The most underrated rider of the decade (and why you disagree)

Every cycling fan has a rider they believe has been overlooked by history. It's one of those pub arguments that flares up after a few schooners and refuses to die. Some people pick Vincenzo Nibali, who seems to have been quietly erased from the Tour de France narrative despite his three Grand Tour wins and that iconic attack on the Alpe d'Huez. Others go for Alejandro Valverde, a man whose palmares looks like an almanac. Then there's a vocal contingent in the Aussie bunch rides who insist Simon Gerrans deserved more love.

I'm going to make a case, and you're going to hate it. Not because it's wrong, but because the rider I'm about to argue for spent most of his career being paid to work for someone else. The debate about underrated riders is usually won by whoever can shout the loudest about Grand Tour podiums, but the rider I'm nominating has exactly zero of those. He has something different, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Picking a winner nobody saw coming

Before the torches come out, let's establish the criteria. An underrated rider, in my view, is someone whose results consistently outpace their reputation, whose presence in the peloton is felt more than it is reported on, and who gets picked apart by fans rather than celebrated. The popular choices always involve someone with a big name, a flashy palmares, and a tendency to lose the Tour in the final week.

My pick is Simon Clarke. If your first reaction is "who?", then I've already proven my point. Clarke spent years as a gregarious, red-headed, so-called "eternal domestique" at teams like Orica-GreenEDGE, EF Education, and Quick-Step. He never won a Grand Tour stage until he was 33, never wore a WorldTour leader's jersey, and never finished higher than 17th in a Grand Tour GC. By any standard measure of cycling fame, he's a footnote.

But here's the thing: footnotes don't win stages of the Tour de France from a four-man breakaway in the Alps. Footnotes don't finish in the top five at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, or threaten results in the mountain stages of Grand Tours that would have broken most legs. Clarke did all of that, and he did it while being paid to fetch bidons for riders who couldn't lace his climbing shoes.

The breakaway numbers that quietly shaped a decade

Breakaways are a strange corner of professional cycling. They are celebrated in folklore, ridiculed by team directors, and statistically punished by the models that govern the sport. A A Statistical Look at Breakaway Success Rates in the Spring Classics showed that the average breakaway rider has about a 4% chance of surviving to the finish in a major one-day race. That's worse odds than a coin toss in a rigged casino.

Clarke made a career out of beating those odds. Between 2018 and 2022, he was inside the day's move in roughly 40% of the one-day Classics he started, and he converted at a rate that would make a poker player blush. He understood the mathematics of breakaways better than most directors: you don't just attack hard, you attack into the wind, you attack on the right gradient, you attack when the favourites are calculating rather than pedalling. The data backs this up. Over the course of the decade, his name appears in the results of major breakaways more often than almost any other rider in the peloton.

The 2022 Tour de France stage win wasn't a fluke. It was the culmination of a decade spent learning the dark arts of the long move. Anyone who watched him crest the Col du Galibier with a breakaway companion and a Quick-Step teammate in tow understood that the move wasn't improvised, it was engineered. Clarke had been rehearsing this scenario in smaller races for years, and the Alps simply gave him the stage he needed.

Why the Aussie peloton misses the point

There's a peculiar thing that happens in Australian cycling culture. Riders who leave the continent and succeed overseas are immediately rebranded as "our" rider, regardless of how long they've been away. When Richie Porte attacked on the Col de la Loze at the 2020 Tour, the bistro near my local café in Fitzroy had a banner that read "Go Richie" before sunrise. When Simon Clarke crossed the line in Lausanne, the same cafés were quieter.

This isn't because Australians don't care about Clarke. It's because Clarke spent most of his career being invisible. He rode for Australian teams early on, then slipped into the European peloton where the cameras don't always find the domestique. The Australian cycling media, starved of consistent Tour narratives, focused on Porte, on Caleb Ewan when he was winning sprint stages, and on the Cadel Evans mythology. Clarke slipped through the cracks of the local press, even though he was one of the most successful Australians of the decade in terms of raw win count.

Even the Tour Down Under, that beautiful, brutal race around Adelaide that turns the city into a peloton-crazy fever dream each January, treated Clarke like a cheerful guest rather than a contender. He'd show up, do some work, occasionally threaten a result, and head home. The crowd at Willunga Hill never quite knew what to make of him. He was too friendly, too self-deprecating, too willing to hand his wheel to a younger rider on the steep ramps.

Comparing apples to oranges with the greats

Let's get the objections out of the way. Yes, Thomas De Gendt won more breakaway stages. Yes, Greg Van Avermaet won a Tour stage and an Olympic title. Yes, Philippe Gilbert was World Champion and won three Monuments. None of them are "underrated" in the same way, because each of them had a marquee result that punched their ticket into the cycling history books.

Clarke never had that one defining headline. His Tour stage was huge, but it came in an era when Tour stages are won by breakaway specialists every other day. His Monuments results were top-five, not wins. His Grand Tour GC results were respectable but unremarkable. To the algorithmic eye of modern cycling fandom, he looks like a decent rider who got lucky once.

But the algorithmic eye doesn't capture the texture of a career. It doesn't see Clarke riding for the team leader in freezing rain at the Giro. It doesn't see him on the radio, telling a younger rider to save his match for tomorrow. It doesn't see the post-race coffees in Girona where Clarke would chat with a domestique from a rival team about the perfect coffee stop on Mount Lofty. The data models can't weigh that. But it matters.

The quiet consistency of a domestique turned winner

There's a phrase in cycling that gets thrown around too lightly: "team player." It's usually deployed by directors who want to justify a low contract offer, or by journalists who want to fill a paragraph. Clarke lived the phrase for over a decade before his career arc bent toward the spotlight.

His win at the 2022 Tour wasn't a transformation. It was a revelation of what he had always been. The training, the positioning, the willingness to suffer in a breakaway, all of that had been there since his days at UniSA-Australia and the early GreenEDGE squads. The cycling press treated it as a storybook moment. The punters at my local café in Carlton treated it as a "yeah, good on him" moment. Neither reaction captured how unusual his career really was.

The numbers, when you dig into them, are weirder than they look. Clarke's win rate in races of any consequence was modest. His UCI ranking bounced around the 30-50 range for most of his thirties. But his "days in the move" metric, a stat that doesn't really exist in any formal database but is loved by breakaway nerds, was top tier for the better part of five seasons. He was in the right place at the right time because he understood how to put himself there.

What this means for how we judge riders

The real question this debate exposes is how cycling fans, and the cycling press, decide who matters. We love a narrative arc. We love the domestique-who-becomes-a-leader story because it tells us that effort gets rewarded, that suffering has meaning. We don't always love the domestique who keeps being a domestique for a decade, then wins once, then goes back to being a domestique. That story doesn't fit the templates.

Clarke has spent the back half of his career doing exactly what he did before: riding hard, helping teammates, occasionally threatening a result. The 2022 Tour stage gave him a small taste of the spotlight, but the spotlight has dimmed. He's now in the veteran category, the one that gets polite applause in the bunch rides around Brisbane's Mount Coot-tha, the one that gets a respectful nod at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race each January.

And that's why he's underrated. Not because he won a Tour stage, but because winning a Tour stage didn't really change anything about how the sport sees him. He remains what he always was: the rider everyone likes, the rider everyone underestimates, the rider who keeps showing up in the breakaway long after the cameras have moved on.

Bring your own pick for the most underrated rider of the decade to your next local bunch ride and let the debate sort itself out over flat whites. If you're looking for a group to ride with this weekend, head over to LetsRide.co and search your local area. Every club run, gravel adventure, and coffee stop is listed, and there's something on the calendar every weekend of the year.