Might just be an issue of the types of climb though. I mean, somebody like Tejay van Garderen started out with some useful puncheur skills, but he neglected these as he aimed more for GC battles, aiming more at climbing endurance and so on, but largely found his best results restricted to those races with longer and more consistent climbs, so Catalunya was the only Spanish race he ever really showed up well at, and he was better suited to the Tour than the Giro or Vuelta and that's where his best results are. Later in his career he got back to being good at steeper stuff and had a great showing on Rettenbachferner for example, so it might just be that consistency is McNulty's issue or he hasn't yet figured which are the races that best suit his skillset to maximise his results. No shame in this at all.
I mean, it does kind of bail Jumbo out because it meant Thursday's tactical errors became irrelevant, but they weren't to know that. As I did say though, we as fans ought to be grateful for some of the classic Rabofail now that they have some of the strongest riders in the péloton, because it necessitates things like today. It doesn't vindicate Thursday, because Rogla had to go a lot deeper for the win today than he would have done otherwise and they could have had a much easier day of it since McNulty wound up not being a factor, but it does mean that they don't have to pay for their errors this time, and we the fans get a much better spectacle than had it been like the 2011 edition where everybody in the upper echelons of the GC was just happy to sprint up the classic side of Usartza, which this year would have seen it leading to a six man sprint for time bonuses, maybe 5 if Gaudu dropped but that seems unlikely given he and Rogla didn't lose a great deal of time on the climb and he wouldn't have been working so hard had he been just in the group and not with the win on the cards. Maybe we need to start begging for Jumbo to throw things away earlier in races rather than at the last minute like in Le Tour or Paris-Nice, because they're a lot more interesting when they are fighting from behind or when they have to rescue something from the race. Yes, even Sepp Kuss.