Up the top of Puy de Sancy, Ben Healy waited with a towel around his neck, a bottle of tart cherry juice in his hand. After almost four and a half hours of racing, it came down to the line: not the stage (although Healy’s got one of those already) but a stint in the yellow jersey. He stood and looked at the big screen like a fan, watching race leader Tadej Pogačar approach as the seconds ticked away. When the result was clear, the smile spread across his face, a pump of the fist, an embrace from a soigneur.
Down the mountain, on the road out of town, the team buses lined up alongside the river. At the Tour de France, there’s a lot of waiting. Waiting for stages to start. Waiting for riders to come in. Waiting for results to be clear. But the waiting always ends, one way or another, and about the same time as the pictures trickled down the mountain to the TV in the bus, a cheer erupted from inside before EF Education-EasyPost staff started filing out down the stairs, smiling widely. Ben Healy had the yellow jersey heading into the rest day, and EF Education’s excellent Tour rolls on.
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The purgatory of waiting for the result was over, but the stage finish today was up a mountain and the buses were at the bottom, so the waiting began again – this time for full-fledged celebration. Team staff – a doctor, a hospitality manager, the press officers – milled among media as the day’s antagonists made their way down from the Puy de Sancy summit to Le Mont-Dore a few kilometres down the road, giving us a real time glimpse of this moment sinking in.
Context started trickling in, bit by bit, as the enormity of it all dawned. Maybe insights from Twitter or commentary or off the top of the head. The first Irish rider in the yellow jersey since Stephen Roche in 1987, someone said. With each realisation like that, another layer of the accomplishment unfurled; another angle. EF’s big yellow jersey moment, on top of the stage win. Ben Healy’s redemption arc after a 2024 Tour de France of close-but-not-close-enough, where he spent five stages in the long break. A plucky underdog team, continuing to ride an absolute blinder of a race. And still, waiting.
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