Team Sky with new leader, Tasmanian Richie Porte, second left, powers through the seventh stage of the Tour de France.Source: AP

RICHIE Porte has the mental capacity to step up to his new role as Sky team leader and succeed, his manager, Dave Brailsford, believes.

The 29-year-old Tasmanian has been thrust from chief back-up to principal player in Team Sky after reigning Tour de France champion Chris Froome pulled out injured.

Froome was the hot favourite coming into the race having dominated last year, but Vin­cenzo Niblai is in yellow and 2½ minutes ahead of new favourite Alberto Contador.

Porte is perhaps the closest of Nibali’s challengers as he is the only rider within two minutes of the Italian apart from young Pole Michal Kwiatkowski at 50sec, who is something of anto be organized as a hierarchy, in which each area processes both color and form, the areas along the pathway into the parietal lobe process the direction of stimulus motion. Visual information about object identity and spatial location, initially processed in separate cortical pathways, appears to be integrated in cortex located within the superior temporal sulcus. Data from cerebral blood flow studies indicate the existence in humans, as in monkeys, of two distinct visual processing pathways. In humans, processing of object identity and spatial location depends primarily on functional interactions between posterior cortical areas in the right hemisphere. Old subjects, compared to young, show reduced functional separation of the two pathways, suggesting recruitment of visual areas belonging to the "other" pathway in order to compensate for reductions in