It’s far too soon to tell if this was a good move for O’Connor who had the best year of his career in 2024, finishing second in the Vuelta a España with a stage win, second in the World Championship Road Race, winning the World Championship Mixed Relay with his Australian teammates, finishing second in both the UAE Tour and the Tour of the Alps, and placing fourth in the Giro d’Italia. He racked up 4,131 UCI points and was the main reason his former team currently sits sixth in the UCI World Team Rankings, ahead of INEOS Grenadiers and Alpecin-Deceuninck.
Jayco AlUla wants some of that magic, though the team had a very good year too, winning 25 races, including two Vuelta stages (by Eddie Dunbar), a Tour de France stage (by sprinter Dylan Groenewegen), the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec (Michael Matthews), the National Road Race Championships of the Netherlands (Groenewegen), Switzerland (Mauro Schmid) and Australia (Luke Plapp), and the Australian National Time Trial Championship (also the indefatigable Plapp).
“Summarising a season is always hard because it’s such a long journey over 10 months of racing,” said Matt White, the team’s Director of High Performance and Racing. “But one thing we can be very proud of this year is our young riders; we’ve had a lot of new guys step up this year and 12 different winners out of the 30 riders. 25 wins is the most victories we’ve had in five years, and they were spread out and varied over the season.”
But the team clearly wanted and needed someone with Grand Tour nous since their Grand Tour rider, Simon Yates – who won the Vuelta in 2018 and counts 10 Grand Tour stage wins to his name – is 32 years old and not the rider he was two or three years ago. But Yates can still be a very important domestique for some ambitious Tour de France rider so he was snapped up by Visma–Lease a Bike to help Jonas Vingegaard in his fight against the powerful UAE Team Emirates train riding for Tadej Pogačar.
O’Connor will be joining a strong team with a healthy mix of veterans (such as Matthews and Groenewegen), established riders in their prime (Dunbar, Chris Harper), and improving youngsters (Plapp, Schmid, Felix Engelhardt, Filippo Zana, Davide De Pretto). It is a team that was lacking a star after the gloss came off Yates’s career, a rider strong enough to get Jayco back into the top 10 and fight for the GC in the big multi-stage races. It has that now with O’Connor – who, it must be said, showed this year that he is capable of climbing well without a domestique, if necessary.
However, if O’Connor has an off-year or suffers an injury that keeps him away from the road for some time, Jayco AlUla has a solid enough core of riders, many of whom will be better next year than they were in 2024. This means that the Aussie is not regarded as a saviour to a troubled team, which means that he can ride without undue pressure on him. If he merely repeats his 2024 success – and the word merely is ironic here, since the year was no mere success – Jayco AlUla will have no trouble breaking into the top 10 next year and staying there for a while.
It is still uncertain if O’Connor will ever win a Grand Tour yellow jersey, especially as Pogačar is thinking about riding in the Vuelta next year and Jonas Vingegaard is thinking about the Giro-Tour double. But he doesn’t really have to, except for his own peace of mind. Grand Tour podiums and stages fill a team’s points coffers – though I’m sure Jayco’s sponsors and staff would be delighted if he could deliver a second Grand Tour GC win for the team.
There’s really not much more to say, except that team sponsor AlUla – actually al-‘Ulā – is an ancient Arabian oasis city in the Medina province of Saudi Arabia and a popular tourist destination because of its proximity to important artefacts, including well-preserved ancient stone inscriptions that illustrate the development of the Arabic language and a number of ancient rock dwellings and tombs.
