In the Bernard Hinault, Eddy Merckx and Miguel Indurain eras, a Giro, Vuelta or Tour de France which lacked the dominant force in professional cycling would have a completely different complexion. Something similar has happened in the six years since Team Sky began to acquire an iron grip on the grand tours, which is why Simon Yates’s victory in the Vuelta a España, like Tom Dumoulin’s in the 2017 Giro, offers a glimpse of what cycling might have become without Dave Brailsford’s drive for world domination.

Like Dumoulin in Italy Yates triumphed in an open race with a kaleidoscopic pattern of ever-changing complexity; the final stage of 101km on Sunday in Madrid, won by Elia Viviani in a bunch sprint, was that rare event in the last three weeks: a predictable day in Spain. The lack of pattern was seen in frequent victories for long-range breakaways, giving teams such as EF Education, Dimension Data, and Cofidis a taste of success that has come rarely this year. There was even, on Thursday at Lleida, a cliff-hanging finish in a flat stage.

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The constant uncertainty boiled down to the fact that on a brutally demanding course, where days without a mountain-top finish felt like the exception, no team – including Yates’s Mitchelton-Scott squad – were able or willing to shut down the race. With no lengthy time trial as in Dumoulin’s Giro there was no tactical high point to act as an obvious focus. The only semblance of control came in the summit finishes, where Yates either limited his losses, or gained time, usually in small increments, until the final Friday’s mountain top finish at La Rabassa.

Yates and Mitchelton-Scott’s strategy centred on saving their leader’s energy and that of his team for the final demanding few days after the time trial in the Basque country on the final Tuesday. It called for discipline and ice-cool nerves but trying to ensure that Yates finished the Vuelta strongly had a potential spin-off: the riders who had finished the Tour de France, such as Nairo Quintana and Alejandro Valverde, would be likely to fade in the final week, if the evidence of Chris Froome’s 2017 campaign was anything to go by, when the Team Sky leader planned carefully to be on form in the Vueltabut went slightly off the boil in the last few days.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Yates won an enthralling race. Photograph: Manuel Bruque/EPA

That proved to be the case, with Movistar’s duo struggling horribly in the closing two days as younger, fresher opposition emerged in the form of Enric Mas and Miguel Ángel López. Like Yates, the young Colombian was a man of the Giro this spring, where he finished third; the same was true of another who came good in the final week, the Frenchman Thibaut Pinot, winner of two tough mountain-top finishes at Lagos de Covadonga and La Rabassa in the space of seven days. All four will now go forward as favourites at what is expected to be a diabolically tough world championships in Innsbruck in two weeks’ time.

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Mitchelton’s need to conserve their resources led to intriguing tactical decisions, flying in the face of the script written so often in recent years, by Team Sky in particular. Those moments underlined their need to box clever rather than imposing themselves on the race, in particular during the hilly 11th stage through north-west Spain from Mombuey to Luintra, where their leader had won his first Vuelta stage in 2016. Yates had taken the red leader’s jersey a couple of days earlier at the Vuelta’s first truly tough mountain-top finish, La Covatilla, but by only a single second from Valverde.

Midway through the stage, Mitchelton took the decision to let a large, threatening move including Pinot go clear, with the Frenchman looking likely at one stage to take the race leader’s jersey. The Australian squad had placed their second-string climber, Jack Haig, in the break, so he too would gain time, but there was a very obvious risk in letting Pinot potentially gain time. Mitchelton called Movistar’s bluff, as the Spanish squad was facing the same potential threat, and they took up the challenge.

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Movistar were far from happy, as the convention in recent years has been that teams do not relinquish a leader’s jersey willingly, no matter how early they have taken it. Froome’s victory in this year’s Giro apart, this is cycling the Sky way: remain on the front foot, work from a position of strength. “They played their game, we played our game,” said Yates when asked about the episode on Saturday, explicitly making the connection with the lessons learned at the Giro in the spring. “We needed to save energy where we needed to otherwise we know how it ends up, like the Giro; we played our cards and came out on top, so for me we had the perfect strategy.”

That led to something else seen rarely in recent grand tours; the race leader’s jersey being “loaned” to a rider who was not a threat overall, again a risky strategy, which can backfire on occasion. A day after the Luintra move – where it was Pinot who faded in the final kilometres – a strong second-ranker, Jesús Herrada, of the French team Cofidis, took the race lead after Mitchelton, again, let the racing develop rather than riding to conserve the leader’s jersey. The upshot was a 48-hour breather for the Australians before Yates made his move at Las Praeres to set up the tense final week, with Valverde breathing down his neck until the kilometres and his advancing years made themselves felt.