Richie Porte failed to turn Team Sky’s perfect plan B into a successful campaign, but squad’s principal Dave Brailsford firmly stood behind his rider, claiming that the 29-year old Australian has what takes to become a grand tour leader when all significant elements will fall into right places.

“I think I’ve said before we got here and I wasn’t being disrespectful to anybody but I think I said that in a race like this it’s not often, but it can happen, but it’s not often that somebody switches to plan B and plan B wins,” Brailsford told the press at the start of stage 19.”

“It’s normally that plan A runs all the way through without too many scrapes and they win. You don’t see too many plan Bs winning. That’s what we tried to do with Richie.”

Still, there certainly are different approaches to measuring a success and even though for Team Sky winning the Tour de France seems to be the only satisfying enough option, still their plan B adopted during the 2013 Giro d’Italia or the one that Tinkoff-Saxo quickly came up with during this year’s la Grande Boucle seem to be more effective than anything the British squad did this season.

Nonetheless, Porte suffered a number of blows early this season to pull out of the Giro d’Italia where he was expected to by Team Sky leader, and even though everything suggested that things eventually started to function properly for the 29-year old Tasmanian during the Tour, yet another illness quickly hampered all his hopes.

“Sometimes in life sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. This was a case where things didn’t work out and if he had 100 per cent health and it didn’t work out then that would be one scenario but he genuinely got ill which knocked the wind out of his sails, to be honest,” Brailsford added.

Asked about Porte’s sights on leading Team Sky in the grand tour events in the future, Brailsford seemed to be convinced about his ability to handle difficulties of demanding three-week long racing. At least when it comes down to its physical aspects…

“Physically, yes I think there’s no doubt about it. With the right conditions and the right form, then of course.”

That response promoted the question over the mental side of the rider’s game.

“Yeah I think he does have it. He just needs to get into a scenario where he’s on top and he’s fighting from the front. I’d still back him to lead a team in a grand tour.”

“You dust yourself down, you recalibrate, you set yourself new goals and off you go again. Doing that alone is one thing but you’ve got to do it with desire, hunger and a real drive. For us, as in all sports teams, when it doesn’t go your way it really makes you want it more and I think that’s good for the team.”