rhubroma said:
That he would have won the Tour had his main two rivals not crashed out, remains pur conjecture.
I would have expected both Contador and Froome to have been flying in the mountains. Was Nibali good enough to withstand them? Unfortunately we will never know, but I think both were stronger than the Sicilian uphill, but probably less then some imagine.
Though counterfactuals are fundamentally unknowable, some counterfactual scenarios are more likely than others. We can analyse them, and in my view, say quite a bit about them with confidence.
Before Contador crashed, Nibali had some probability to win the Tour, given everything known at that point. That assessment was of course affected by, and took into account, uncertainty regarding Nibali's form in the mountains.
What happened next is that Nibali went on to be by far the strongest guy in the mountains climbing better than ever, exceeding all expectations. Later, analysis even revealed (see for instance the pic posted above) that his climbing was comparable to the best performances in recent years. This means that given what we know now, the chance Nibali would have won, had F and C not crashed, is significantly greater than what it was before Contador crashed. That's just probability theory.
I defer to the market for an estimate of what that chance was thus I'm quite confident Nibali's counterfactual chance to win the 2014 Tour in the event neither F nor C crash exceeds that of F and C. Not because he was stronger, but because he gained a lot of time in the cobbles and turned out much stronger than I (or the markets) expected, enough for me to believe he would have held on.
What if you don't defer to the market for what the chance was that Nibali would go on to win after the cobbles? Suppose instead that after the cobbled stage, you gave Nibali only a tiny chance to win the Tour. If you thought so despite his 2+min headstart, you must have expected C or F to be much stronger in the mountains. That means you either didn't expect Nibali's climbing would be as strong as it was, or you did, but you thought C or F would be much stronger than F was in 2013. In the former case, the conclusion is the same as before: You must now regard it as much more likely Nibali would have won, had they not crashed, than you did back then. The latter case seems to be the only way out for the Nibali detractors.