Late in the evening of the last Sunday of May 2021, when Egan Bernal and a small host of friends, team staff and admirers filed into the press room in central Milan's plush Palazzo dei Giureconsulti as the winner of that year's Giro d'Italia, it felt like the almost inevitable continuation of what had already been a decade of Sky/Ineos Grenadiers Grand Tour dominance.
Things are never as simple as they sometimes look in cycling, though, and seven Tour de France victories from 2012 to 2019 and three other Grand Tour wins in the same period had already seen challenges to that particular narrative – major ones, too.
