Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) has extended his dream Tour de France by defending his yellow jersey on stage 11, ensuring he remains race leader as the riders face the first big summit finish tomorrow, that of Hautacam.
Though Healy can climb very strongly, he has not been among the top tier climbers in the Grand Tours he has ridden to date. However, as he is currently in exceptional form, it is the kind of day where he could hold yellow, or at least the white jersey. One thing he says for certain is that he is going to go all out and respect the yellow jersey and push his limits.
“I'm quite interested to test myself and see what I can do,” Healy said of the 13.5km final mountain tomorrow, averaging eight per cent gradient. “But I'm realistic in what I can do as well. I've got to be very smart and push every day and try not to make too many mistakes.
Advertisement
"I’m optimistic you know. I think it’s going to be a pretty hard fight to hold onto yellow but I’m going to fight right until the end. Hopefully I have some super legs tomorrow. Let's give it a go. Why not?"
In total, the riders face 3,800m of climbing tomorrow as the summit finish is just one of four climbs on the 180.6km stage. The others are the 1.3km Cote de Labatmale, the 12km cat 1 Col d Soulor and the 3km cat 2 Col des Bordieres.
Today's stage was very hard to control, with several groups forming and Healy even going on the attack with Jonas Vingegaard (Visma | Lease a Bike) at one point when they realised Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) was out of position.
They were quickly closed down by 2nd and 3rd overall – Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal QuickStep) – but only after they’d made their way across to a large chasing group that had set off in pursuit of the breakaway men. Healy went on to finish, with the other GC men, in the near 40-strong bunch, some 3:28 down on Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility), who won from a breakaway.
Related News
“Honestly, I think I've lost a few years off my life after today,” said Healy of all the action during his first day in cycling's most iconic yellow jersey. “It was pretty stressful. But the team just did a super effort to keep me up there, even when we missed the split early on. From then on, we were on the ball the whole day.”
He said of his attack with Vingegaard: "You've got to take what you can get. I heard on the radio that Tadej was behind. I spoke to Jonas, and it would have been silly not to take it against someone like Tadej.
"It was a crazy day, with non-stop attacking. We were trying to lock the race down. But honestly, it was just impossible. There was a lull in the peloton for a little bit because we've got to drink and we've got to piss, so that happened
"But the attacking continued after that. From that on, there were a lot of tired legs, and there was a little climb where a gap happened."
And when Pogačar crashed in the final, and was chasing back on, Healy said nobody in the group of favourites had any desire to push on and capitalise on the Slovernian's misfortune. He spoke to the others and they agreed to knock off the pace until Pogačar came back.
"I guess it’s just respect amongst riders, like I said before, we were not expecting any time gaps from that point forward, and if anyone on the other side of that, I'd have appreciated the same in return," he said.
"If whenever someone makes a silly mistake where there's not going to be crazy differences from that point forward, I think anyone would have appreciated the same."
