“On a personal level, I’m really, really proud" - Ben Healy reflects on all-action Tour de France debut

Although Ben Healy wasn't quite able to take a stage win on his Tour de France debut over the last three weeks, the Irishman was consistently one of the instigators of attacks and one of the most exciting riders in the entirety of the peloton.

“On a personal level, I’m really, really proud of where I got to and how I raced this race. Unfortunately, I got a bit sick in the last week, but sometimes you can’t help that. I was still able to help the team where I could. Overall, it was a really good race,” the EF Education-EasyPost star reflects of his first Tour de France experience in quotes collected by Sticky Bottle.

“We came into it with Richard Carapaz not really knowing where he was at, which made for a last minute switch up in plans, but everyone really just bought into the plan. Every day, we had a different leader," Healy continues. “On some levels, that actually helps a lot, because everyone knew they were going to get their chance. If you did your job for this guy, this guy’s going to pay you back. That really, really helped this team bond. It was a different sort of way to race and that really helped us. Everyone was fully committed every day."

"By the end, Richie was flying. We all came together and that helped him get his stage win. My favourite memory is coming across the line and hearing that Richie won," adds the 23-year-old. "I’d had a pretty tough day that day and was really slogging it home. We had lost the radio connection over the mountain so we didn’t know if he’d won or not. And then people started chanting to me and Neilson. We were like, 'Richie, has he done it or has he not?' When we finally found out, it was just this massive relief. We’d been fighting for this for almost three weeks at that point. That he could finally pull it off was just an amazing moment for the whole team.”