The question that will inevitably arise from Cadel Evans' magnificent effort across the 21 stages of the Tour de France these past three weeks is this: have we just witnessed Australia's greatest individual sporting performance?

As the Victorian crossed the line in Saturday's time trial, sweat dripping from his chin, face contorted in pain and red BMC uniform glistening in the weak Grenoble sunshine, our minds drifted to that question and the pantheon of all-time greats that Evans indisputably now joins.

In fact, and we offer this up as an argument that's yet to be fully tested in the BPL lab, what Evans has done over the past month eclipses anything we've seen before from an Australian in a sporting arena.

It's an exercise obviously fraught with difficulty - comparing performances from different sports and different eras - but if the criteria is confined to individual feats in truly global sports, then it's hard to go past the dimple-chinned Victorian.

For cycling clearly qualifies as a world-wide pursuit. Not necessarily in a professional sense, just that most people in the world learn to ride a bicycle at some stage and millions of them in cities from Shanghai to Stockholm rely on a bike to get around.

Have a look at the nationalities of the riders competing in this year's Tour. They come from virtually everywhere - from Colombia to Costa Rica, Norway to the Netherlands, Ukraine to the US and Australia to Estonia. (No, there wasn't an Asian team involved, but it is a fledgling professional sport in south-east Asia and pro outfits such as the Marco Polo Cycling Team will soon be making their mark.)

So cycling ticks that particular box, as does running and kicking a soccer ball around. I'd even accept an argument for boxing.

If you win the Olympic 100-metre sprint, you are rightly said to be the fastest man on the planet. If you win the Tour de France, you can rightly lay claim to be the best road cyclist in the world. And Mike Tyson was once widely accepted as being the baddest man on the planet.

The same boast can't be made by the pre-eminent exponents of skiing, surfing, shooting, sailing, cricket, tennis, golf or even swimming, because there are great swathes of the global population who not only don't participate in those sports - but wouldn't have the faintest idea what a sand wedge was used for, or ski stocks, or a batsman's 'protector'.

Don Bradman, Walter Lindrum, Rod Laver, Lauren Jackson, Ian Thorpe, Rod Laver, Layne Beachley, Mick Doohan, Heather McKay, Greg Norman, Luc Longley and many more besides might have racked up peerless performances in their chosen sports but - through no fault of their own - those sports did not have the mass global appeal of cycling. Squash and cricket weren't played much outside England and her realm, there's not much surfing done in mainland Europe and Scandinavia, or swimming in Africa, and when Rod Laver was winning the Grand Slam in 1962 and 1969 tennis hadn't really caught on in Asia, eastern Europe and Russia. Ditto Walter Lindrum: how many families in Africa and Asia had billiard tables in the 1920s?

That's not to demean their careers. It just means they can't be said to have excelled in a truly global sport. (While acknowledging that the world is a significantly smaller place now, and easier to access, and Australian sportsmen and women don't need to board a ship for the two-month trip to Europe to compete.)

Of Evans' rivals in the Australian pantheon, Cathy Freeman's gold medal run in the 400 metres at the Sydney Olympics and Herb Elliott's victory in the 1500m - the prince of track and field events - at Rome in 1960 would have their supporters. Mick Doohan - through his five straight 500cc motorcycle racing crowns in the 1980s - would undoubtedly score some votes, too. And many will feel Thorpe's domination of the pool through the late 1990s - culminating in his six gold medals at the 2001 world championhips - will deserve greater recognition.

But the thing is, Evans has conquered his Everest in a sport that is recognised just about everywhere. There are said to be 1.4 billion bicycles in the world. And none of the owners of those bikes could have covered the 3500 kilometres through France this month as quickly as the man from Victorian coastal town of Barwon Heads.

That makes him the greatest road cyclist in the world and, when the dust settles over the coming weeks and we get a chance to digest exactly what he's done, we might well be hailing his 2011 Tour de France triumph as the premier individual performance in Australia's long and storied sports history.