Ben Healy is a racer, pure and simple. He self-identifies as an “unconventional rider”, as someone who dreams big and who isn’t intimidated by his more decorated or experienced competitors. He’d rather come last having tried to do something in a race than finish mid-pack without having really taken any risks. He is not a rider there to simply make up the numbers. For Healy, it’s all or nothing.
“Sometimes it backfires on me,” he says. “It meant I was a bit inconsistent when I was in the under-23 and junior ranks, it made people question what I could do.”
A glance at Healy’s ProCyclingStats page from this season tells one side to the story of the Irishman’s career. It paints the picture of yet another young, cycling supertalent who can win Grand Tour stages in his second year as a professional rider and finish on the podium in the Ardennes Classics in a style that makes it look easy. What it fails to represent, though, is the journey Healy has been on to get to this point.
His story is one of setbacks and determination, of self-belief and unwavering determination in abundance. For Healy, it has not been as easy as pinning a race number on and discovering he has the talent to win big in this tough sport, but instead a rollercoaster ride with plenty of bumps on the tracks. We start talking about the very beginning.
“I started doing it because of my Dad,” Healy says. “He’s always been a pretty keen cyclist and took me down the local track in Halesowen when I was a kid. I just loved doing it and always went back.”
Despite his love for it, Healy, by his own admission, was always “dreadful” at track cycling and began to spend more time mountain biking as he moved through the youth ranks. He found his way onto what was then known as the British Cycling Olympic Development Academy (ODA) for mountain biking but was dropped from the programme when he became a junior. This fuelled a transition back over to the road racing scene.
“When I got kicked off the ODA, GB were unresponsive. They didn’t tell me why or what I needed to do differently which was my first aggravation with them. In my first year junior I was riding pretty decent on the road but I never got a look in for selection for races with GB,” Healy explains.
It was this frustration that led the 22-year-old to switch his allegiance…