Ben Healy walks through the automatic doors of his team’s air-conditioned beachfront hotel in Castelldefels, an affluent seaside town just south of Barcelona (where a certain Lionel Messi owns a mansion), and steps out into the blistering Catalan heat and blinding sunshine.
“I want a beer,” Healy sighs, to no one in particular.
The 25-year-old has just returned from a 100km training ride and is about to spend the next hour talking to journalists. He’s also just over 24 hours away from the start of the Tour de France, the race he lit up last year with an aggressive, spectacularly successful ride. There’ll be no beer tonight, then.
Which is a shame, I suggest, as Healy and I walk outside towards the corner of a covered outdoor terrace overlooking the town’s impressively long beach and its crowds of tanned holidaymakers.
“I would take a beer, yeah,” the Wordlsey-born Irish star laughs, when I ask whether I correctly overheard his plea for some non-team approved refreshment earlier.
“But look where we are! I was watching the Spanish game last night thinking, ah, how good would this be? The beach is just teasing us, you know. I’m watching everyone play volleyball in the sea. I’m getting jealous, I’m not going to lie.”
Instead of lounging in a deckchair with a pint of lager in his hand, Healy has spent the past few weeks, in his words, “baking” in Mallorca as he raced against time to enter this year’s Tour in top form.
It’s been a turbulent, stop-start 2026 season so far for the EF Education-EasyPost rider, marred by illness, injury, and no wins. After crashing at 50kph at the Tour of the Basque Country, Healy was then struck by a motorist during a training camp at altitude in May.
He returned to racing last month at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (formerly the Critérium du Dauphiné), but fell ill and abandoned the race before the final weekend.
It’s a build-up to the Tour he succinctly describes as a “bit crap”.
“It’s been super up and down, but to be honest, I think I’ve got all the prep I need,” he tells road.cc on the eve of cycling’s biggest race.
“I’m confident to say I’m going to be here from stage one. I got hit by a car in altitude camp, and then I got sick in Dauphiné, so it’s just like banging my head against the wall. It took a week to get over it. I think you’ve heard a lot of sickness in the peloton and it really knocked me around.
“But then I had a good couple of weeks in the heat getting ready for this Super El Niño, and I’m here at the Tour in one piece now and I’m ready to race. All the work’s done, so I’m just itching to race now.”
The last time I spoke properly with the Irish star was at last year’s Tour, half-an-hour or so after he lost the yellow jersey on Hautacam, where he dug extremely deep into his reserves in a desperate, ultimately doomed bid to retain his position on GC.
“I was cooked, I was fully cooked,” he says now, reflecting on that ride on Hautacam.
“And in that scenario, most of the time I would have just sat up a long time before that. Pushing all the way to the top was really…” he trails off.
But riding hard, regardless of the consequences, is what Ben Healy is all about. His relentlessly aggressive style paid off spectacularly at the 2025 Tour, earning him a brilliant stage win in Vire Normandie, two days in yellow, and ninth overall on GC in Paris.
“It was a real dream come true,” the 25-year-old says now of his breakthrough Tour ride.
“For any cyclist, your dream of winning a stage at the Tour, but to win the stage, yellow jersey, top 10 overall. It was just kind of beyond belief, and I would have been happy with just a stage win. But everything else that went along with it was just phenomenal.”
A self-styled underdog – hence his focus on aero and technological gains – since last year’s Tour Healy has nevertheless fully embraced his clear leadership role at EF, which he will share with Richard Carapaz at the 2026 race. He was vocal when it came to determining the route for the team’s last pre-Tour training ride, and joined in with the squad-wide ribbing that ensued when Kasper Asgreen revealed he’d ride the entire 100km on his time trial bike.
The 2026 Tour, while underlining Healy’s status in his own team and among the sport’s elite, also raised a few interesting questions about his ceiling, especially in grand tours. During Friday’s press conference, his EF Education-EasyPost boss Jonathan Vaughters, never one for understatement, described Healy as the “best breakaway rider in the world”.
But can Healy also turn himself into a fully-fledged grand tour GC contender? According to the man himself, no. Mainly because he just doesn’t want to.
“I think I definitely proved to myself that I could do that GC role, but I was a bit optimistic and thinking that I could get in breaks still as well,” he tells road.cc.
“Stage 20 [to Pontarlier] for me was a really perfect stage and I just couldn’t move anywhere. It was kind of frustrating, but I think now I’ve ticked that off.
“I really do just want to go back to doing breakaways and racing in that way. It’s what I love doing. Putting my hands in the air is much better than finishing eighth or ninth, which doesn’t really move the needle for me, I guess.
“Just getting that adrenaline of racing out front and winning, that’s what I want to do.”
Of course, in the modern era, Healy knows that the aggressive style he favours can pay dividends when it comes to the overall battle, though he insists any positive GC performance will be purely incidental in the hunt for stage victories.
“The Tour is such a hard, attritional race,” he says. “I think you just put yourself in the front a few days and don’t really lose too much time in the other days, and you’re in the game in GC pretty quickly.
“Especially in a course like this year, there are so many intermediate mountain stages – and I’m not complaining at all this. It’s actually perfect for me, but I think you can really yo-yo up and down in the GC, five minutes up one day, 10 minutes another, so you’re going to be there or thereabouts.”
So, what would a successful 2026 Tour look like for Ben Healy?
“I think the first goal for myself is just I want to be back at the front racing and being competitive for a stage win,” he says.
“And yeah, if I can win another stage, that would be the cherry on top.”
If he does attack his way to success at this year’s Tour, surely a celebratory beer could be squeezed in at some point, marginal gains and nutrition plans be damned?
“Hopefully,” Healy laughs. “Fingers crossed…”
