"I hope to reach my 2024 level, I still have it in me": Ben O’Connor looks to leave the 2025 season far behind

The 2026 season is about to begin. More precisely, it will happen in less than two weeks with the first stage of Tour Down Under set for Tuesday, January 20. The Australian WorldTour race is crucial for Jayco AlUla as the home team, and therefore also for Ben O'Connor, the country’s leading star. There he will hope to start making amends for a very difficult 2025 season, where despite his stage win at the Tour de France, he didn't live up to the expectations set in 2024.

On the cusp of a new season, Ben O’Connor approaches 2026 with a clear idea: he needs to return to the level he showed in 2024 and, above all, rediscover the mindset that drove him then. He does not sugarcoat, he does not gloss over last year and he does not hide his frustration in an interview with CyclingNews.

"There’s no need to sweeten it," he says when comparing 2025 with his standout 2024. "It’s certainly not the same, that’s very clear."

The 2024 season had been outstanding for O'Connor: second at the Vuelta a España, including a stage win, and a silver medal at the World Championships in Zurich, only behind Tadej Pogačar. However, almost nothing in 2025 went as expected.

A win on stage 18 of the Tour de France was his only major success of the year. A crash wrecked his GC hopes before the end of stage 1. He finished the Tour 11th, far from his projection. And the Vuelta also ended early for O'Connor due to another crash.

Looking back, he salvages one positive: “The stage win at the Tour was the moment that reminded me you can always turn a race around when things go wrong."

A prolonged health issue marked his first half of the year. He carried it for too long. And that’s where the self-critique began. "[The illness] lingered for a long time and I didn’t get over it until pretty much the Tour de Suisse," he explains. He admits he made the mistake of resisting a pause: "It’s surprising how much not applying a bit of flexibility can finish you off." He sums up his year in one word: "annoying."

And he admits a dangerous tendency: trying to fix everything by pushing harder. "Sometimes it’s better to just step away, let the body reset and then come back."

Knowing he had the level and that it never fully appeared exasperated him: "I wish I could reach the same level [as 2024], I know I’ve got it. It just never happened… and that’s the most frustrating thing. You can’t copy and paste."

O’Connor does not hide the emotional hit of 2025. "I was furious. It’s really depressing," he admits. "You get angry when things get complicated without being your fault… knowing you can still perform, that the structure was there, and you just waste it."

With his GC dream broken, he switched mindset at the Tour and hunted breakaways. "It’s by far the most fun way to race the Tour," he says. Fighting for GC, he adds, "is actually a drag" because "it’s fantastic… until it isn’t."

That’s why, when he speaks now about expectations and approach, he puts it like this: "Tackling things tooth and nail, and just being angry."