Tour de France, Ben Healy has realized his crazy idea

The solitude of a man fleeing from it all was still missing from the narrative of the 2025 Tour de France . It was expected among the mountains of the Massif Central, because it's when the elevation gain reaches thousands of meters and the altitude exceeds a thousand meters that it's easier for it to take shape. Ben Healy, however, isn't a rider who pays attention to these things. Because Ben Healy has the absent-minded and curious gaze of someone capable of observing the unusual that most people don't see, because he has within him the anarchic spirit of cycling .

Ben Healy has a great adventurous spirit in a small body that moves crookedly and inelegantly on a bicycle. And, above all, the ability to perform calculations quickly and in unusual ways: he divides when it would be better to subtract, he transforms additions into multiplications, multiplications into exponentiations. Calculations that seem wrong, but give the right result.

Toward Vire Normandie, the finish line of the sixth stage of the 2025 Tour de France, Ben Healy's calculations yielded a bizarre result. In a stage chock-full of climbs and short climbs, with hard climbs as digestible as certain French meats cooked in cheese, they identified the 42.6 kilometers to the finish line, a downhill stretch, as the best point to break free from the company of the other seven frontrunners who had ventured toward the finish line with the stubbornness of desperation: Mathieu van der Poel, Quinn Simmons, Will Barta, Simon Yates, Michael Storer, Eddie Dunbar, and Harold Tejada. They watched him shrink even smaller before them as one watches a madman. They wondered, "Where does that guy want to go?" He would have answered, "To the finish." But he was already too far away.

Ben Healy could have waited. He could have dropped those seven even on the climb, on one of the many côtes the organizers had scattered toward the finish line. He didn't; he preferred to trust what his calculations told him. He preferred to pedal in solitude, enjoying the thrill of having all the alleys, the applause, and the shouts of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who had decided to watch the Grande Boucle riders pass by from the roadside .

Since morning, he'd begun trying to escape from a group incapable of slowing down and giving the escapees a free pass. He'd been the first, along with Quinn Simmons—also driven by cycling's anarchic spirit—to be chased, to take the heat in his face, and to push the pedals harder than anyone else just to give himself an afternoon away from the crowd. It had gone wrong. He'd tried again. It had gone wrong again. And again. He never stopped believing.

And once he was there at the front, with the group far away and the would-be escapees resigned to the evidence of having missed their chance, he set about doing his part, swapping riders, pushing hard, hoping that the time he'd spent in the slipstream would match the energy he'd expended. It was all worth it. And it was worth it because there was nothing else he could do to try to realize his crazy idea.

Ben Healy pursued his crazy idea to get ahead of her, pedaling alone for 42.6 kilometers, adding a memory that will never be erased, no matter what happens in the coming days and weeks at the Tour de France. Pedal after pedal, he has imprinted his name in the collective memory, in the manner of cycling's greats. Or madmen. Very often, there is no distinction between first and second, at least in our memories. The palmares is another matter; you just have to not over-consider it .

Ben Healy had to wait a long time before seeing again those who had pedalled with him in the breakaway from the will of the group today: 2'44” Quinn Simmon, 2'51” Michael Storer, more than three minutes the others, almost four Mathieu van der Poel, who wore yellow in Vire Normandie .

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