With two kilometres left of the Col de la Loze, Jonas Vingegaard attacked out of the small group in an attempt to gap his great rival Tadej Pogacar in search of the Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France. The mountain was covered in a fine mist and spectators lined the road in rain ponchos as the race reached into the clouds. Vingegaard looked around to survey the damage but Pogacar was still on his wheel — and behind him was Oscar Onley from Kelso, southern Scotland.
“Even during that moment, I realised that this was pretty cool,” Onley, 22, says. “It was one of the biggest climbs that we do in the Tour and the fact that it was just the three of us in the final two kilometres, it was quite special.”
Onley remained fixed to the wheels of the two best grand-tour riders in the world as they dragged him away from his nearest rival in the fight for third place, Germany’s Florian Lipowitz, who had been dropped earlier in the climb.
Onley was only 22 seconds off the podium going into stage 19, rubbing shoulders with Pogacar and Vingegaard
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“I couldn’t hear much on the radio,” he says, “but I could hear every time there was someone getting dropped, and then when I realised that it was just the three of us … those two are the best in the world by quite a long way, so to be able to stay with them as long as I did, I was quite proud of that ride.”
While the 2025 Yellow Jersey seemed a foregone conclusion by the end of the Hautacam climb on stage 12, after Pogacar had extended his lead on Vingegaard to 3min 31sec, it was Onley and Lipowitz who offered some of the greatest jeopardy of the race.
In July, Onley told The Times that he wasn’t going into the race thinking about a top-five finish, instead aiming for a stage win. But as he found himself naturally in a good position after the first week it seemed obvious to target the best general classification (GC) position possible.
“I was fully expecting to crack one day and lose some time, and the fact that I was expecting that meant I wasn’t stressing when that would happen,” he says. “The deeper we got into the race, I think the first real mountain day on Hautacam I could see a lot of guys struggling. Coming to the end of the second week I realised that I probably had the level to compete for a top-five [finish in the GC].”
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The Picnic–PostNL rider couldn’t quite move up to third place after that day on the Col de la Loze, when he closed the gap to Lipowitz to only 22 seconds. And in the final stages, the 24-year-old German managed to pull away again. Scotland’s Onley had to settle for fourth overall but he had arrived on the grand-tour stage.
“The whole Tour gave me a lot of motivation for the future because going in I also questioned whether I could actually ride GC for three weeks,” Onley says. “So it gave me a lot of confirmation and more of a clear idea of what I need to do.
Onley is taking on this year’s Tour of Britain, in which he finished second last year
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“Now I need to focus on going for GC and the Tour, the Giro d’Italia and La Vuelta. Before I always said I’d like to go for those goals but I didn’t know if they were realistic. Now we can look at the coming seasons and try to focus almost the whole year around these races.”
But the Tour de France takes more than just physical strength and endurance — it takes mental fortitude too. At the end of three attritional weeks, Pogacar was victorious once more but cast a tired figure. “I’m already counting the years until retirement,” he said afterwards. “This year was something on another level. There was maybe one day that we went a bit easier.”
This is something Onley understands, saying the focus required for a grand tour, and particularly at the pointy end, drains a lot from a rider.
“It’s definitely hard mentally,” he says. “I remember after the first stage it was really hectic with the crosswinds. Physically it wasn’t that hard a day but I was lying on my bed after and my head was just spinning. I hadn’t felt like I had concentrated that hard for a long time.
“As you go deeper into the race when you’re still riding for GC, the days I found the hardest were the days where you didn’t have a chance to win or it was a breakaway up the road but you still had to focus and be in position and make sure you didn’t lose any time. You could only lose in that position, you were never going to win anything.”
After the Tour, Onley went to race the Clásica de San Sebastián, where he finished 13th before taking a week off the bike. Then the training began again before the Tour of Britain, which started on Tuesday in Woodbridge, Suffolk.
“It’s really nice to race again in the UK,” he says. “I haven’t done it so much since coming out of juniors. I’ve done the Tour of Britain twice now, this will be the third time.”
Last year Onley finished second in the race, which started in his home town. This time he’s arriving at the startline as a new star of British riding — the 22-year-old who stuck with Vingegaard and Pogacar on the queen stage of the Tour de France. So what next?
“We have to look at what the options are and a lot of it depends on the course,” he says. “But I’d like to go back to the Tour and really focus on that again. There’s no guarantee you’re going to get fourth or top five again but it gives you more motivation.”