Giro d'Italia 2015: Richie Porte must step up into leading role as Sky enter new era

Without Bradley Wiggins or Chris Froome, pressure will be on the in-form Australian in Italy

Richie Porte (GETTY IMAGES)

On Saturday afternoon when the Giro d’Italia gets under way for Team Sky it will be their 16th Grand Tour start – but in one key way, here at San Remo on the shores of the Italian Riviera, even the now highly experienced British squad will be venturing into unknown waters.

The difference is at the very top of the team hierarchy. In almost all of their previous Grand Tours, whenever Sky fielded a rider with serious hopes of victory – take a bow Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome – their contender had already been a top challenger in a three-week stage race. Even in 2010, in Sky’s very first Giro d’Italia, Wiggins had racked up a top-five finish in the previous year’s Tour de France for rivals Garmin.

On Saturday, though, in Sky’s first Grand Tour of the post-Wiggins era – following the Londoner’s planned mid-season switch last month from Sky to a much smaller squad where he can focus largely on his track racing – that is not the case.

Instead, the British team leader in the Giro will be 30-year-old Richie Porte. The Australian is hugely experienced in Grand Tour racing – but mostly as a team worker, with his only previous spell as sole leader for such events for Sky in the Tour de France last year. Racing as Sky’s “Plan B”, the Tasmanian briefly held the reins of power after Froome crashed out, before himself falling ill with pneumonia and spiralling out of contention. He finished 23rd.

Now, however, Porte is Sky’s “Plan A” for the Giro, a race where he was supposed to lead last year for Sky but opted to skip the event after a very uneven spring. Fast forward 12 months, though, and it’s a very different story.

The Australian has positively rampaged through the first part of the 2015 season, winning two major week-long stage races, Paris-Nice (for a second time) and the Volta a Catalunya, as well as reigning for a long spell as the top-ranked rider in the world. Of his 23 victories as a pro, nine have come this year.

Porte’s most recent success came just two weeks ago when he crushed the opposition in the mountainous Giro di Trentino in Italy. The knowledge that his best result to date in a Grand Tour came in the Giro d’Italia itself – seventh in 2010, following a spell in the lead – will surely form extra motivation.

Although the 2015 Giro’s 59-kilometre time trial on stage 14 will be a key factor in Porte’s favour – he is currently Australian national champion in the speciality – neither Porte nor Sky are under-estimating the difficulty of the task ahead. Memories of Wiggins’ dramatic failure to take the Giro in 2013, ending with his abandoning when he fell ill, are still fresh. The biggest obstacle in Sky’s and Porte’s path could well be none other than Alberto Contador, winner of six Grand Tours and widely considered the most gifted stage racer of his generation.

Contador has targeted the 2015 Giro as the first part of his tackling one of cycling’s most difficult challenges: winning both the Italian Grand Tour and the Tour de France in the same year.

Other top names Porte will have to vanquish on a 3,481-kilometre route with seven summit finishes, 40,000 metres of vertical climbing and a relentless series of nervous, technical finishes throughout include his old Sky team-mate Rigoberto Uran, now twice a runner-up in the Giro. Italian hopes are pinned on talented young climber Fabio Aru, third last year, and the small but doughty mountain specialist Domenico Pozzovivo.

However, arguably the greatest challenge for Porte and Sky will be his own uneven track record in Grand Tours, with memorable flashes of brilliance and superb teamwork in successive Tours de France followed up by spells of bad luck and illness. In the Giro this year, both Sky – always a huge factor in the Tour de France but yet to triumph in either one of cyclng’s other two Grand Tours – and the Australian will be hoping for a definitive breakthrough in his career.