen may not have been the dominant sprinter during his most competitive years, but he was always a factor to be dealt with and made life hard for his opponents.

Oscar Freire

Also counting amongst the best tacticians of his fellow fast men is Spaniard Oscar Freire. Similarly to McEwen, the man who spent most of his career at Dutch team Rabobank often caught his rivals off-guard when they least expected him. Only three other riders in history have also achieved Freire's three World Championship titles, and he combined them with another three Milan-Sanremo victories, one overall green jersey win at the Tour and a total of eleven Grand Tour stages.

Even though Freire has had several setbacks during his career - including back and neck problems, saddle injuries - he still won a total of six Classics. In 2010 Freire became the first Spaniard to win Paris-Tours and on that occasion set the fastest average speed in a Classic race ever: he covered the 233 kilometres at an average of 47.73 km/h.

Alessandro Petacchi

The Italian fast man's reign reached its peak from 2003 to 2005, but in the space of those three years Alessandro Petacchi managed to achieve the greatest number of wins of all riders each season. 'Ale-Jet' seemed unstoppable when in 2003, 15 of his overall 24 victories were obtained at the three Grand Tours. One year later, he dominated the Giro d'Italia, taking an unbelievable nine stages as well as the maglia ciclamino in the 2004 edition. Petacchi was also very successful at the Vuelta, where he won a total of 20 stages and the blue points jersey in 2005.

That same year, every sprinter's dream - and especially an Italian's - was achieved when he surged to victory on the Via Roma in Sanremo. But his second points classification jersey at the Giro in 2007 - and all this victories during that time - were annulled following a positive doping control for salbutamol and a one-year suspension. But Petacchi came back, and made another dream come true in 2010 when he proved to be the most regular sprinter at the Tour de France.