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Road to the Tour: Ben O’Connor Looks to Crack the Tour de France Top 5

By Siegfried Mortkowitz

Is Ben O’Connor a potential Tour de France top 5 contender? Because that is the goal the 29-year-old Australian and his Jayco AlUla team have set for this year. It sounds like a modest objective, but in fact it’s quite ambitious given the opposition.

Assuming that the four favorites – Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates–XRG), Jonas Vingegaard (Visma – Lease a Bike), Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) and Primož Roglič (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe) – all ride up to their capabilities, they will almost certainly take the top four spots of the GC. That will make the battle for fifth very intense as it will be targeted by at least a dozen riders.

Fortunately for O’Connor, Richard Carapaz (EF Education–EasyPost) will not be among them as he will not be riding in the Tour due to illness. However, Carlos Rodríguez (INEOS Grenadiers) finished fourth in the 2023 Tour and has had a decent spring, with top 10 finishes in three stage races. Lidl-Trek’s Mattias Skjelmose has had an excellent spring campaign, which included a shock victory in the Amstel Gold Race over Pogačar, Evenepoel and Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike).

Both he and Rodríguez are only 24 and just coming into their own. And there are some very talented support riders who seem strong enough to crack the top 5, such as Pogačar’s lieutenant João Almeida, Roglič’s main man Florian Lipowitz or Visma powerhouse Matteo Jorgenson. All three are capable of both riding support and finishing in the top 10 of numerous stages.

Add to that the fact that the Tour has not been very kind to O’Connor. To be fair, he has only ridden it three times in his 8+-year career, with a fourth-place finish on his first attempt, in 2021, being his best result. But the competition at this year’s Tour is significantly tougher than it was in 2021. On the other hand, he is a better rider than he was four years ago, has finished in the GC top five in each of the three Grand Tour races, and finished second, behind Roglič, at last season’s Vuelta a España.

La Vuelta Podium
Ben O’Connor finished second at the 2024 La Vuelta. © Profimedia

But anyone who saw that race knows what O’Connor’s problem is: he is not a great climber. He had a lead of almost 5 minutes over Roglič  after stage 6, but the Slovenian took time back on nearly all the climbing stages. O’Connor is a very good climber, but he isn’t explosive and is often dropped when the pace heats up on a steep climb. He then proceeds at his own rhythm and needs the leaders to slow down to get back in the mix.

And he has had an unimpressive spring, with no victories and no top 5 GC finishes in any of the stage races he rode. His best finishes were actually in the ITTs, where he registered two second places. In his final prep race, the Tour de Suisse, O’Connor finished seventh, 5:08 behind the winner, Almeida, and also behind two other Tour rivals, Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL) and Felix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale).

But the Aussie remains confident. “We have a really versatile team and I’ve performed well in Grand Tours in the past so I’ll do everything I can to get back to the top five,” O’Connor was quoted as saying on the team’s website.

“The route is a race of two halves,” he went on to say. “You have northern France with some extremely punchy stages, and then pretty much, from stage 10 onwards, all of the climbs are 30 minutes to one hour long. There are some really big cols and passes, so I think that’s where I will be enjoying the race a lot more. They’re the kind of mountain stages I really prefer. For me, it’ll be about getting through the first half and then executing in the second half.”

What he neglected to say was that the Tour has five summit finishes, with the two toughest – the HC climbs to Courchevel (26.5km @ 6.4%) and Plagne (19.3km @ 7.2%) – coming on stages 18 and 19 respectively. That is where the race for fifth place in the GC will probably be decided, and I don’t see O’Connor being with the other GC contenders at those finishes. His best bet would seem to be to join a breakaway and then use that group as a platform to snatch a stage win. But in order to be allowed to join a breakaway, he would need to be no threat in the standings to Pogačar, Roglič and the other main contenders.

That will be his and Jayco AlUla’s dilemma: go all out for the top 5 or try to win one or two climbing stages as consolation. Perhaps the race will decide, because there are a number of punchy, Classics-type stages in the first week that could put several GC contenders under pressure. No doubt to prepare for that aspect of the Tour, O’Connor rode in three spring Classics this year, and the results were middling but encouraging. He abandoned the Amstel Gold Race, finished 37th in La Flèche Wallonne and 44th in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but less than 1:30 behind Pogačar in both races.

That’s not bad and suggests that O’Connor will hold his own in the first week. Still, while the Tour GC podium is pretty easy to handicap this year, predicting how he will fare is really impossible. So I asked AI. Here is what Copilot had to say: “While he didn’t look particularly sharp at the recent Tour of Switzerland, he’s banking on peaking at the right time. If everything aligns – form, team support, and race dynamics – he could very well be in the mix for a top-five or even podium finish.”

Interesting. But “everything” rarely “aligns” in the Tour de France. O’Connor may have to contend himself with a top 10 finish or one or two stage wins. Which isn’t bad at all.