Astana finished 2015 with an exceptional second half of the season. Fabio Aru won the Vuelta a Espana and Vincenzo Nibali triumohed at Il Lombardia. The two Italians will again be the leaders in 2016 and manager Alexander Vinokourov has made his plans, with the Sicilian set to focus on the Giro d'Italia while the Sardinian will make hus debut in the Tour de France.

The Kazakh team has won three grand tours in the last three years: Nibali won the 2013 Giro and the Tour in 2014 and Aru won the 2015 Vuelta. Vinokourov wants to continue that streak and has distributed the tasks after Mikel Landa has left for Team Sky.

"We will meet in late November. Without doubt, I am certain that Nibali and Aru will have two different programmes. Vincenzo feels a lot towards the Giro, he wants to return. Aru is 25 and he has progressed extraordinarily: in two seasons he has been third, fifth, second and first in the Grand Tours that he’s ridden - there is nobody like him in the world. In two or three years he can win the Tour and I would like to test him immediately. They are two great leaders that have won a lot, it is right that everyone has their own objective," he confirms in an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport .

In 2016, the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro will be have a road race on a hard course just after the Tour de France. "For his race, I see chances for  Nibali who is more of a classics rider than Aru and the course is very technical for him. We have to decide how he will prepare for this, and a possibility is that Vincenzo will also race at the Tour to prepare for the Olympics, it hasn’t been ruled out. I would love to see Aru out at the Olympics but it will depend on how he responds to the efforts of the Tour," he says.

Vinokourov points out the differences between the two Italian riders.  “Vincenzo is a leader, he is a great champion, but he must be more consisten. Not only at the table but also in the race be must establish his own group. Fabio is more stubborn than Vincenzo. He was very quick to win but last year he surprised me with his third place in the Giro, that he could have settled for that and said: ‘I will go home and concentrate on the Vuelta’, and he won those two stages," says the Astana manager.

Regarding Nibali, he acknowledges that it has not been an easy season and praises his reaction after his expulsion from the Vuelta. "I talked a lot with Vincenzo during the year and even in these days. He started the Tour with too much pressure on him and knew he had to stay in the race after the first ten days and had to react on the road. He is an example for the staff and his teammates. And then there's what happened at the Vuelta. I was in Kazakhstan when we had the expulsion of Shefer and Nibali. It was very hard for the team's image, the expulsion was fair. When Vincenzo arrived in Astana in September, I said that the sponsors always believed in him, that he had to react and not die. And he did it like a champion," he tells the Italian newspaper.