Originally Posted by waterrockets

My point is that there are a lot more variables than just when a guy started winning Tours. EPO wasn't just used by the race winners. Indurain was riding for a proven leader, and you would have to look at each season as a whole from a training, peak, and health, and a team dynamic perspective.

The only Tour champ in your list that even compares to Indurain is LeMond, and everyone knows that he was a special kind of badass who probably could have won 7 or 8 Tours given good health. Everyone else in the list, given their relatively limited success being so early, maybe should have waited a couple years to start tearing it up.

There's no correlation between early Tour success and eventual Tour ownership.