The British Bradley Wiggins will try to beat the Hour Record this summer and according Eddy Merckx, he must come forward. “If you’re nobody and you don’t beat it, there’s no problem, but if Wiggins attacks the Hour Record, he has to beat it,” Merckx told Cycling Weekly.

“If you’re nobody and you don’t beat it, there’s no problem, but if Wiggins attacks the Hour Record, he has to beat it.”

The Belgian knew this situation. He dominated cycling through 1960s and 1970s. In 1972, he beat the record with 49,431 kilometers in Mexico City. “It was the same way with me because I’d already won the Tour de France two or three times, the Tour of Italy, the classics and things like that. The journalists in Mexico thought I couldn’t beat it. I knew that I had to if I went for it. I also felt that my career wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t break the Hour Record.”

Merckx give some advices: “If I was going to do the hour record again today then I’d do it in a closed velodrome, but on a track like in Moscow, a track that’s 333 metres,” he added. “The bigger the track the better it is for pushing through the curves.”

On 30 October 2014, Matthias Brändle set a new record of 51.852 km at the World Cycling Center in Aigle, Switzerland.