It’s a tale as old as the race. A rider starts the Tour de France aiming for the general classification, and for one way or another, that doesn’t work out, so their attention turns to winning a stage to still come away with something to show for the months of hard work they’ve put into this one event.
Ben O’Connor (Jayco AlUla) is one such example of this in 2025. But unfortunately for him, so are several other riders, and all the usual breakaway specialists, with the number of opportunities dropping each day as the Tour nears its conclusion.
As the Tour heads into the Alps on stage 18, only three chances remain for the breakaway, and O’Connor will be one of the riders hoping that – on at least one of those days – the GC riders allow the break to take the glory, and that it will be him who raises his arms over the line.
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O’Connor last won a Tour stage in 2021 on the road to Tignes, and after his GC hopes took a hit in the hectic first week, he is hoping a return to the Alps could deliver the salve his Tour ambitions and preparations need.
“I think probably the best is Friday, the stage to La Plagne,” he said when asked which stage could be primed for a breakaway win.
“I really like this kind of stage, I like the climbs that it goes over, so that for me is probably the one that is the most targeted in my mind. It’s pretty straightforward, because you make the break on legs when you’re in the mountains, it’s not really tactical or following the right group.”
O’Connor has so far had the legs to get in many of the winning breaks – bar the stage to Ventoux, where he thought it would be a GC and didn’t target the breakaway – but hasn’t quite managed to turn that into a win yet.
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With so many riders in the same position of wanting to win a breakaway stage this week, and many of them repeat guests in the day’s escape, the composition of moves could prove crucial to O’Connor’s success in the days to come.
“I prefer just to be with a group of committed boys to be honest,” he said of who is best to be in a move with. “When Yatesy won [Simon Yates, stage 10 – ed.], he didn’t really ride much at all. Probably the worst is when you’re with Visma or UAE, they just play the GC card, but then that never really happens, so that can be the most frustrating group of guys to be with, because it’s not really that fair. But it’s cycling.”
Getting in that right move with the right riders can be a challenge, especially when teams like UAE Team Emirates-XRG have occasionally been quite selective about who gets in – though never before as much as on stage 16, O’Connor said – and that drawn-out process can make it harder.
“I think it’s just, when it goes on for so long, there’s just a much bigger time frame for figuring out when is the right move, because people get tired, and then you think it’s the right one, and then it’s not, and this whole cycle starts again. So it’s been kind of funny trying to make the breaks here,” O’Connor said.
The other sticking point for breakaway riders is the role of riders like Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard and their teams, who sometimes chase down the break to go for the win themselves, further adding to the dominance they have on this race, but there were no hard feelings from O’Connor about racing against such outstanding riders.
“It’s just sport. It’s like being a tennis player when you had the whole Federer, Nadal, Djokovic situation. It’s no different,” he said. “There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it; you can’t do anything about it, it’s reality. So you do what you do. Life plays its pathway, its story, out in front of you, so you don’t really have a choice.”
O’Connor’s pathway in this Tour has led him towards breaks and stage hunting instead of fighting for the overall win or podium, but with four days left remaining, he was sagely accepting of the way cycling goes.
“Not everyone’s going to win the Tour, not everyone wins stages either,” he said. “I’d love to have the yellow jersey, but it’s probably not realistic that it will happen.”
However, he was clear that that doesn’t take away any motivation.
“It’s the biggest race in the world, you reach the pinnacle of what the sport is,” he said. “You can demand a lot of yourself, but you’re still at a pretty high level that you don’t need to be ashamed of just being here in this race.”
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