Simon Yates joined the exclusive club of Grand Tour champions on Sunday and then began plotting the next one. It is not likely to be the Tour de France, at least not yet. Instead, Yates revealed, it is the Giro d’Italia that will probably be his priority in 2019.

“My gut feeling is that I’d like to go back to the Giro because I have unfinished business there,” he said, the memory still raw of his collapse, 48 hours from the end of the race, in May. “I’ve not thought about it too much because I’ve been concentrating on this and the world championships [in Innsbruck in two weeks]. But my gut feeling is that’s where I’d like to try again.”

Simon Yates’s Vuelta a España win offers glimpse of world without Sky | William Fotheringham Read more

It will depend on the course, he added, though it is not easy to imagine one that would not suit him. Over three weeks in Spain Yates proved himself a strong climber and all-rounder, able to look after himself in time trials and flat stages and put his rivals to the sword in the mountains.

As he reflected on his triumph he kept returning to the slow, gradual progress he and his team made to reach this point. For Yates himself the journey began some years earlier, on the British talent team, where he, Laura Trott, Lizzie Armitstead and others were coached by Frances Newstead. Newstead says that her clearest memory of the Vuelta winner was his “tenacity, his family’s total commitment to cycling and his complete lack of ego”.

If British Cycling turned him into a world champion on the track, with a 20-year-old Yates winning the points race in Minsk in 2013, it has been with his Australian professional team, Mitchelton-Scott, that he has developed into a Grand Tour winner.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Simon Yates during Stage 15 of the Vuelta a España. Photograph: Tim de Waele/Getty Images

“It’s been a very long process,” he said. “The huge increase in funding for British Cycling happened when I started my career and I came through the British system until I turned professional. I always had great support and I’ve slowly improved until this moment. Over the last four or five years since I’ve been a professional the team and myself have had the aim of trying to win a Grand Tour. That was the reason I signed with this team because I believed I could do it.”

The other two riders around whom the project was built were Esteban Chaves, the Colombian who finished second in the 2016 Giro then third in the Vuelta in the same season, and Yates’ twin brother, Adam.

Initially it was Adam who took the biggest strides, winning the Tour of Turkey in his first year, with Simon crashing out. When the news was conveyed mid-stage that his brother was out with a broken collarbone, Adam responded: “Keep your mind on the race.”

Simon Yates’ Vuelta glory built on endless patience and iron discipline Read more

The brothers are close but fiercely driven. Asked who would be the next British rider to follow Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas and now him, Simon said: “I think he has the same name as me, but we’ll see. I’d really like to see my brother step up and I believe he can.”

In their mid-20s the differences between the Yates twins might be more pronounced but they remain subtle, says their team’s sports director, Matt White. “Their personalities are a bit different,” White said. “Adam is naturally more aggressive, which works well for one-day races, and Simon’s a bit more tempered. But the differences are small.

Sign up to The Recap, our weekly email of editors’ picks.

“They’re twins so they have a special relationship; sometimes they have a lot of contact, sometimes they don’t. When they came to the team they didn’t have girlfriends and they didn’t race together much. They shared an apartment in Girona and at the end of the season Simon said to Adam: ‘You don’t mind if my girlfriend stays, do you?’ Adam says: ‘Girlfriend? You never told me you had a girlfriend.’ The relationship had been going on three or four months. Sometimes they’re in contact every day. What are they talkng about? Probably bikes, not personal stuff.”

In Madrid on Sunday evening Yates was flanked by riders younger than him in Enric Mas, 23, and Miguel Ángel López, 24: the youngest Grand Tour podium since 1936.

“It’s probably a good time for me to win a Grand Tour because these guys are getting faster and faster every year,” said Yates. But, at 26, and the youngest British rider to win a Grand Tour, so is he.