Eddy Merckx

Merckx won the world amateur road championship in 1964 and turned professional in 1965. In 1969 he won the Tour de France, the first Belgian to do so since 1939, and Sports Illustrated's 1972 profile records that he won it again in 1970 and 1971.

On 25 October 1972, on the open-air Olympic velodrome in Mexico City, Merckx rode 49.431 km in an hour, 788 metres more than Ole Ritter's record. Cyclist magazine notes that the mark stood for 28 years.

Merckx retired from racing in spring 1978, and in 1980 he started a bicycle company, Eddy Merckx Cycles, with help from the Italian frame-builder Ugo De Rosa. According to Cycling Weekly, its bikes were later supplied to professional teams including 7-Eleven, Motorola and Quick-Step.

On 8 July 1971, at Orcieres-Merlette, Merckx lost 8 minutes 41 seconds to Luis Ocana after pulling a chasing group for about 100 km with no one taking a turn. Two days later he and three Molteni team-mates attacked from the start of the 251 km stage to Marseille and gained about two minutes, according to Belgian retrospectives by RTBF and La DH.

Keeping up the attack after his heaviest Tour loss to that point is consistent with the profile's persistence score; the stage gained back only a small part of the deficit. Persistence

Visiting Merckx's home in 1972, a Sports Illustrated writer found a basement workshop with about 100 wheels left to cure for up to three years, and was told that he experimented with saddle positions for climbs, flat roads and rough roads. The frame-builder Ernesto Colnago later recalled that Merckx took more than 20 bikes a year and would stay at the factory until a bike was right.

These working habits sit alongside the profile's detail-orientation score. Merckx himself connected some of the later adjustments to comfort after a 1969 track crash, and the profile draws no conclusion from that injury. Detail Orientation

For his 1972 Hour Record attempt Merckx chose the Mexico City velodrome, although his sponsor Molteni wanted Milan. His masseur Guillaume Michiels and a 2015 Remezcla feature describe six weeks of preparation, with university tests in Milan and Liege and sessions on rollers in his garage breathing from oxygen bottles to simulate altitude. Merckx describes the same altitude training in a 2004 Cycle Sport interview.

Weeks of set-piece preparation for a single hour offer one example behind the profile's discipline score, and the choice of venue against the sponsor's wish also bears on its need-for-autonomy row. Discipline