Chapter 7: The Baroudeur

For all his qualities, Ben Healy cannot use a rider radio. When he speaks into the microphone all that comes across in the team car is a distorted squall.

About sixty kilometres from the end of stage six of this year’s Tour de France, whilst I was driving behind the break of the day, his rider radio emitted a desperate, thirsty question of some kind to me.

After a pause and a hopeful check that Cedric the mechanic in the back may have understood, I spoke.

“Please repeat, Ben.” More garbled noise came back to me. “Please repeat.”

There is nothing more annoying for a rider than being asked to repeat yourself when you’re already doing all you can to squeeze a few words out in the middle of a race. As I said, Ben is a great cyclist, a serial winner, and the hero of this July—but he cannot manage to speak clearly when we really need him to.

Instead, I drove up alongside the break, handed Ben a bidon, and gave him the chance to finally get his message across.

“Find me a place to go… Technical.”

This was the question I was waiting for. We had all been waiting for. There are very few riders bold enough to just say, give me the spot and I’ll make it work. But in this case, I had no doubt. A true breakaway specialist is a rider you must give the freedom to succeed—or fail.

When you sit where I sit, you need to understand that a breakaway specialist is forged from failure. They are the last artists left in the game—dogged, fallible, endangered, exposed. They are the tragi-comic heroes of the sport—doomed to chase victory without a clear path, cannibalising themselves and each other in the process.

To have to win from the breakaway means you’ve been backed into a corner of your own failings and inabilities—and, miraculously perhaps, find a way out. Unlike the bankable winning skills in cycling—sprinting, climbing, time trialling, or sprinting again against reduced opposition—winning from the breakaway demands more than talent alone.


Watts per kilo, or maximum watts over a short duration on the back of a seven-man slingshot, just won’t work. Instead, you're faced with a complex equation—one that weighs your strengths and weaknesses against your rivals, the terrain, the weather, desire, cunning, and craft.


When you’re behind the break with these guys, that’s who you’re working with.

These riders want guidance, sure—but less so instruction. They’re searching around in the dark, looking for a way out. Ultimately, they will find it. Your job is to not block the exit.

In 2025, winning a Grand Tour stage from the break has become virtually impossible. To do it without being an elite-level climber who’s off the GC, or a sprinter without a team, reduces the odds even further. To repeatedly win from these complicated scenarios requires something else: hunger, desperation, courage, talent—and perhaps just no other option.

Ben Healy, of course, is all of these. Time and time again, Ben has found a way. As such, he is one of very few examples in the current peloton of a real breakaway specialist. A rider who climbs well but won’t beat the best if he waits. Who time trials well, but not enough to threaten the top GC contenders. And who—for the life of him (sorry Ben)—just can’t sprint.

Yes, chance can play a part: once—yes. Twice—maybe. But to arrive in a position to win from the break time and time again, as Ben does, takes much more than that. In April he did it on stage five of the Basque Country—a perfectly played gambit.

It’s not poetic or cool—much less like a wild night out on the town and more like an evening spent in on Reddit, buried in nerdy forums about friction. It takes ruthless precision and a desire to get everything in place to win from these positions. The details of each gram, of resistance and turbulence, of terrain and conditions, are poured over and dissected until the sum of the parts can add up to the whole.

These guys are looking for the things that seemingly defy logic: If you’re alone into a headwind and you commit, it can be easier for the solo rider than the group behind, where riders skip turns because of the headwind. If you go so far from the finish that others think there’s time to catch you, the gap can quickly become unmanageable—the further it seems, the easier it can be. Then on the flip side, sometimes being just there is much further away in real terms than the rest of the group thinks. If you’re alone in the group, you can be better off, as the complexities of ambitions and relations between teammates often simply defy textbook tactics.

These are the things the breakaway specialist is looking for—or simply sensing. I can’t tell you with authority that Ben knew or had time to consciously understand these things, but on stage six of this year’s Tour de France, it felt as if he could see very clearly. And I watched on, from my privileged position, as everything suddenly bent to the will of the breakaway specialist. It was incredible.

The last cruelty about winning from the break like this is that it isn’t a formula you can repeat. Stage six of the Tour was incredible. It was magic. But we can’t win that way again.

We will never be there again—in that situation, with those riders, at that moment. But those same faults that have developed such a keen sense of how to win are still there. Only now, the rivals become wiser, harder to beat. They wait for us.


Instead, the breakaway specialist is cursed to keep searching—to reinvent, to push, to adapt—in pursuit of victory against almost impossible odds.

During the 2023 Giro, Ben customised our Pro Team TT Aero Suit, cutting the top of his number pouches to fashion nutrition pockets. His instinctual innovation galvanised the development of our Pro Team Breakaway Suit, crafted with Ben to produce the optimal outfit for offensive bike racing. 

Available first to RCC members in limited quantities.