What we learned from the Tour

While it's hard to rate a team bereft of its captain and three strongest climbers, Euskaltel's Tour performance still deserves an evaluation. There were plenty of positives over the three-weeks, but there's still quite a lot to work at in the upcoming editions.

Euskaltel should have brought a younger team.
The orange outfit was one of the oldest of the 22 participating teams, with only 24-year-old Gorka Izagirre under the age of 30. Jorge Azanza wasn't up to much and Pablo Urtasun found it tough after his near-miss on stage five. In a year in which several of the sport's future greats (Sagan, Pinot, Van Garderen, Rolland etc.) made names for themselves, you wonder if the likes of Sicard might have thrived as well. The team is right to field Landa in the Vuelta before sending him to France, but along with Sicard, Ion Izagirre and Peio Bilbao, he should be given a shot at the greatest race of all next July.

Gorka Izagirre is a star in the making.
Seemingly equally adept at all kinds of terrain, Ion's elder brother eventually came through with flying colours after some questionable performances in the Alps. He's already become a mainstay of the team in the biggest races, and his performances over the last few years bodes well for his own, not to mention his team's, future.

Egoi Martínez is everything but a spent force...
The 34-year-old stepped up to the plate and pulled out his best Tour performance ever when his team needed him the most. His 17th place overall showed he's still got a few years left in him at the top table,  and the former Tour de l'Avenir victor showed some of the form that attracted the mighty Discovery Channel back in the winter of 2005.

...yet Euskaltel remain, decidedly, a one-man show
While the team deserves the utmost praise for their aggressiveness and presence throughout, Euskaltel without Samu is a pretty toothless outfit. Not that that's anything new. Yet it's hard to see what the sporting directors can do differently. With only three (as of yet) real general classification riders in the squad, you can hardly field them all in the Tour and send reserve teams to the Giro and the Vuelta. Sending Nieve, Samu and Antón to one GT each is the only reasonable option, but it leaves the team in a perilous state if one of them falters or crashes out - as has been the case more often than not the last couple of years what with Antón's enforced DNFs over in Spain and now with Samu in France.

The team has grown up.
The way the team took care of Samu and kept him out of trouble expertly in the first week shows the progress that's been made under the tutelage of Gorka Gerrikagoitia and, earlier on, Igor González de Galdeano. While the orange jerseys were easily spotted towards the rear end of the pack in the days of Mayo, Zubeldia, Laiseka et al., Euskaltel look much more like a "proper" GT team nowadays.