Ben Healy, Harry Sweeny, Kasper Asgreen, Marijn van den Berg, Michael Valgren, Vincenzo Albanese, Neilson Powless, and Alex Baudin raced how JV always wanted our teams to race. They went on the attack from the Grand Départ in Lille all the way to the final stage over Montmartre in Paris and were rewarded with a stage win for Ben and two days in the yellow jersey. The whole organization was swept up in the team’s Tour de France vibe. We showed the world that you can have fun and kick butt at the highest level at the same time.

We sat down with EF Pro Cycling’s founder and CEO to talk about how the Tour de France came together and what we can expect from the team going forward.

Our Tour was really exciting and fun, the best that we could have hoped for. Losing Richard Carapaz a week before the Tour, everyone had tempered their expectations a little bit, but we brought a group of guys who were really prepared to race, and they seized the opportunity. We had to say, ‘Ok, we’re not going to have a GC guy, so we're just racing every day.’ And the guys really took that to heart and made the most of it. For me, this Tour was probably the most fun race that we have had.

Everyone prepared really, really well for the Tour. We had reserved a lot of our best riders and allowed them a really good run into the race. Obviously, there were some pressures to support other riders at the Giro and elsewhere, but we were able to give all the key guys a really good run in without compromising their schedules. The preparation work had all gone really well. It was very precise and very measured and made to measure for the occasion. The riders and staff were ready to go, for sure.

What we needed was for the race to open up a little bit. In the past couple years, it hasn't been terribly open. The racing has often been very closed, and it certainly started to look like it might be that way in 2025 as well. But we decided to just try every day. I told Head DS Charly Wegelius and the riders, ‘I'm not going to say we want a stage win; of course, we want a stage win. I am not going to say we want the yellow jersey; of course, we want the yellow jersey. But we need to be in every single breakaway that makes it to the finish line.’ Whether or not we would win out of those breakaways was a different discussion. Of course, we wanted to do that, but the broad strategy was that if a breakaway would make it to the finish line, we needed to be represented every single time, because the break would probably only make it one out of every four stages at the Tour and we needed to take every single one of those five or six chances for one of them to work out.

From there on out, everyone could race in a more relaxed manner. The pressure was off, so we could just have fun with it. We were like, ‘Okay, so what are we going to do next?’ We had our stage win in the bag, so what was next? And that is what led to the yellow jersey a few days later. Since we had a stage, we weren't desperately chasing a stage win anymore. So, what would be even more interesting than a stage win? By racing in a relaxed manner, we put ourselves in a position to do something even bigger. And a few days later, we did that by having half the team in the breakaway. When you can do that, you have a lot of options for how you can play it.

The yellow jersey is obviously the greatest prize you can have in the sport of cycling. It’s an honor for a team and for a rider to be able to wear the yellow jersey. It doesn't actually carry that many UCI points. Maybe, a very casual observer of cycling would say, ‘But aren't you trying to get that in Paris?’ and not understand the importance of carrying it for a few days. But, for those of us who have been in the sport for a long time, for the very hardcore fans of the sport, carrying the yellow jersey is the most important thing that you can do in cycling. Even if you only get to have it for one day or two days, it is still a career-defining moment. That was obviously the case for Ben.

Ben went from being a really exciting rider who had won a stage - everyone kind of knew he was capable of that - and a super breakaway specialist, and with great long-lasting power, to Ben the superstar, because he was in the yellow jersey. All of a sudden, Ben's dog was a superstar.

The attention on the team exploded in a really positive way. It didn’t put pressure on the team at all. All of a sudden, everything that we've been trying to do and message and say and act on and execute on for years, being a very serious team behind closed doors, but when we're out there on the road, just having fun and racing hard and not doing it in this monotone, mechanistic way, but being goofy, being the fun pink team, but the fun pink team that kicks butt, just blended together when we had the yellow jersey. The yellow and pink just looked really good together. It all came together for a few days. It was like, Look! This is what we've been trying to say and what we've been trying to show the world for years! It was great.

The reason Ben loves one-day races is that the pressure is there just for one day and then it's gone. You don't have to race in a measured way. You can race in the most spectacular and aggressive way you possibly can. If you succeed, you succeed. And if you don't, it's only one day. If you mess it up, whatever, you wait until five days later and then you do another one-day race. There is no steady grinding pressure. Ben has historically suffered a little bit with that kind of grinding pressure. Every single time we've experimentally tried to race him as a GC rider, he usually has one day where he just kind of explodes and can't handle it, and then a few days later, he ends up being the strongest rider in the race. The Tour of the Basque Country is the best example of that. He’d already lost ten minutes and then he won with a massive solo. He just isn’t used to that conservative, all-I-want-to-do-is-not-lose-today GC rider mentality. Ben is more of a maybe-I-will-explode-but-I-will-try-to-win kind of guy. He is an all-or-nothing kind of guy, not a do-not-lose dude.

At the Tour, we saw the first evidence that maybe he won't struggle as much with that kind of day-to-day pressure in the future. He was able to deal with it. Maybe Ben can be a GC rider in three-week tours, but he has to do it in the Ben Healy way, which might be going out and gaining 10 minutes one day and then losing 10 minutes the next, but being on par anyways. If you look at the top 10 in the Tour de France, he's the only rider who got into that top 10 by racing the way that he did. He rode both time trials essentially easily. None of the other riders in the top 10 rode the two time trials easily and treated them like recovery days. He was in multiple long-distance breakaways where he gained tons of time and dragged people to increase those time gains. There were certain mountain stages where he blew up and lost a bunch of time, and other mountain stages where he was right there with the best GC riders all the way to the finish. There was no one else in the top 10 that did anything like that. I think it gave Ben the confidence going forward to be like, ‘Okay, I don't have to race GC in a grand tour the way everyone else does. I don't have to race it the way you're supposed to race it. I can race it my own way and still get a really good result.’

If someone said to me, ‘I’m going to trade you Ben having the race he had for Ben riding this super conservative race, but he performs well in both the time trials and blah, blah, blah and he finishes fifth. I'm going to trade you fifth on GC for ninth on GC, but he doesn't race the way he did on Ventoux, for instance, or the stage he won or the stage he got the yellow.’ I'm not taking that trade. That's a bad trade!

Ben is a guy who all the other riders want to ride for. He reminds me in that regard of Rigoberto Urán. He is not the showman that Rigo was, but the guys want to work for Ben like they worked for Rigo. They don’t work for him because he's the best, and they have to because that is what they are supposed to do – put on your big boy pants and go out and help the leader, because that's what you're paid to do. No, they want to help him. Those guys want to throw it on the line for Ben. They're almost anxious to sacrifice themselves for him.

That puts him in a very strong leadership position. If you've got people who want to help you, they're just going to ask you, ‘How high do you want me to jump?’ So, he is in the luxurious position of not having to push for that leadership. It comes to him naturally.

I've known for quite some time that Harry's an unbelievably strong rider. Just from a pure physiology standpoint, his numbers are enormous. We have been waiting for the moment when those numbers really hit the road. Harry also struggles a little bit with pressure, in that he gets so amped up, because he's excited to race and he's so excited to get his own opportunities with our team and not always have to help somebody else out, that he sometimes kind of overcooks it a little bit in his head.

Probably one of the best things for Harry was that, with that early stage win of Ben’s, all of a sudden, he didn't feel so much pressure anymore. Slowly but surely, as the race went on and he got a little bit more tired and a little less nervous, he was able to start producing some real results because that pressure or that nervousness lifted off of him. He started to race with a little bit more fluidity and a more relaxed style. Harry just needs another Tour de France. Maybe, it is the one next year. I have no doubt in my mind that Harry will win a stage of the Tour de France at some point in his career. This year, he came pretty close, and as he becomes more mature and a little bit more relaxed, the underlying engine is there in abundance.

The day we got the yellow jersey is the obvious one. The guys threw it all out on the line for Ben and Ben threw it all out on the line for them. But beyond that, just the social environment every day. It is very rare that you go three weeks in a grand tour where there isn't a disagreement between the riders about something, whether it's how to do the tactics or what's for dinner or what time is dinner. That didn't happen. These guys moved as one unit from day one. That showed every single time we were represented in the front.

The day we defended the jersey, they came together, and they rode over their heads that day. I mean, heck, the first day we had three riders in the front group. Unfortunately, Marijn crashed. But, there was never a critical moment in this year's Tour de France that we missed. We were there every single time. Every single time there was an opportunity, we were there and we weren't there with individual riders, we were there as a team.

We learned that we have always got to be ready to make lemonade out of lemons. We started off the Tour with a bit of a lemon, losing Richie, and we turned that around real quick. Cycling is a hard sport, and it's a harsh sport, and it's a real sport, and it's very easy to hang your head when things don't go quite right, which is most of the time in cycling. The biggest lesson from a managerial standpoint is that you need to be able to pivot, and you need to be able to pivot fast. You need to be able to have the whole organization ready to completely change everything we were thinking about in 24 hours. And if you can do that, and you can do that without people losing faith, then usually the pivot will produce some sort of success. Don’t mourn what you’ve lost for too long, or you’ll miss what’s great sitting right under your nose.

I've told our Head DS Charly Wegelius that we're fine on UCI points. I am not worried about relegation or any of that anymore. I don't really care whether we end up seventh or we end up 13th in the ranking. That to me is irrelevant. What I want from the rest of the year is that we experiment with some new combinations of teams, with some younger riders, with some guys you wouldn't expect to be making rosters for this race or that race. We want to experiment to see what works and what doesn't work for 2026. What are my performance exhibitions? I don't really know, because we're going to throw a bunch of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. With the races we've got left, we're not going in with fixed objectives. Okay, Ben is very focused on the world championships and we are supporting him as much as we can for that. Obviously, he will be racing for Ireland there, but we're trying to support him in his effort to get ready for the world championships as much as possible. But, beyond that, what I want to see is the junior varsity team step up and see what they have got at the Vuelta and in some of the other races toward the end of the year. I want to see new faces. I want to see new, different tactics. I want to see us doing something incredibly well that we didn't expect. And I also expect to see us really screwing up and falling on our faces a few times too. I want to learn from errors from now to the end of the year. Let's just throw it all out there, see how many mistakes we can make from now to the end of the year, so we can correct those mistakes for next season, so that we go into 2026 having perfected what we can get out of the junior varsity team going forward.