Tour de France 2025: Ben Healy, the rebel breakaway

The peloton has its punk rocker. He rides like he would attack: punch after punch, his head slightly screwed to one side, and if cycling allowed it, he'd wear combat boots . On social media, we've already seen him surfing. He has a small sausage dog and he shares songs by the very cool Dubliners Fontaines DC, a band he could easily be part of with his pub crawler face with sticky tables – controlled facial hair, rings in his ears, ringlets licking his forehead. But this is a Toulouse hotel, and Ben Healy, 24, who the day before, on the heights of Mont-Dore (Puy-de-Dôme), became the first Irishman to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France since Stephen Roche in 1987, looks like a little boy.

In front of the cameras and the reporters who have come for this rest day, halfway through the Tour, his body appears elsewhere; he doesn't completely take up space. He seems a little awkward. His tone remains even and polite with each question. When asked how he anticipates the rest of his career, he blurts out: "I just like riding." A little warm water and a good cold shower: in Escape Collective,