To a dull reception on the deserted slopes of the Col d’Eze in March, Richie Porte became a two-times champion at Paris-Nice after a dominant ride in the final day’s mountain time trial. Less than a week later he notched another major win, further south in Catalonia, overshadowing three Grand Tour winners no less, to collect another narrow but deserved overall victory.

After months of near misses – at the Tour Down Under, where Porte was far and away the strongest rider, but ran second all the same, and at the Volta a Algarve, where he was misdirected by an overzealous marshall in the time trial to see his title hopes melt – and after a thoroughly forgettable 2014, his fortunes appear finally to have changed.

These aren’t the kind of results that alter the course of a career, but they’re long overdue for Porte, who’s had more than his fair share of setbacks in the last 18 months. In two short weeks he reminded his doubters not only that he can ride, but that he can win.

In Paris-Nice, he pegged back a minor deficit to Polish world champion Michal Kwiatkowski over the week-long race’s undulating parcours, finally taking the lead, and the overall title, only on the race’s final day. In the Volta a Catalunya, he found himself on top early after an unlikely break on stage three and defended his position to the race’s conclusion.

And just last week, coming off a stint at altitude at Team Sky’s training camp base in Tenerife, Porte notched his third overall win of the year at the Giro del Trentino, his final tune-up before the Grande Partenza of the 98th Giro d’Italia. This is a Richie Porte that we’ve only previously been offered glimpses, a sharp, lean, tactically astute rider that seems unworried by the travails he’s set to face. Porte arrives at the Giro deservedly among the favourites.

His country’s greatest, Cadel Evans, remains the only Australian to win a Grand Tour. Photograph: Mark Gunter/AFP/Getty Images

But to stand on the top step of the podium in Milan come May’s end, Porte needs to do what he’s never done before: replicate what he has managed to achieve on a consistent basis at one-week events for the duration of a three-week Grand Tour. Porte has to date only once navigated a three-week race to a promising conclusion, way back at the 2010 Giro as a first-year professional when he finished seventh overall. Then he wore pink, and won a legion of fans as an affable, bright talent ready to lead the next generation. Instead, his career stalled. The Porte that fans had clamoured for in 2010 was a shadow the following season and by 2012 was taking a backseat at Team Sky where focus had shifted to nurturing Bradley Wiggins and then Chris Froome to Tour success.



Rather than build and develop on what he’d shown, Porte’s career regressed. Illness and fatigue played their part; the weight of expectation that comes with promise too. And while he’s grown stronger as the years have passed, it’s only been in the last two years where Porte’s potential has been properly explored. In 2013 we got a hint, with his first Paris-Nice triumph, and his rallying ride beside Froome in the same year’s Tour. But it was only a hint.

Last year’s aborted attempt to take on the Giro d’Italia as outright leader at Team Sky was the first time in Porte’s career he has been presented with the opportunity to ride a Grand Tour chasing a result of his own. After that unravelled, Froome’s Tour de France abandonment gave Porte another opportunity in July, a ‘soft’ but unconvincing audition that was ultimately scuttled by illness. Indeed, in a professional career that began with Saxo Bank in 2010, and is now entering its sixth full year, Porte, remarkably, remains untested as a Grand Tour leader.

Ahead of next month’s Giro, and despite his impressive form, this is the major caveat to his ultimate success. Consider this: of Porte’s major rivals for the Giro – Rigoberto Uran, Alberto Contador, and Fabio Aru – all three stood on Grand Tour podiums last year (Uran and Aru at the Giro, and Contador on the top step of La Vuelta a España). All three led their teams. Porte should have, but didn’t.

At his best, Porte has the measure of all of them, he can climb at a rate that only Chris Froome, and perhaps the irrepressible Nairo Quintana can match, and is among the best time trial riders of his peers. Porte has out-muscled Contador in the mountains before, he can do it again. Aru has looked lacklustre so far this year, and may well be underdone come May, and Uran wins even less than Porte. With Quintana and Vincenzo Nibali turning their attentions to the Tour and Contador juggling ambitions at both the Giro and Tour, there will be no better opportunity for Porte to notch a big result.

Still, he has it all to do. Greatness beckons in Italy, but so too the spectre of an unwelcome failure. The Giro d’Italia is set to be the defining race of his career.