“There’s always another race,” was how Ben O’Connor (AG2R Citroën) summed up how he felt about abandoning the Tour de France this summer with a muscle injury. And in his case, this season the Vuelta a España will be the next race in question.
O’Connor had gone into the Tour de France with hopes of improving on his fourth place from 2021. But a crash as early as stage 2 left him with a torn gluteus muscle and on the second rest day, close to where he had taken a memorable victory in Tignes the year before, the Australian was forced to leave the race.
The 26-year-old had already told Cyclingnews earlier this year that he would like to try to complete his Grand Tour stage win ‘set’ with a victory in the Vuelta a España. But that will now be backed up with, what he told reporters on Thursday, would be “GC ambitions.”
“I’m pretty confident I can be up there with the guys and I’ll see how I can play it,” O’Connor said. “If you’re there, you’re there: you’ve always got a chance.”
While missing out on a Tour de France is always a disappointment, to judge from his pre-Vuelta interview, O’Connor had learned to take a more detached approach to it, arguing that “it’s just one race. Just to focus on the Tour can be a bit too much.”
However, despite his keenness to move on, O’Connor’s usual battling spirit was also evident as he prepared to tackle the second Vuelta of his career, after finishing 25th in 2019.
“I don’t want to roll into Madrid in tenth place having hung on every day. And riding for GC shouldn’t write you off for winning a stage, either.”
“I’ve looked at the road book, I know the Sierra Nevada stage, and in the Bilbao stage I’ve looked at all the climbs round there. It’s all open.
“The dream is to finish on the podium, that’d be super cool. But I can win a stage, I’d be super proud, too.”
He was not deterred, either, by the opening team time trial and two flat mass-start stages in Holland that followed.
“It can’t be trickier than the first week of the Tour or Paris-Nice,” he reasoned. “And barely any teams have done any practice, so in the end, you shouldn’t be worried about it.”
Discussion of the TTT brings him back to the here and now in the Vuelta where, he emphasised in a second answer, he has no intention of letting the shadow of the Tour’s misfortune pursue him into the autumn.
“You have to laugh it off. It’s not going to kill me that I didn’t finish,” he said. “You can’t always have what you want and in the end, you have to shrug your shoulders and move onto the next thing.”
