BlurryVII said:
He was not aiming to peak for the Giro in 2015, he said it himself man. Instead of going for one super peak like 14' and 16', he wanted to be decent at both Giro and Tour. Didn't work out for the Tour because of Astana, the hard racing, double too hard overall. Simple as that.
2013 was his first full year after his ban, and after dominating GTs since 07', god knows how many reasons there are to explain this one bad year, the only one where he didn't win a GT.
And people don't give him enough credit for the Vuelta 12' win, coming in with close to no racing days at all.
He's by far the most consistent stage racer, not only in winning GTs but also throughout the season itself. And none of his rivals have gone through the bad luck and difficult circumstances he's been through since 2010.
No. Didn't work out only because the double is, nowadays, too hard to pull off. No matter how easy you can win one, when it comes to the Tour, all the big guys are there in a very good form.
Specialization makes racing more competitive, which undermines the possibility of being able to win two GTs in a row while they're very little separated from each other. There's no preparation that can enable you to win, no matter how good you are. And Contador, while not as good as he once were 6 or 7 years ago (I just don't believe he's able to perform as he did in Verbier or Etna, where he was able to pull numbers that he hasn't achieved ever since), he's still almost as good or even better than Froome or Quintana. Let's wait a couple more weeks and check it out.
Anyway, while I disagree that he isn't the most luck deprived of his main rivals (for instance, Quintana didn't win last year's Vuelta possibly because of illness; Froome also had to abandon due to crash, much like in le Tour of 2014. In 2011's Vuelta he didn't win, because Sky chose to favour Wiggins, like in 2012's Tour, otherwise he'd have 2 more GT wins under his belt at least), I agree that he's a fairly consistent guy when it comes to GT wins. That's just a matter of looking to his palmares and realizing that since 2012 he only didn't win anything in 2013.