'At the end of the day, it's an entertainment sport' – Ben Healy on breaking through and breaking away

It didn’t come about by accident, but it wasn’t entirely by design either. Ben Healy was the revelation of 2023, and the beauty of his breakthrough is that it was as much an adventure as a project. Some of it was planned, but much was ad-libbed.

It was already clear that Healy was a good rider. Only good riders, after all, tend to win stages at Tour de l’Avenir straight out of the junior ranks, as Healy did in 2019. But nobody, perhaps not even Healy himself, seemed to understand just how good he was until a grisly Sunday afternoon in Limburg last April.

Healy had been planning to skip the Classics altogether as he readied himself for his Grand Tour debut at the Giro d’Italia. As the Spring drew on, however, his form simply couldn’t be ignored. At the very least, EF Education-EasyPost realised it would be foolhardy to squander it, and so Healy was dispatched to the Ardennes Classics, almost to see what might happen.

The hasty rewriting of Healy’s schedule was justified from the moment he made the winning move at Amstel Gold Race, but his performance over the rugged 90km that followed would essentially change the course of his career. Even when Tadej Pogačar  (UAE Team Emirates) pressed clear on the Keutenberg, Healy refused to yield, first chasing in the company of Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers) and then pressing on alone in the finale to take second place.

By then, Healy was cutting his deficit to Pogačar with every pedal stroke, and he would have gone even closer if the race director’s car hadn’t offered its slipstream to the Slovenian for several beats longer than was necessary in the finale. Healy, whose default setting appears to be one of beatific calm, refused to cry foul on the day, nor has he dwelt on the incident since.

“Even if I’d caught Pogačar, I don’t think I’d have dropped him or beaten him in the sprint,” Healy tells Cyclingnews. “I can’t be too angry at the car situation.”

Healy would follow up by placing fourth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and claiming a spectacular solo victory at Fossombrone on the Giro d’Italia. But it was Amstel Gold Race that had shown him what was possible, when he looked around in the winning break and began to realise he had the measure of everyone bar Pogačar. “Even when they first went, I felt good,” Healy says. “And then dropping Pidcock was another thing that spurred me on, because I felt I was doing it on the biggest stage as well.”

In the depths of last winter, Healy had already had an inkling that his second season as a professional was ripe with potential. At the January training camp in Mallorca, he found himself moving with far greater ease than he had done at the same point the previous year. “I could see I was more comfortable with the load we were doing, and I could see how I was stacking up against the other guys on the team,” he says. “I could see I was just a step ahead of where I was.”

Winter dreams only occasionally survive contact with reality, of course, but Healy’s third place at the Trofeo Calvia on his first race day was a promising omen, and not even a heavy crash at Étoile des Bessèges could interrupt his flow. A stage win and third overall at the Settimana Coppi e Bartali was followed by an assured victory at the GP Industria & Artigianato, fifth at the Région Pays de la Loire Tour and then second at Brabantse Pijl.

“At Coppi e Bartali, I knew I had a super high level, but it was impossible to predict how that would translate to the Ardennes,” Healy says. “I think the first moment I realised I could do something there was after Brabantse Pijl. That made me hopeful.”

And yet for everyone else, Healy was still a distant outsider for the big prizes. His results, impressive though they were, had been amassed Off Broadway in races a rung or two below WorldTour level, after all, and without men like Pogačar or Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) for competition. Until Amstel, nobody fully understood the leap in quality he had made from one year to the next. 

As it turned out, Healy had been hiding in plain sight.

At first glance, there was little in Healy’s first season as a professional in 2022 to suggest the heights he would reach in his sophomore year. There were few results of note, although he left the occasional calling card for his preferred, attacking style, most notably by infiltrating the early break at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and by making a daring long-range effort on the road to Sandnes at the Tour of Norway.

The big win for Healy in 2022, however, was a hidden one. He took the occasional kicking, as neo-pros often do, but completing a full season of racing from February to October helped him to build the kind of engine required to thrive at this level. That year in the school of hard knocks was probably all the more necessary given the rather staccato nature of his under-23 career. Healy was still a part-time student during his season at Wiggins-Le Col in 2019, while the COVID-19 pandemic truncated the following two seasons.

“If you look at my U23 career, the first year I was studying, the second year was COVID so I did ten race days, and even in the third year, I still only did maybe 25 race days, which for sure wasn’t a lot,” he says. “People say that you step up a level when you ride a Grand Tour – so when I wasn’t racing much as a U23, then maybe I wasn’t stepping up as much as I could have done. Doing a year of WorldTour racing for sure played a part in bringing me up a level.”

On a macro level, Healy’s overall strength improved once he had absorbed and then recovered from the workload of his debut professional season, and that cycle continued on a micro level throughout the spring of 2023. On repeated occasions, the Irishman essentially raced himself to a standstill, took a week or so to recover, and then found himself raising the bar another notch once he returned to the peloton. Almost by hazard, Healy had happened upon a winning formula.

“It was quite strange, because I really managed to time everything quite well,” he says. “I was always flying at the races but after Bartali I got home, and I could hardly ride my bike for the week. And it was the same after the Ardennes – I was really in a box before the Giro. But it was just high load, recover, high load, recover, and that really worked very well.

“Once the Giro finished, I could sit back and think it had been a bit of a surreal block. To achieve the results I did in the Ardennes and the stage I did in the Giro, that could almost make a career in some people’s eyes, so I’m proud of that.”

There were other factors too, of course. The lessons Healy learned during his first season at WorldTour level weren’t limited to withstanding moments of intense physical suffering. There were more nuanced elements to his schooling, such as adapting to the rhythms of his new team and adjusting to the nutritional requirements of racing at this level.

“One thing I worked really hard on was keeping track of my food and keeping track of my weight – that’s one thing that definitely contributed to my success,” he says. “I also just got more confident in the training methods I’m doing, and all these little things just added up to something.”

In the 2020s, the cycling world has become increasingly accustomed to neo-professionals who arrive in the WorldTour seemingly fully formed and already primed to win from the off. Some, like Evenepoel and Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates), have moved directly from the junior ranks to the WorldTour without missing a beat. Healy’s improvement between his first and second seasons as a pro, by contrast, was a useful reminder that not every talent necessarily develops at the same rate or even travels along the same path.

“There are people who can do it, but for me it would have been crazy to go from junior to the WorldTour,” Healy says. “I learned so much as an under-23 and I’m still learning so much more now about myself and more about how to race. You learn all the time.”

Indeed, in an era where young riders are hot housed through the underage ranks, Healy deliberately went against the grain by settling on a more organic kind of growth. In the aftermath of his stage win at the 2019 Tour de l’Avenir, Healy’s agent raised the possibility of making the jump to the WorldTour that very winter, but the rider opted against it, feeling he wasn’t yet ready. Just twelve months previously, after all, Healy had found himself scrambling for a Continental team as he exited the junior ranks, finding a late reprieve from Wiggins.

“It was just kind of floated. I was told there were teams interested in me and we could look at the options. That was the conversation, and I was pretty confident I wanted to stay at under-23 and forget those offers,” Healy explains. “I felt I still had a long time to develop. I’d won a stage in l’Avenir but I still wanted to prove to myself to make that step up and I wanted to make sure I was ready for the WorldTour when I did move up.”

The decision looks a sage one from this remove, but at the time, it was an act of striking restraint for a 19-year-old who had spent his adolescence aspiring to a professional career. Healy shrugs when asked if he had begun to doubt his choice the following Spring, when his first season at Trinity was interrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown.

“To be honest, not so much, because I had great support with Trinity,” he says. “I was confident I could make it to the WorldTour and I didn’t see any benefit to going sooner rather than later. Even though it was through the COVID period, I did really value the extra couple of years at under-23, they developed me a lot as a rider as well.”

Then again, Healy has always seemed deal calmly with adversity. The potential crises of his cycling life have never been allowed morph into dramas, and, for all his restlessness on the bike, patience has been a constant off it. When he began cycling as a child in Halesowen in the English West Midlands, he competed on the track and then in criteriums. Neither discipline fitted with his talents, but he stayed the course in anticipation of the chance to race on the open road as a junior.

In the meantime, Healy had added mountain biking to his range, doing enough to earn a place in the British Cycling academy in the discipline. He would be dropped from the programme as a 16-year-old, but he gently dismisses the idea that the rejection had been a pivotal moment in his origin story. Any disappointment was lightly worn and quickly shaken off.

“I don’t think it was a massive brutal moment,” Healy says. “I was never disheartened by it, I guess, and I still enjoyed racing my bike and I was always going to race my bike. I never really saw a pathway through mountain bike anyway, so I was super happy to commit to the road.”

In truth, mountain biking was only ever a means to an end. When that trail closed, Healy simply reset his coordinates and followed another, focusing fully on the road and, shortly afterwards, switching allegiance to represent Ireland, the nation of his father’s family. He travelled at his own pace and on his own route, but every year brought him a little closer to where he wanted to be.

If Healy’s performances in the Ardennes elevated his status, then his all-action display at the Giro cemented it. His win at Fossombrone was one of the greatest athletic feats of the race, and he went close again in Bergamo a week later, before pursuing the king of the mountains prize in the final week. “I really did feel the fatigue by then,” Healy admits.

By then, he had also begun to attract firm interest from the highest echelons of the WorldTour, but EF Education-EasyPost manager Jonathan Vaughters moved swiftly to secure Healy’s service into 2025 and beyond, offering him an improved three-year deal. Healy, for his part, struggled to see the sense in moving on, and not only because EF offered leadership opportunities that wouldn’t necessarily be available elsewhere. “I think I’m quite an independent rider and the way EF operates just suits the type of person I am,” Healy explains.

While certain teams are almost invasive in the supervision of their riders, there is, Healy explains, a decidedly less overbearing approach at EF. Riders have a safety-net of support should they need it, but they are also free to make decisions of their own regarding their training and preparation.

When Healy first signed for EF at the end of 2021, for instance, he asked if he could keep working with the man who has coached him since he was 16 years old, Jacob Tipper. He reasoned retaining the same coach would help him keep his bearings during a time of intense change, and EF agreed.

“It’s worked out and I’m still with my coach, whereas with other teams, you would have to go onto their coaching programme straight away. That’s just one thing I had to consider,” Healy says.

“At this team, we’re kind of left to our own devices. If we need the help, it’s there, but we’re not bombarded with phone calls every weekend or micromanaging. They trust the riders to do what’s required and if we need support, then it will be there.”

Healy’s 2024 racing programme has yet to be unveiled in full, but it’s certain that he will return to the Ardennes Classics with real ambition. A Tour de France debut would also seem logical, even if Vaughters has suggested the more moderate Giro route might tempt him to send Healy there for a crack at GC.

Healy is a difficult rider to pigeonhole, though it’s perhaps too soon to say if his all-round ability and powers of endurance can translate to three-week racing. “I just know what I’m not. I’m not a sprinter, that’s for sure,” he laughs. 

His penchant for attacking from distance, meanwhile, makes him a compelling watch. Those daring efforts, Healy explains, are simply his best chance of winning races, but he is aware, too, that his long-range efforts have earned admirers. 

“That’s nice because at the end of the day, it is an entertainment sport. And if people are entertained by what I do, that’s great,” says Healy, whose hunched silhouette is one of the most recognisable in the peloton. The gentle rocking of the shoulders a trade mark, and he smiles when asked if a coach had ever tried to change his style. “Not overly. Don’t fix what’s not broken, I guess.”

A maxim to guide him in 2024.