For Team Sky, the Giro d’Italia represents the point where one of their longest standing top stage racing riders, Richie Porte, may prove once and for all that he can battle for a Grand Tour victory.
But as becomes clear from Sky Team Principal Dave Brailsford’s comments during the countdown to the race start, when it comes to fighting for cycling’s first Grand Tour of the season, it was never going to be a question of Sky throwing Porte in at the deep end and seeing whether he sank or swam. Or as Brailsford puts it “no-one ever landed on Mars just like that.”
Brailsford clearly believes that Porte has it in him to go for a Grand Tour. “Every race is a test, [but] not that many people can go to a Grand Tour and say I genuinely have a chance of winning this. And he has,” Brailsford told a small group of reporters.
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“In three weeks' time, we'll know whether it worked out or not, but as you've seen with the [general election in the UK] polls” - forecast to end in hung parliament and in fact won by the Conservative Party - "it's pretty pointless to predict anything.”
“It is a big moment for him, he's 30 years old, he's had a great career, and I do believe he's a Grand Tour rider. if he can keep his health and keep his form form, we’ll see what he can do in three weeks time. It’s a great opportunity.”
To that end, Porte has applied some new techniques to his training program, including learning how to race and train better when already tired. Brailsford’s reasoning behind this is “we've seen some of our best individual performances over the years on days when the guys said that they didn't feel great, say I’m pretty amazed that happened. That’s an important lesson.”
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