Ben O'Connor looses GC ambitions after hellish day in the cobbles

Ben O'Connor was one of the riders most vulnerable to the cobbled stage at this year's Tour de France, and that proved to be true as the leader of AG2R Citröen Team shed serious time and is left with reduced GC ambitions.

"When I was on the second sector I punctured. And yeah, the race started to split a lot. It was really, really hard to chase back," O'Connor explained to Cyclingnews. "There were a million cars in between, too many motorbikes, TV cameras everywhere. A TV camera will come in front of you and then all of a sudden there's a big traffic jam so it was a bit rough for us to chase and we never could get close.

It was an unlucky entrance in the first cobbled sectors, however it was tough on the Australian who never managed to get back in the peloton. What followed was a long afternoon of chasing and limiting losses, as the French team used every single rider - besides Aurélien Paret-Peintre - to keep O'Connor in reach of the first places in the overall classification.

"Maybe we could've all stopped straight away, maybe. But I still had Geoffrey [Bouchard], Mikaël [Cherel] and Benoît [Cosnefroy] for the start and eventually Oli [Naesen] and Bob [Jungels] were with me until the very end. The last 40km it was just those two guys. I can't thank them enough because we stayed together and just tried to do a team time trial. But once again we lost a lot of time on the pavé with the cars," he detailed.

O'Connor lost 3:21 minutes to Tadej Pogacar. It is a significant loss, however O'Connor's fourth place in the race last year was largely due to a successful breakaway - and win - in Tignes where he won over six minutes on his direct competition. He has the possibility to repeat that success, however it will be a very difficult task and his rivals will be aware of the danger he will pose.

"It was just really bad luck. I'm a bit sad and a bit disappointed. I feel calm for once because it's been really stressful the past few days but I'm just a bit sad because there wasn't a lot else we could've done today," he concluded.