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Tour de France Daily | Stage 14 | Ben Healy races back into the top ten on GC

Irishman goes toe to toe with yellow jersey favorites up Superbagnères

July 19, 2025

Ben Healy soared back into the top ten of the Tour de France’s general classification with a strong ride up to the summit of Luchon-Superbagnères in the Pyrenees.

Ben Healy soared back into the top ten of the Tour de France’s general classification with a strong ride up to the summit of Luchon-Superbagnères in the Pyrenees.

He finished the Tour’s 14th stage in seventh place and is now ninth overall in the race for the yellow jersey. After two days in the maillot jaune, Ben is determined to find out what kind of GC rider he can become at this Tour de France.

This morning, his plan was to go for the breakaway. With a cool mist hanging over the Pyrenees, Ben hoped he could make one of his signature long-range raids stick. On the road out of Pau, he attacked again and again, but the peloton didn’t let anything go until the race hit the Tourmalet. On the fearsome climb’s lower slopes, Ben made all the right moves, following the Tour’s current King of the Mountains Lenny Martinez and eventual stage winner Thymen Arensman, but with over 5000 meters of total climbing on the day and a massive effort to defend yellow just behind him, he reckoned he didn’t have the legs to hold out all the way to finish. So he let up, caught his breath, and dropped back to the yellow jersey group, ready to give his all on Luchon-Superbagnères.

Harry Sweeny did a huge turn to keep Ben out of the wind over the top of the Tourmalet and then the Col d’Aspin. When the race opened up on the Col de Peyresourde, Ben had the legs to go with the best.

On Luchon-Superbagnères, he was right there with them, racing through the fog and rowdy crowds to finish seventh on the day.

Hear from Ben and his teammates from the finish of Stage 14 of the 2025 Tour de France.

Ben Healy

I went for the break today and spent a lot of energy doing that, but I realized pretty quickly on that I didn't have the legs for the stage, especially with UAE pulling behind, so I decided to pull the plug and see what I could do in the finale. I think it was the right decision in the end. Thymen and then Lenny were pulling so hard on the Tourmalet. I had to make the decision on the road. They went so hard on that climb, and in the valleys. It really hurt the legs.

Now that I am top ten on GC, I am not just going to lose time on purpose. Days like this and the ones coming up are the kind of days that always suit me. I think I've always sort of known that, but I've approached them from a breakaway standpoint rather than for the GC. I want to be up with the big boys.

Neilson Powless

I just tried to find a group as soon as the peloton started exploding. I got some water and got some drinks for the boys before the Tourmalet started, and then I just tried to find a good gruppetto to get to the line as easily as possible.

Over the top of the Tourmalet, the fog was pretty intense. I couldn’t really see too much, but luckily we weren't pushing the descent too hard behind, so it was safe enough.

Harry Sweeny

Ben and I were going to try and get in the breakaway, but it ended up going on the climb and I didn't have the facilities for that today. Ben tried, and he blew up, and in the end it just turned out to be a GC day, with Thymen winning. Chapeau. Hats off for that.

Ben's moved up two spots and everyone's feeling good. It'll be interesting now to see what the plan is and see if we still race aggressively or whether we can defend. No one's going to let ninth place on GC go in the breakaway. So we will see.

Charly Wegelius, Sports Director

As we expected, there was a big fight for the breakaway. That went on for a long time. The sprint competition brought the race to the bottom of the Tourmalet. Ben did a great job making it in. But, the constant pace changes and accelerations were a bit too much for him to handle. And he did something that's quite rare, which is getting dropped out of the breakaway, but still finding the resources to recover before getting caught, so he could stay with the yellow jersey group.

He basically pressed reset and did his best race for the finale, which brought a pretty impressive seventh place. That was a great standalone performance. We're going to sit down now, and focus on tomorrow with some other riders, and then we'll see what it means for the race going onwards. It was a pretty impressive ride.

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FRTour de France
Jul. 05, 2025 – Jul. 27, 2025
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Ben Healy

Ben Healy is one of the best young bike racers of his generation. Born and raised near Birmingham, the 24-year-old is proud of his Irish roots and honored to wear the Bratach na hÉireann stripes on his sleeve as a former Irish road race national champion.

The 2023 season was Ben’s breakout year. After winning the GP Industria & Artigianato and a stage at Coppi e Bartali, he finished second at Brabantse Pijl and second at the Amstel Gold Race. And then he went and won a stage at the Giro d'Italia with a 50km solo. Ben followed this up in 2024 with a stage win at the Tour of Slovenia and an inspired Tour de France which saw him climb like never before in service of his teammates. He rolled into 2025 more motivated than ever and capped off his spring with a huge solo stage win at Itzulia Basque Country, third place at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, fourth at Strade Bianche, as well as top tens at La Flèche Wallonne and the Amstel Gold Race. He won stage 6 of the 2025 Tour de France with a stunning solo attack and then rode into yellow on stage 10.

Results like that are a testament to his tenacity.

Ben blazed his own way to the pro ranks. He was riding at his local track by the time he was five years old. Growing up, he was there every Sunday morning to train and race. But his first love was mountain biking. That meant hucking himself off the established track for a young bike racer in Britain. Ben dropped out of the academy and decided to go it alone.

Racing mountain bikes and road bikes on smaller teams, he soon had stage wins at the Giro Ciclistico d’Italia and the Ronde de l’Isard to his name, as well as Irish road and time trial championship titles. In 2019, Ben became the youngest ever winner of a stage at the Tour de l’Avenir.

He has since shown that he can go toe-to-toe with the best in the world in the sport’s greatest races.

Ben loves getting in breakaways and surprising his rivals with his daring attacks. He is as aero as anyone in the peloton and is always looking for the latest edge.

Away from the races, Ben likes big cities and hanging out with his friends and his dog Olive in Andorra.

He is an explosive climber, who wants to find out what he can do over the course of a grand tour. So does the rest of the world. The only thing that’s for certain is that Ben Healy is going to keep racing his own way.

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Neilson Powless

When Neilson Powless started racing X-Terra triathlons with his sister back home in Northern California, he just wanted to spend time outside and rip around the trails near his house. His first love was mountain biking. It was his best discipline in those off-road triathlons, and when he got to high school, there were all sorts of opportunities for him to compete in California’s mountain bike league. Soon, he was traveling with the US national team, racing junior world cups and championships against the world’s most talented mountain bikers. Race in and race out, Neilson proved he was one of them.

Then he decided he wanted to have a go on the road.

Neilson has progressed steadily since he turned pro in 2018, thanks to his hard work and diligent approach to training. In 2020, Neilson became the first tribally recognized Native North American to race the Tour de France. The next year, he won Spain’s greatest one-day race, the Clásica San Sebastián, and finished fifth at the world championships in Belgium. Neilson was stellar in 2022. After a strong campaign in the Ardennes, he finished fourth on GC at the Tour de Suisse and lit up the Tour de France. He finished the year off with a victory at the Japan Cup. In 2023, he won his first race of the year: the Grand Prix Cycliste de Marseille. He then won the overall at Étoile de Bèsseges and stormed the Flemish classics, finishing third at Dwars door Vlaanderen and fifth at De Ronde in his debut campaign on the cobbles.

He raced his fifth Tour de France in 2024 and played a big role in helping teammate Richard Carapaz win the King of the Mountains jersey. He capped off the year with wins at Gran Piemonte and Japan Cup.

Neilson got his 2025 season rolling in a big way at Dwars door Vlaanderen, where he took the victory in a three-versus-one sprint. After a strong spring, he wants to fulfil his life-long dream at the 2025 Tour de France and win a stage. He has come close before and knows that he has what it takes. The Tour is his home race.

Neilson lives in Nice, France with his wife and young daughter during the racing season. He enjoys exploring their adopted city and relaxing on the beach after hard rides through the Alps.

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Harry Sweeny

Harry Sweeny joined our team in 2024 and quickly became a key rider for us in the classics and grand tours. This is the Australian’s fifth season as a pro.

Harry is still discovering his limits as a racer. As a U23, he won Il Piccolo Lombardia and has since ridden the Tour de France, where, as a rookie, he finished third on a stage and rode onto the Champs-Élysées in the break, as jets trailed bleu, blanc, et rouge streaks into the sky overhead. He has raced Paris-Roubaix in the wet and Liège-Bastogne-Liège alongside his friend, the former winner and cycling legend, Philippe Gilbert. Last year, he finished seventh on GC at the Tour of Luxembourg after riding hard for his teammates all season. Harry believes that his best is yet to come.

He came to cycling late. As a kid growing up in Brisbane, where his family moved when he was a child, he played soccer and rugby and did gymnastics and swam. He took up triathlon as a schoolboy, but focused on cycling when he was a junior and was recovering from a running injury. He started out racing local crits. His athleticism soon shone and he was picked to race the world championships in Richmond, Virginia for the Australian national team.

He moved to Europe to race, first for a small junior team in Belgium, and then for two years with the Australian Institute of Sport squad, which was then based in Italy, before moving back to Belgium for his final year as an U23. Those years opened up new worlds for Harry.

EF Education-EasyPost’s open-minded international character is a big draw for him. On the teams he has raced for in the past, he has often been one of the few foreigners. Our team is made up of riders and staff from dozens of nationalities. Most of them know what it is like to build a life far from home and can help with all of the little difficulties that come with that. Our multicultural make up helps us to expand our outlook and think beyond traditional ways of doing things too.

Harry is a lot more than a bike racer. He is a keen cook and he loves to go camping and hiking with his girlfriend, an environmental scientist, near their adopted home in Andorra. In the winter, he loves to ski. And he is a YouTuber.

This summer, Harry will return to the Tour de France in EF Education-EasyPost pink. We know that we can always count on him to be where we need him to be when it counts – and to bring a laugh to the bus.

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