Yellow jersey on his shoulders. Bronze medal round his neck. And the first thing he says about taking yellow at the Tour de France is that it did not feel like winning.
That sentence tells you most of what you need to know about Ben Healy.
Listen to the full conversation on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
I sat down with Ben after a season most pro cyclists would frame and put on the wall. A Tour stage win. The maillot jaune. Bronze at the World Championships behind Pogacar and Remco. For an Irish road cyclist this is the biggest step-up since Roche and Kelly were stitching results together in the late eighties. We had not seen anything like it for a generation.
The story behind it is not what you would think. It is not a new training plan. It is not a wind tunnel breakthrough. It is not even a new bike.
It is a winter sat down with his coach, Jacob Tipper, going through every mistake of the previous season and rebuilding how he races.
The Bit Nobody Talks About
Here is the thing nobody really mentions about pro cycling. The jump from "good pro" to "stage-winning pro" is rarely about getting fitter. The fitness is already there. The riders at the front of a Tour breakaway are not separated by FTP — they are separated by the timing, the terrain, and the moment they choose to go.
Ben had a breakout 2023 at the Ardennes. Then in 2024 it stopped working. Same rider. Similar shape. Different result.
The reason is simple and brutal. In 2023 nobody knew who he was. By 2024 they did. The same long-range attacks that surprised the bunch a year earlier were now exactly what everyone was waiting for. Ryan Mullen famously let him go in the Irish national championships once because everyone assumed he could not do it solo from 110k out. Ryan never saw him again. But that move only works once. Then you have to find another one.
This is the trap every rider falls into when they start winning. You become a pattern. The pattern gets read. The pattern stops working. And if you do not have a second move, the door closes.
Ben's response to that closing door is the most useful thing in the whole conversation, and it has nothing to do with watts.
The Tactical Reset
Sitting down in the winter of 2024 with Jacob Tipper, the question they asked was not "how do we get stronger." It was "how do we win again."
Ben is honest about it on the episode. He had been racing the same way since junior — go off the front, keep going, wait for everyone else to crack. At the Tour de France that is not a strategy that survives 21 days. The world's best stage racers do not crack just because you are turning the screw. You need a moment. A surprise. A point where they hesitate for two seconds and that is your race.
So the work he and Tipper did was to study the patterns. Where Ben had been predictable. Where the peloton expected him to go. And, more importantly, where they would not.
That is the unglamorous truth of the modern WorldTour. The best teams employ people whose entire job is to study how the other riders attack. Times of day. Gradients. Wind direction. Distance to the line. If you keep going to the same well, you will eventually find someone with a bucket waiting for you.
The reset was not about adding a new weapon. It was about taking the existing weapon and using it somewhere unexpected.
How the Tour Stage Was Actually Won
The footage looks instinctive. It was not.
Ben and his EF Education–EasyPost team had identified the kind of terrain where his attack would land. Not a steep climb where everyone is watching the wattage on their head unit. Not a flat run-in where a sprinter would mop him up. They wanted twisty, downhill, with a small rise on the back of it. The kind of section where the group naturally slows, takes a breath, and looks around to see who else is suffering.
He drifted to the back of the move on the descent. Nobody minds when Ben Healy is at the back of a breakaway on a descent — he is not going to attack on the descent. That is the whole point. The bunch lets him do it. He builds a bit of speed coming through, hits the small rise with momentum that nobody else has, and the hesitation does the rest.
Twenty metres of gap is all he needs. That is it. From there it is just maths and pain.
The pacing of what came next is the bit that gets misunderstood. He is not glued to a power number. He whacks the climbs as hard as he can and recovers on the flats. Why? Because he has done enough long solos to know that this is how the chase works. The chasers slow when you slow. They commit when you commit. So you make the climbs hurt. That breaks their morale. And then you stretch the flats. That breaks their belief.
If you have ever wondered why some breakaways stick and most do not, this is the answer. The successful ones are not opportunism. They are rehearsed. They have studied descents, hesitation patterns, the typical peloton response. Years of it.
495 Watts at 62 Kilos. And Still 15 Seconds Down.
The Worlds in Rwanda was a different race. Different problem.
Ben's average power across the day was, by his own admission, not impressive at all. The plan with the Irish team — Ryan Mullen, Eddie Dunbar, Darren Rafferty and the rest — was to keep him out of the wind for nine laps. Get him to the bottom of the two climbs on the circuit with the front ten wheels. Let him sandbag to the back over the top. Repeat.
The strategy worked. By the closing kilometres he had something left. And the something left was around 495 watts at 62 kilos for a 4 to 5 minute effort on the final climb to take bronze.
Let me put that in context. That is roughly 8 watts per kilo for nearly five minutes after a brutal day at altitude in air that he describes as one of the hardest things to deal with all week.
And Pogacar still put 15 seconds into him over the same stretch.
Ben says it himself. People look at the race and ask why nobody else is trying. They are. He was. Pogacar is just operating on a different level. That is not a defeatist statement. It is honesty. And it is the kind of honesty that makes the bronze feel like a result rather than a consolation.
For the wider context on what 8 watts per kilo actually means at the top of the sport, our power-to-weight ratio guide breaks the numbers down across categories.
The Race Weight Conversation
This is the part of the episode I want every amateur listening to take seriously.
Ben lost 4 kilos between his first and second year as a pro. Same power. Different weight. That single change was, by his own measure, the largest performance step of his career. The maths is obvious. If you can hold the same number on the climbs and the bike weighs four kilos less, you climb faster. End of.
What happened next is the bit nobody tells you.
In 2024 he tried to hold that ultra-low weight artificially. Tracked food obsessively. Picked rice off plates because it was 20 grams over. Ignored hunger signals. Was, in his own words, stressed about it constantly.
The 2024 season was a mess.
In 2025, the change was the opposite of what most riders would have done. He stopped stressing. Ate when he was hungry. Loaded properly for training and races. Accepted that being a kilo or two over his theoretical race weight was not a problem if it meant he was actually fuelling the work.
He still finished the season on a Tour podium and a Worlds podium.
There is a lesson in that for every cyclist who has been in a calorie deficit on a Saturday morning club run trying to "use" the long ride to lose weight. Underfuelling does not make you faster. It makes you slower, and it makes you stressed, and the stress makes you slower again. We have written about this at length in our weight loss for cyclists guide and the aero versus weight breakdown.
If you are a serious amateur trying to find your own race weight, the model is not to copy a pro at 62 kilos. It is to copy the discipline of fuelling for the session in front of you and letting body composition follow.
Stress as the Missing Variable
We talked about something on the episode that I keep coming back to.
We can measure almost everything in cycling now. Power. Heart rate. HRV. Sleep score. Glucose. Lactate. Core temperature. The kit list keeps growing.
We are still terrible at measuring stress.
Ben said it best, and I think he is right. The riders ten years from now who win consistently will probably be the ones whose teams figured out how to keep the stress environment low. Not because stress is some soft, fluffy concept. Because stress changes how you sleep, how you eat, how you absorb training, how you respond under pressure.
Look at his own season. The version of Ben Healy that obsessed over 20 grams of rice in 2024 did not perform. The version that backed off, trusted the work, and stopped trying to control every variable went into yellow at the Tour.
This is the bit that matters most for the audience reading this. You are not riding 30,000 kilometres a year with a Wahoo Kicker Bike Pro and a personal nutritionist. You have a job, kids, a mortgage, a winter that drags on, a coach you message at 11pm because the session schedule is conflicting with a school pickup. The stress load is real. And if you are layering training stress on top of life stress without acknowledging the second one, you are going to get the same result Ben got in 2024.
The fixable part is not always the training plan. Sometimes it is the framing.
Imposter Syndrome at the Top of the Sport
One of the more revealing moments in the conversation was when I asked Ben whether he sees himself in the same bracket as Pogacar, Remco, Mathieu van der Poel.
He does not. Not really. He still feels like the underdog. The dark horse. The guy who is going to surprise people.
The interesting twist is that he knows he has to start acting like he belongs there. Because the bunch is starting to treat him like he does. He talked about a race after the Tour where positioning was suddenly easy. He was at the front without fighting for it. The reason was not that he had got better at positioning. It was that the other riders were getting out of his way.
This is the unwritten code in the WorldTour bunch. There is a peck and order. A food chain. When you join the top of it, you do not get a memo. You feel it in the small ways the race begins to organise itself around you.
Ben is still in the strange middle phase where his self-image and the bunch's image of him have not aligned yet. Watching him work through that publicly over the next two seasons is going to be one of the more interesting things in pro cycling.
It is also a useful mirror for any rider listening who keeps telling themselves they are not good enough yet. The version of you that the rest of your group sees is often a season ahead of the version you see in the mirror. Catch up to it.
Yellow Without the Win
Back to the line that opens the episode.
Ben took yellow at the Tour de France through the time gaps from his stage win. He did not win the jersey outright the next day. And that detail — small, technical, almost arbitrary — is what makes the moment feel incomplete to him.
Most people would settle for that. Most people would frame it.
He cannot quite. Because by his own standards, taking yellow without winning the jersey on the road is unfinished business. He is proud of his parents being there at the start, of repaying his dad for two decades of weekend driving, of pulling on the most famous jersey in the sport. He is not proud of how he got it. Not entirely.
That is a "not done yet" attitude in its purest form. The result that would shut most riders up has just turned the volume up on the next ambition. The rainbow jersey. A real maillot jaune. A Monument. He is not coasting on bronze. He is using it as fuel.
That is the version of cycling we keep coming back to on this podcast. Not the highlight reel. The version where the win itself is just the next problem to solve.
What Amateur Cyclists Can Actually Take From This
You are not going to win a Tour stage. Neither am I. But the principles in Ben's 2025 season are universal.
1. The biggest gains usually come from review, not addition. Ben did not add a new training block to his year. He took an honest look at what had stopped working and changed how he raced. Most amateurs reach for more — more volume, more intensity, more equipment. The bigger lever is often less stress, better timing, smarter use of what is already there. We see this every week on the Roadman coaching call.
2. Fuelling beats restricting. Ben's 4kg pro-rookie weight loss is the exception. Holding an artificially low weight by underfuelling cost him a season. The model that works is "fuel the work required" — eat for the training, let body composition come second. The in-ride nutrition guide and our race day nutrition guide cover the practical side.
3. Tactical thinking matters at every level. You think tactics are a WorldTour problem. They are not. Where you sit in the bunch on a club ride, when you go on the local Saturday hammerfest, how you read the wind on a sportive, when you eat in a 100-mile event — these are tactics. The rider who finishes well is rarely the strongest. They are the one who chose the right moment.
4. Pace solo efforts the way Ben does. Push harder when the terrain demands it, rest when it allows you to. The "sit on threshold for the whole hour" approach is rarely the fastest. Read the road. Read the chasers. Let the gradient dictate the wattage.
5. Lower the stress environment around your training. Sleep, calendar, life admin, work pressure — all of it feeds into the same recovery bucket as your intervals. If you cannot reduce one, reduce another. The rider who manages stress beats the rider who only manages training.
If you want to get into the small details of how your week stacks up against the riders we interview on the podcast, ask the Roadman AI coach — it is trained on every episode and has the same expert input I have been pulling from for years.
Listen to the Full Conversation
The full episode with Ben Healy is on the podcast and on YouTube. It is one of the most honest interviews we have done with a current WorldTour rider this year.
If you want more of this — the genuine, behind-the-scenes story from the front of the sport — the Greg LeMond two-parter, the Lachlan Morton interview and our Pogacar training breakdown are the natural next steps.
Key Takeaways
- The 2024-to-2025 step up was tactical, not physical. Same engine, smarter race craft.
- The Tour stage win was a pre-planned descent attack on a small rise — not opportunism.
- At Worlds, Ben held ~495 watts at 62kg for the closing 4 to 5 minutes and finished 15 seconds behind Pogacar.
- The 4kg weight loss between his first and second pro year was the biggest single performance step of his career.
- Holding that weight artificially in 2024 cost him a season. Backing off the obsession in 2025 added results.
- Stress is the variable nobody is measuring properly yet. It almost certainly matters more than another marginal gain.
- The bunch starts treating you as a top rider before you feel like one. Catch up to that image.
- Yellow without winning the jersey is the kind of "almost" that motivates a "not done yet" rider.
- For the practical fuelling side, our carbs per hour guide and in-ride nutrition guide are the next reads.
- For the tactical side, see our race tactics guide.
- For the aero question Ben touches on, our aero versus weight breakdown and Dan Bigham aerodynamics piece cover where the actual gains live for amateurs.
- If you want help building a year that compounds the way Ben's did, the Roadman coaching system is the place to start. If you want a fast answer to a specific question, ask the AI coach.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Ben Healy win his 2025 Tour de France stage?
Healy and his EF Education–EasyPost team identified a twisty downhill with a slight rise where a move would not be expected. He drifted to the back of the breakaway on the descent, came through with speed at the right moment, and opened a 20-metre gap before the rest of the group could react. From there it was a solo to the line, riding the climbs as hard as the remaining distance allowed.
What power output did Ben Healy hold at the 2025 Worlds?
In the closing 4 to 5 minutes of the World Championships road race, Healy estimates he held around 495 watts at 62 kilograms. Tadej Pogacar still put 15 seconds into him over that stretch, which Healy uses as a benchmark for how far ahead the very top of the sport is right now.
Why was 2024 a turning point for Ben Healy?
After his 2023 breakthrough at the Ardennes Classics, riders started marking him. The same long-range solo attacks that worked when nobody knew him stopped working when everyone did. He had a difficult 2024 season, sat down with his coach in the winter, and rebuilt how he raced. The 2025 results followed.
What did Ben Healy change about his race weight in 2025?
Less, not more. In 2024 he was tracking food obsessively and stressing about being a kilo over what he thought of as race weight. In 2025 he went back to fuelling for sessions, eating when hungry, and accepting a small fluctuation in body weight without panic. The result was better racing, not worse.
Does Ben Healy use W'bal modelling for solo breakaway pacing?
Not formally. He paces by feel and experience. He has done so many long solos over the years that the maths is almost intuitive — push harder on the climbs, recover on the flat, judge the gap by who is chasing rather than by a power target. W'bal expresses what he is already doing.
