No one can accuse Alberto Contador of having won the 91st Giro d'Italia at a canter. The 25-year-old Spaniard may have rode to overall victory without recording a single stage scalp, but Contador's triumph was never as likely as it may have seemed on paper.

Granted, a fully fit Contador - the Tour de France champion and one of the most exciting talents of his generation - would have been a clear favourite for overall victory in normal circumstances.

But the unlikely events which combined to see Contador and his Astana team ride in the Giro were far from normal.

Invited at the 11th Hour and with just six days to go until the race's Sicilian start, Astana's presence in the gruppo was as surprising as it was controversial.

Omitted from the Tour owing to the team's embarrassing record on doping, Astana were given a wildcard entry into Italy in what many saw as a political duel between the two major tour organisations.

With the chance of defending his Tour crown scuppered, Contador made the decision to cut short a holiday and join his Astana team-mates for the start in Italy.

Although he had won the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon stage race in March and the Tour of the Basque Country stage race in April, Contador entered Italy shorn of form, practice and precedent.

He had never featured in the Giro before, whilst his last race on Italian ground came four years previously.

Unsurprisingly, a rusty-looking Astana could only manage the eighth best time in the opening team time trial in Palermo.

But the real challenge would come in the final 10 days of racing when the riders hit the Dolomites and the Alps.

Contador admitted prior to the race that he had not even started mountain training for the season when he received the call from Astana headquarters beckoning him to Sicily.

To make matters worse, the Spaniard had broken a bone in his arm during a fall in the eighth stage.

But Contador's tenacious displays over the high roads in the north of Italy underlined his champion credentials.

While he could not put on the kind of displays of climbing excellence that lit up the 2007 Tour when he did battle with the Dane Michael Rasmussen, Contador managed to check each and every attack that was launched against him - most notably in stage 19 when the likes of Riccardo Ricco, Gilberto Simoni, Emanuele Sella and Denis Menchov threw everything but the kitchen sink at him during the fearful ascent of the Mortirolo.

It was a perfect example of cycling chess - and Contador emerged from the fray as the Kasparov of the peloton.

A day earlier, Contador's lack of true form or practice had shone through when he looked to have cracked on the Monte Pora. But grit and determination saw the Spaniard limit his losses to Italian pair Danilo Di Luca and Ricco and keep control of the maglia rosa.

Contador may not have won the Giro with flare - but he did win it fair and square.

Having become the first Spaniard since Miguel Indurain to win in Italy, many are now tipping the man from Madrid to go on and emulate his compatriot and five-time Tour de France winner.

But Contador has more in common as a rider and as a personality with Lance Armstrong than he does with Big Mig.

Like Armstrong, who won seven successive Tours after surviving a life-threatening cancer, Contador has had to bring himself back from the brink on his way to becoming one of current cycling's greats.

In 2004, when he was with the now defunct team Liberty Seguros, Contador spent 10 days in a coma after a congenital vascular disorder caused a swelling in his brain.

Many thought his career would have been thrown into jeopardy, but the young rider seemed to come back hungrier and stronger than before.

It was maybe this inner strength, hinged with his sheer natural ability, which caught Armstrong's eye when he brought Contador to the Discovery team in 2007 as his natural successor.

The first part of that succession was assured with his Tour de France triumph last summer. Now, with a Giro win under his belt and both the Olympics and the Vuelta to look forward to, Contador could soon become one of the few riders who have won all of cycling's top prizes - something even Armstrong failed to do.

Like Armstrong, however, Contador's brilliance will for some always be shrouded in doubt. His involvement in the infamous Operacion Puerto episode - "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," he insisted - and his 'default' victory over Rasmussen have aroused much suspicion, while the storm surrounding Astana shows no sign of abating.

It would be a shame if the same atmosphere of rumour and disbelief that clouded the twilight of Armstrong's career was to blight the early stages of Contador's stellar rise. At just 25 years of age, the all-rounder still has so much to offer the sport. The Tour will arguably be all the worse for his absence.

Felix Lowe / Eurosport