Peter Kennaugh is placing his eggs in the Grand Tour basket over the next phase of his career, with the aim of breaking into the top 10 or 15 of a three-week race.
The Manxman has won the Tour of Austria and the Settimana Coppi e Bartali and has impressed on Grand Tour domestique duty while at Team Sky – where he started his career in 2010 – but last year's Vuelta a España confirmed his desire to explore his own potential in the biggest stage races. After a spell in the leader's jersey courtesy of Sky's opening-day TTT victory, he sat in the top 15 overall until that crazy stage to Formigal that saw close to 100 riders finish nearly an hour down.
"With the Grand Tours at the minute I'm trying to improve, and if I'm consistently there in the mountains, when it's whittled down to 10-15 guys, and I'm consistently there throughout the whole race – that's what I'm looking for this year," Kennaugh told Cyclingnews at the Abu Dhabi Tour the end of February.
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"Not just doing a job into the climb then losing minutes and minutes. Just sort of being around those GC guys more when it comes down to the thick end of the races is sort of my main aim."
Kennaugh's commitment to testing himself as a GC rider is intriguing, given that arguably his most eye-catching results have come in one-day outings – two British national road titles, last year's Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, and a stage win in the 2015 Criterium du Dauphine. He would seem to fit the mould of a hilly classics rider, though an annual April slump, which he's never been able to get to the bottom of, has meant he's never made an impact in the Ardennes.
Sky's lack of one-day success relative to the dizzy heights they've hit in stage racing has attracted much attention – though that tag has worn increasingly thin in the last two years – and Kennaugh is the latest in a line of riders capable of pulling off classy individual feats to lean towards the less spectacular model of general classification riding, where consistency is everything.
'I always have a bad April and I don't know why'
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