Although this season is far from over with big races such as the Vuelta a Espana, the Tour of Lombardy and the World Championships still to be won, one of the main talking points of next season has already presented itself. Will Andy Schleck be able to win the Tour de France as part of a new team, and in so doing, defeat his ex-directeur sportif Bjarne Riis and the reigning Tour champion Alberto Contador?

Both riders will be riding for new teams, Contador will be in the unusual position of riding for the team Andy Schleck has just left, while Schleck, along with brother Frank, has moved away from Riis to start a Luxembourg based team. Incidentally, as well as Contador and Schleck, the third rider who finished on the Tour podium will also be riding for a different team next year. Denis Menchov will be making the move from Rabobank to Mauro Gianetti’s Team Geox. This will be the first time ever that all of the podium finishers in the Tour de France have changed teams for the following season.

In a recent Real Peloton podcast Matt Rendell said this when discussing Frank and Andy Schleck’s move to their new Luxembourg team

these guys are at the top of their game, they’re suddenly going to a new set of structures and they’re going to have to bed in there and gel with new team mates

While the Tour de France itself is a test of physical strength, a move to a new team could prove to be an ample test of mental strength for both of the major contenders. As Joe Lindsey pointed out in a recent article, Contador has certainly proved in the past that he has the resolve to deal with the most taxing of challenges.

To summarise, the Spaniard has bounced back from a life threatening injury sustained early in his career. He was implicated in Operation Puerto and witnessed the subsequent demise of his Liberty Seguros team. But he found his feet once more, signing for Johan Bruyneel’s Discovery Channel team. Having won the Tour in 2007, he was dealt the blow that he would be prohibited from defending his crown in 2008.

Andy Schleck, Alberto Contador, and Denis Menchov will all be riding for new teams next year.

Again he regrouped and did the most impressive thing possible given the circumstances, he won the other two Grand Tours instead. In 2009, through no fault of his own, he found himself lodged in the middle of the Armstrong/Bruyneel relationship. Instead of letting underhand tactics and snide remarks from within his own team get him down, he got on with his work and won the Tour again. Finally, this year, Contador was faced with the ignominy of every one of his 2009 Tour team mates moving to Armstrong’s Radio Shack. Yet again, he coped admirably and won the Tour for a third time. Contador’s route to becoming a triple Tour winner has most certainly not been plain sailing.

Both Schleck and Contador are now faced with the prospect of trying to win the Tour while riding for a new team. Since the re-introduction of trade teams in 1962*, there have been 47 editions of the Tour. On only six of these occasions has a rider won the Tour during his first year on a new team. It does not bode well for Andy Schleck that two of these six riders are Alberto Contador and Bjarne Riis.

Contador achieved this feat in 2007 during his first year riding for Discovery Channel. Although he won the Tour that year, he was not signed to a team that expected him to challenge for the yellow jersey. When Contador joined the Bruyneel setup, Ivan Basso was the undisputed leader and a major favourite to win the Tour. When Operation Puerto eventually caught up with the Italian, leadership duties were bestowed upon the next rider in line, Levi Leipheimer. Bruyneel expected Leipheimer to challenge for the podium while setting the more modest goal for Contador of the white young rider’s jersey. This allowed Contador to rise to the top of the cycling world uninhibited by pressure and expectation, a luxury which will not be afforded Andy Schleck on his new team.

When Bjarne Riis won the Tour in 1996 he had just left the Gewiss-Ballan team to join Team Telekom. One of his main rivals for the Tour that year was Evgeni Berzin, winner of the Giro in 1994, and runner up in 1995, who was riding for Riis’s former team under the tutelage of Riis’s former team manager. The Russian took the yellow jersey on stage seven only to cede it to Riis two days later. Riis went on to wear it all the way to Paris, while Berzin faded badly to finish the Tour in 20th.

Bjarne Riis won the 1996 Tour de France beating his ex-teammate along the way.

Due to Contador’s impending transfer to Saxo Bank, Schleck will also be faced with the prospect of attempting to defeat a rider being guided by his former team manager. And in Riis, Schleck will be up against a man who knows him extremely well and who has faced, and won, this type of psychological battle before.

Although Schleck has signed up for a brand new team, there will be some elements of continuity. Kim Andersen, a directeur sportif at Saxo Bank since 2004 will be on board to aid the young Luxembourg rider. A handful of Schleck’s current Saxo Bank team mates will also be there. Along with his brother Frank, Jens Voigt, Jacob Fuglsang and Stuart O’Grady are all expected to ride for the new Luxembourg team. However, unlike Contador, Schleck has only ever ridden for one professional team under one team manager. As Matt Rendell suggested, having never gone through this process before, he is going to need time to bed in and gel with new team mates. A further fact which Andy Schleck will not want to hear is that the Tour de France has never been won by a brand new team. As I’m sure Carlos Sastre (Cervelo 2009) and Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky 2010) will attest to, it is not an easy task.

There are plenty of subplots which will be interesting to see develop as Contador and Schleck take to the road for their new teams. But most of the problems one could expect to face, Contador and Riis have overcome before, while Andy Schleck has not. The Luxembourg rider will be under pressure to finally deliver the goods, having now placed 2nd in three Grand Tours. Contador will be under pressure of his own to become the 6th rider to win four Tours de France. But Contador has far more experience dealing with the change and upheaval that will be faced by both riders next year. It’s early doors yet, but Contador will likely be far better equipped to win the 2011 Tour de France, and if he does, he will become only the 2nd rider ever, after Greg LeMond in 1989 and 1990, to win the Tour two years in a row with two different teams.

*Trade team’s participation in the Tour was put on hiatus in 1967 and 1968 when international teams competed once more, but the trade teams returned in 1969 and have been present ever since.

The Vuelta a Espana is now just over a week away, it starts on August 28th with a team time trial around Seville which is due to take place at night. There have been races staged before which took place under street lights, a stage earlier this year in the Tour of Oman comes to mind, and there are many criteriums which are raced after the sun goes down. However, a Grand Tour stage is a very different proposition. There has been plenty of peloton power exercised by the riders in recent Grand Tour stages.  In this year’s Tour after a huge amount of riders crashed on the decent of the Stockeu on Stage two, a go slow was organised followed by a neutralised bunch sprint. Similarly, in last year’s Giro, due to rider’s concerns about hazards along the Milan circuit on Stage nine, the peloton decided not to race until the last of ten laps. This year, it’s the turn of the Spanish Grand Tour to host what could prove to be a controversial stage. Although the riders will not be racing as a bunch, and therefore won’t be able to act as one, if the organisation of the opening team time trial is not perfect, there is definitely potential for grievances and complaints.

For a team to be successful in a team time trial they must work in complete harmony. It is the one stage of any race where no rider can ride for themselves. However, because we are in the thick of the transfer season, many team leaders have already announced that they will be leaving their current teams to ride elsewhere. Big name race favourites such as Andy Schleck, Frank Schleck, Roman Kreuziger, Carlos Sastre and Denis Menchov will all be riding for new teams next year. While we should have no reason to believe that this would compromise any rider’s professional approach toward the race, surely the fact that a team leader no longer wishes to ride for his current team will play on the minds of their domestiques.

The 2001 Giro d'Italia podium. The only Giro or Tour podium full of riders who competed in that year's Vuelta.

Andy Schleck and Denis Menchov will be taking part in the Vuelta having finished on the podium of this year’s Tour de France. Surprisingly this is only the 4th occasion on which two Tour podium finishers will ride the Vuelta in the same year. This happened in 1956 (Walkowiak and Bauvin), 1973 (Ocana and Thevenet) and most recently in 2006 (Pereiro and Sastre). The fact that Tour de France winner Alberto Contador will not be competing in his home Grand Tour continues the trend of there never having been a year where the top three finishers in the Tour all competed in the that year’s Vuelta.

Interest in the Vuelta by the Giro podium finishers fares little better, with the Spanish Grand Tour having only once played host to the top three finishers in the Giro. That year was 2001, when Gilberto Simoni, Abraham Olano and Unai Osa filled the Giro podium and all competed in the Vuelta that September. Obviously the Giro comes before the Tour in the racing calendar, as did the Vuelta pre-1995, which means that the Tour podium for the year was unkown before these races occurred, but we won’t let that get in the way of a nice piece of trivia!

The Vuelta a Espana was first raced in 1935. Due to the outbreak of the Spanish civil war and subsequently World War II, it was put on hiatus for a number of years. As a result, the Vuelta has taken place in the same year as a Tour de France on 66 occasions. In addition, the Vuelta has taken place in the same year as a Giro d’Italia on 67 occasions. This gives a total of 133 combinations of Vuelta/Tour and Vuelta/Giro, which in turn gives us 399 riders who finished on the podium in the Tour or Giro in the same year that there was a Vuelta a Espana. Yet, only 62 of these 399 riders decided to race the Vuelta in the same year, that’s just 15%.

The first rider to ride the Vuelta in the same

Fiorenzo Magni. The first rider to finish on the podium of either the Tour or Giro and ride the Vuelta in the same year.

year as finishing on the podium of the Giro or Tour was Fiorenzo Magni aged 35. He won the Giro d’Italia and also won three stages of the Vuelta in 1955. The first rider to finish on the podium of either the Tour or Giro and the Vuelta in the same year was Jacques Anquetil in 1963 when he won both the Vuelta and the Tour de France. In doing so he became the first of only two men to win the rarest of Grand Tour doubles, the other was Bernard Hinault in 1978.

On 18 occasions a rider has finished on the podium of the Vuelta and also on the podium of another Grand Tour in the same year. The most recent examples come from 2008 when Contador won both the Vuelta and the Giro, while Carlos Sastre finished 3rd in the Vuelta and won the Tour. The only rider who has finished on the podium of the Vuelta and also on the podium of another Grand Tour twice is Mr. 2nd Place, Raymond Poulidor. He suffered the ignominy of finishing 2nd in both the Tour and the Vuelta in 1965. But the previous year, he finished 2nd in the Tour and managed to win the Vuelta, a Grand Tour victory oft forgotten amongst his superfluity of near misses at the Tour de France.

Two more interesting Grand Tour podium facts before I call it a day… In 1973, three of the six podium finishers at the Giro and the Tour rode the Vuelta. And these three riders, Eddy Merckx (1st in the Giro), Luis Ocana (1st in the Tour) and Bernard Thevenet (3rd in the Tour) managed to fill the Vuelta a Espana podium.

Finally, that famous 8 second gap meant that 1989 was the only year that the Tour de France podium consisted of the winners of all three Grand Tours, Greg LeMond (Tour), Laurent Fignon (Giro) and Pedro Delgado (Vuelta).

This week Bjarne Riis announced that in the coming years Alberto Contador will attempt to win all three of cycling’s three week Grand Tours in the one season, the ‘Grand Tour Grand Slam’. Also this week, Alberto Contador announced that this is not a goal of his and Riis’s words must have been lost in translation. In addition, Contador’s agent has also played down these reports, claiming that the Tour de France champion will continue to focus solely on the Tour de France. Perhaps the language excuse is valid, or perhaps Riis is getting a bit over enthusiastic with his new signing. Either way, the idea of one cyclist attempting to win the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana in the same year is most certainly a far fetched one.

To win all three Grand Tours, a rider would have to hit a considerable peak of form on three separate and not too distant occasions. I have written before about the likes of Hushovd and Cavendish peaking for Milan San Remo, the Tour and finally for the Worlds as a distinct possibility. There is a six and a half month gap between Milan San Remo and the World Road Race Championships. In contrast, there is less than four and a half months between the start of the Giro d’Italia in May and the end of the Vuelta a Espana in September, considerably less time to hit three form peaks.

In addition to the personal challenge of hitting three separate peaks in form in such a short space of time, there is also the factor that one would be competing against riders who are aiming to peak just once in the year, as Contador did this year for the Tour de France. If Contador was to attempt to stretch out his form two months either side of July, his form for the Tour de France would suffer. It’s not as if Contador had minutes to play with this year in terms of his winning margin. A gap of 39 seconds is not sufficient to be compromising one’s form by attempting to win another two Grand Tours. To illustrate, I give you a hand drawn graph of the form of a rider aiming to peak solely for the Tour de France, versus a rider aiming to peak for each of the three Grand Tours:

The form of a rider aiming to peak solely for the Tour de France (blue), versus the form of a rider aiming to peak for all three Grand Tours (red).

A rider aiming to win all three Grand Tours will be considerably handicapped when racing against riders who are concentrating on the Tour. There will also be riders who are focused solely on the Giro or the Vuelta also.

Obviously, winning three Grand Tours in one season has never been achieved before. Although many riders, including Alberto Contador have done a double of one form or another. As a result of his Astana team being banned from the Tour de France, Contador achieved the Giro/Vuelta double in 2008. As well as Contador, a Grand Tour double, be it Giro/Tour, Giro/Vuelta or Tour/Vuelta, has been achieved by eight other riders. However, all nine of these riders didn’t take to the start line of the third Grand Tour in the year they won the other two.

Even finishing three Grand Tours in one season is a feat which has only ever been achieved by 29 riders. King among them is Marino Lejarreta, who I seem to be referring to a lot lately. He started and finished three Grand Tours in one year on four separate occasions. Remarkably, he did it three times in a row in 1989, 1990 and 1991. His best performance came in 1989 when he finished in the top 20 in all three races, 5th in the Tour de France, 10th in the Giro d’Italia and 20th in the Vuelta a Espana.

However, Lejarreta’s performance in 1989 is not the best performance from a rider to have completed all three Grand Tours in one year. That honour belongs to Gastone Nencini who won the Giro in 1957 and also finished 6th in the Tour and 9th in the Vuelta in the same year. He remains the only rider to have won one of the Grand Tours in a year when he finished the other two. He also won two stages and the mountians classification in the Tour de France that year. However, if we were to add up the final positions in the G.C. of riders who have completed all three Grand Tours in one year, the rider with the lowest score would be the Frenchman Raphael Geminiani who impressively finished 3rd, 4th and 6th in the Vuelta, Giro and Tour respectively in 1955.

While Nencini is the only rider to have won a Grand Tour on his way to completing all three in one year, three other riders have won the mountains classification of a Grand Tour having completed all three. Triple Grand Tour finisher Inaki Gaston won the mountains classification in the Giro d’Italia in 1991, Manuel Fuente did the same in 1971, his first of four mountains jerseys in a row at the Giro. Finally, Federico Bahamontes won the mountains jersey in both the Tour and the Vuelta in 1958 while also finishing 17th in the Giro d’Italia. Bahamontes is the only rider to have won a classification in two separate Grand Tours, having completed three in one year.

Achieving success in all three Grand Tours in one year is clearly a monumental task. Winning all of them is seemingly impossible. However there is another, never been done before, achievable goal which Contador could conceivably aim for, and that is completing all three Grand Tour doubles in his career. Three men, each of whom are five time winners of the Tour, have achieved two of the Grand Tour doubles. Both Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil have done the Tour/Vuelta and the Tour/Giro doubles, while Eddy Merckx is the only rider to have achieved the Tour/Giro and the Giro/Vuelta double. Alberto Contador has already won the Giro and the Vuelta in the one year, he has two doubles left to go, both of which include his major goal of each season, the Tour de France. Three Grand Tours in one season is beyond any man, but a Tour/Giro or Tour/Vuelta double could be within reach of the best Grand Tour rider in the current peloton.