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A great opponent can bring out the best in athletes. That seems certainly the case between Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert. So far they started in 9 monuments together, and in 8 of them one or both ended up on the podium. 

As they both are still in the middle of their cycling career, there probably is more to come. That leads us to the question who were the biggest rivals in the history of the 5 monuments?  We have created the following list by taking the number of times riders finished both in the top-20 of a race and at least one of them on the podium. For riders to be opponents, there needs to be some balance in the number of times they outperform eachother, so we keep only the opponents where either rider has won at least 25% of the duels. 

This returns an impressive list, with Eddy Merckx versus Roger De Vlaeminck at the top with 17 duels in the monuments. From more recent times we find the duels between Tom Boonen, Fabian Cancellara and Juan Antonio Flecha high up in the list. In 14th position we find Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert.