It is a mark of Alberto Contador’s character and palmares that despite his joy at winning the Giro d’Italia, he still doesn’t call his 2015 season a success after he failed in his objective to win the Tour de France.

“I’m happy because I won a very beautiful, and very hard race. It’s a race that only a few cyclists in the world have won but of course the objective was the Giro and Tour,” he told Cyclingnews in an exclusive interview.

When he reached the Tour, he wasn’t at his best and was distanced on both stage 2 and 10 by Chris Froome, as the effects of the Giro took its toll. A crash in the Alps didn’t help him in his bid to regain time as he grew into the race either.

“I was tired in the Tour and couldn’t be at the right level," he said. "During that race it wasn’t a question of my head being in the right place, I was mentally 100 per cent but it was a really hard race. Astana were very aggressive at the Giro and then maybe between the Giro and Tour, when I raced again, maybe I could have done that differently but overall I’m happy.”

Contador won his Giro on the Mortirolo where he had been dropped prior to the climb to change his bike and Astana went full gas to give Fabio Aru and Mikel Landa as big a gap on pink-jersey wearer Contador as they could. But Contador, who started with a deficit of almost a minute, had caught and dropped Aru and had bridged to Landa.

“For me, this, together with the Gardeccia stage in the 2011 Giro, was maybe the two hardest stages of my entire life," says Contador. "When I finished the Mortirolo stage I went to the press conference and didn’t feel too bad. Then when I was heading back to the hotel I started to vomit and I was like that for two hours. I’d put my body on the limit, right on the limit, for a very long time.”

Next year, Contador will target the Tour and will be in peak shape to challenge Froome, who, along with Contador, is the only other active Tour winner in the bunch. Contador says the Brit is the toughest rival he has ever faced and will force the Spaniard to reach a higher level to return to Paris in Yellow for the first time since 2009.

“I think Froome is the most difficult rider I’ve faced. In terms of talent I think that Andy [Schleck] was ahead. He was class. Remember, he was in Saxo before I came here so I know a bit about his training, so I know that he was super, super class. He wasn’t stronger than me in the time trials and that’s really the problem with Froome, especially now in the flat time trials. If it’s an uphill or hard time trial then I don’t have too much of a problem but when it’s flat like the one we had in Mont-Saint-Michel in 2013 and you look at his average of 55kph, I can’t do that with my weight. If the speed is down at 49-50 then I have a chance.”

While it hasn’t been confirmed for sure that Contador will retire after next season, he is sure of what he will do once he is no longer a pro: work with his Specialized-Alberto Contador Foundation team.

“I’ve given my life to cycling and after I retire I’ll concentrate more on the foundation, which is a really good project,” he says.

“You look at France and Holland and they’re producing more young pros. That’s not happening in Spain. If I’m a young Spanish rider there’s not enough riders at the same level so we’ve put a big part of the foundation budget into travel so that Spanish riders can travel to Europe, otherwise they’re not competing at the highest level. Look at me, Froome put on me the pressure to improve my level and it’s the same for the younger riders in Spain. They can win races at home but then they go to the Worlds and they don’t finish. So we take our riders to France, Belgium, all over the place so they have the experience.”