Tom Southam: If it didn't work, then we'd fail trying 🇫🇷 🥇
Inside Ben Healy's Tour de France stage win, through the eyes of his sports director
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Stage 6 of the Tour de France saw the first successful breakaway win of this year’s race with Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) attacking with 42.5km to go and soloing to victory in Vire Normandie to take the biggest victory of his career.
Last night, I caught up with his sports director, Tom Southam, to talk about the win and how the perfect plan was put together and executed.
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Daniel Benson: When did you realise that this was a stage in which Ben Healy and the team had a chance, and did the opening five stages have an impact on your strategy?
Tom Southam: During the opening five days, we had Ben on the back burner because we wanted to target stage 6, and he and his coach had the same idea, and they’ve had that idea for a while. With the natural evolution of the race and how the stage 5 time trial naturally gave the GC more structure, it was always likely that the following day would be suitable for a break. There hadn’t been a successful breakaway so far, and the other finishes until this point were going to be too punchy, and with so many teams basically drag racing for the first few stages, we’d never be able to get away. With Ben, we needed a race where he could win from the break and not from the bunch. All of our eggs were in the one basket of winning from the break, and if it didn’t work, then we’d fail trying. We committed to the plan.
DB: What was said before the start on the team bus, and were you looking at specific riders from other teams?
TS: The other rider we spoke about was Mathieu van der Poel, because we felt he was going to go for the break. Actually, we also thought the same about Wout van Aert. We thought that Tadej Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates might let van der Poel take the yellow jersey, and we thought Van Aert was going to go up the road as well. He tried, but our thinking was that even when we made it into the breakaway, we were still going to come up against really high-quality bike riders that we needed to beat. Getting into the break was a bit of a battle, but there was a lot to be done after that.