Alberto Contador looks to capture elusive double, join all-time greats

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Even before Lance Armstrong fell from grace, many fans argued that the Texan could never claim a spot among the best of all time because he focused only on the Tour de France. For most of cycling history, goes this theory, even the biggest stars had the much harder task of racing to win all season.

Emblematic of this immense pressure in the old days was Eddy Merckx, winner of 525 races over a 13-year career and one of only seven people to triumph at both the Tour and its Italian equivalent, the Giro d'Italia, in a single season.

This month, Spanish star cyclist Alberto Contador is in the Tour trying to add his name to that incredibly select group. After crashing out of the marquee French race last year, he began this season with the stated target of pulling off pro racing's first Giro/Tour double since the late 1990s.

"If I win just another Tour, it's not going to change my career, but if I achieve the double, this is something people are going to remember," Contador said at the prerace news conference two weeks ago. "I take a lot of motivation from this."

It's an audacious goal.

Triumphing in a three-week "grand tour" is a matter of strength, tactics, selfless teammates and the luck to have the cards fall right. Doing it twice – with barely a month in between to recover from the gruelling effort – is among the hardest challenges in sports. And pulling it off when your top competitors have built their whole season around contesting only the Tour de France makes it harder still.

"I think riders today, they don't believe or want to believe they could do it, they just want to win the Tour," said Irish pro Stephen Roche, one of the four living people to have pulled off the double, who in his retirement runs a cycling tourism business on Majorca.

"Contador's the only one brave enough to attempt."

The 32-year-old Contador is often called the best stage racer of his generation. He is credited with a total of seven wins in the historic grand tours – two Giros, two Tours and three times at the Vuelta a Espana – in spite of a ban that cost him two prime years of his career. But pulling off the double would elevate him to another level again.

"You're going on a list of the most revered names in the sport of cycling," said broadcaster Phil Liggett, who has been calling the Tour de France for decades.

"It's nearly 20 years since [Marco] Pantani won. But it's still very much a wanted target. If you look at the guys who've won it – Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault, Stephen Roche, Eddy Merckx, of course, Miguel Indurain – these are the best names the sport's ever known. These are the best men, and I think if you want to go out and look back at your career, you want to say you've done what they've done, because they're the icons of the sport."

Jockeying to deprive him of his prize is Italian Vincenzo Nibali, the defending Tour champion, Briton Chris Froome, who won in 2013, and Colombian Nairo Quintana, a rising star and the favourite for many, as well as a handful of lesser known racers.

There's still a lot of racing to be done in the Tour, which has wended its way from the Netherlands to Belgium and then into France, but Contador already has shown some weakness.

He lost time in the short solo race against the clock on the opening day. More seriously for his ambitions, on Stage 3 he didn't match Froome in the final bit of a nasty climb up the so-called "wall of Huy" in eastern Belgium.

After that stage Contador acknowledged that Froome was "very strong" but noted that the race had barely begun. He lost a bit more time Sunday in the team time trial, heading into the rest day 1:03 behind the Briton, who is firmly in the driver's seat.

But with the big mountain stages looming, no one would count out the Spaniard whose nickname translates as "the gunslinger."

Contador showed his toughness in the 2014 Tour when he crashed hard but rode over another mountain before quitting the race, only to learn then that he'd broken his leg. He showed his nerve in the Route du Sud last month when he attacked on the descent of a Pyreneen mountain into Bagnères-de-Luchon, putting enough time into Quintana to win the stage and secure the overall victory. And he showed the depth of his strength in this year's Giro d'Italia.

In one notable Giro moment he fought back after a flat tire on a key stage. At the base of the Mortirolo – one of the hardest climbs on the pro circuit – he was 51 seconds behind challenger Fabio Aru. He rode up the mountain solo, reeling in and dropping one cyclist after another, before catching and crushing Aru. On another stage he attacked 40 kilometres from the end, finishing second on the day and extending his overall lead.

But Contador also showed weakness late in the Giro and his team wasn't as strong as it could have been. And the second half of the Tour is a punishing grind of mountains that will expose any lingering fatigue from earlier in the season.

When he pulled off his double, in 1987, Roche had to dig so deep on one climb that he collapsed at the finish line and had to be given oxygen. "At La Plagne I buried myself … but that saved my Tour," he recalled. "I was totally wasted."

But he believes that the psychological burden facing Contador is the harder part of his attempt.

"If you underestimate the challenge ahead, it can all go belly-up on the last week of the Tour," Roche said. "In the last week it's more the mental, it's more the mind, more the brain."