Back when he was cutting his teeth as a racer in Western Australia, Ben O'Connor said he recollects crossing paths with Luke Durbridge, the longstanding pro who is soon to be his teammate at Jayco-AIUIa. Probably the best way to describe the young O'Connor's reaction when he saw 'Turbo-Durbo' was being star-struck.
"I remember I was riding round Perth and seeing Durbridge and going - Oh my God! Durbo! GreenEdge!" O'Connor told reporters during an interview at a recent training camp in Spain with his new squad.
"So imagine if it had been Cadel" - Evans, the Tour de France champion in 2011, who never raced for his home Australian squad during his career - "and he'd been in GreenEdge. That would have been huge, because he'd won the Tour.
"I think as a younger cyclist, to have that allure for the Aussie team would be special, because when you're younger, you look up to these guys, you want to be like them. So it's cool for Aussie cycling."
'It' of course, is O'Connor's imminent move to Jayco-AIUIa their top Grand Tour leader, a space left vacant by the departing Great Britain's Simon Yates and starting on January 1, 2025. O'Connor is already at training camp in Spain with his new squad, getting familiarized and enjoying an atmosphere which, unlike his previous team, Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, fully connects with his Australian roots.
O'Connor is at pains to emphasise that he has nothing but praise for his former French team, where in 2024 he enjoyed his best season to date. He even gently but firmly rebuts one journalist's suggestion that he'll have less negative energy to handle at Jayco-AIUIa by saying, "No, because the whole thing about 'French negativity' isn't true."
As well as clearly looking forward to being the first-ever Australian Grand Tour leader for Jayco-AIUIa in their 12-year history, and maybe inspiring some future generations of racers, come 2025, albeit with caveats, O'Connor is also determined to perform at least as well as he did in his stand-out 2024 season. As he puts it: "I know there's more I can do."
"I probably won't be in the lead of the Vuelta for two weeks again, that's for sure," O'Connor says with a laugh, referring to his lengthy spell at the top of the Spanish Grand Tour GC last September, which culminated with second overall in Madrid.
"But I can get close. Whether it is the best year of my life in cycling terms, I'm not certain, but I can perform at this level again, that's for sure, and I can perform better because I know there's more I can do.
"Results are fickle, though, you can do your best things and have it not work out. It can just be about intelligence, being smart. It's like at the [2024] Worlds, right? I wasn't the second strongest guy there in the race, I was smart, but I wasn't second strongest. But I came away with a silver medal."
When it comes to performance versus results, he agrees that "you can't correlate that at all".
By way of example, he cites the 2024 Giro d'Italia where he rode to fourth overall. "I was sick as a dog in the final week, I hated that week, it sucked, apart from Bassano [stage 20] where I started to feel better again.
"You can look at that and go: that was a big missed opportunity because I had the chance there to be on the podium but I couldn't do it because I was sick. That's the way it is, but what else can you do? Don't cry about it."
It was a similar story at the 2024 UAE Tour where he said he could have won outright but instead had to settle for second behind Lennert van Eetvelt (Lotto-Destny).
"Van Eetvelt did a great ride, but I also probably didn't do the best one. Those two things you can say: hey, I got a podium in two WorldTour stage races, but I didn't win them, that didn't happen.
"So I know that for next year, it's something I can improve on. But you can't go back and change time, either."
Yet for all O'Connor knows he has yet to reach his peak, even if he attains and maintains a higher performance level in 2025 he is realistic about his chances of taking on Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates). That said, he's not going to switch races just to miss out on crossing swords with the top two Grand Tour racers of his era, either.
"That's out of reach, they're too good," he says about his chances of beating either the Slovenian or Dane. "You can be close on certain days but I'm not that physically talented.
"I guess I could do the Giro and Vuelta every year, and avoid the Tour" - thereby avoiding Vingegaard and Pogačar at least in one Grand Tour - "but the Tour is the pinnacle, you want to be there.
"Sports are full of greats, that's part and parcel of it and you can't win everything, you can't avoid it, 'cos that's professional sport. You just have to get on and deal with it."
One-day racing - when?
The Grand Tours and stage racing are very much O'Connor's bread and butter, and he's yet to reveal his race programme for 2025 beyond the Tour de France, saying in Spain that it is still under wraps.
But when he talks to journalists in a hotel in Alicante, it so happens that he is barely an hour's drive away from where he took his first win of the season, the one-day Vuelta a Murcia, thanks to a gutsy late solo break. Then while that was an excellent start to the year and helped him hit the ground running, O'Connor's final 2024 race at the Road World Championships also saw him finish as 'first of the mortals' in a one-day event, claiming silver behind a Pogačar on the rampage.
These results are hardly to be sniffed at, but it's curious that one-day racing hasn't featured heavily in O'Connor's career to date. His only other win in that specialty came when he outgunned breakaway specialist Jesus Herrada (Cofidis) in the low-key Tour du Jura in France back in 2022. There is also a seventh place in the GP Montreal in 2023 and a few other top 15 finishes in the Italian semi-Classics knocking around in his palmares.
So although his attitude towards the Ardennes Classics might politely be described as mixed, O'Connor recognises that one-day racing does have its appeal for him, and thus potential for being a greater priority in the future.
"Murcia was great fun - I loved that, that was such a good race to do. There wasn't the stress of positioning, and the worry, the huge expectations: it was my first race and you just got to hit it.
"One-day racing is something my now former coach always believed I should be doing more of, but it just never aligned with what we were doing. You have to like that kind of racing and when it comes to Amstel, Fleche and Liège - it's not like I feel 'I can't wait for this.'
"The World Championship is a little different. It's a hell of a vibe with the national kit and with the Aussie boys, that's really a special thing.
"One thing I do like about one-day racing is that you have to lay it on the line, which is cool. Stage races - you can wait to be the best guy over time, be it in a time trial, a mountain top or in the win. But a one-day race you have to search for it, you have to be somewhat aggressive at some point, and that's a cool way to race.
"But overall, one-day racing is a kettle of fish there that's ready to open and try to exploit, so I guess you're right," he concludes. "It's something I should do more of."
Team spirit
Whether one-day racing ends up featuring larger or smaller on O'Connor's hit list very much remains to be seen. But for now, both O'Connor and Jayco-AIUIa begin working together to see how they combine in the stage racing arena.
O'Connor himself has more than proved his worth in that specialty to date, and the same goes for his new team, so it should be a promising match. The Australian squad is not the biggest hitter in the Grand Tour battles, but O'Connor is confident they'll be able to back him as much as he needs, and he points to the way that Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale stepped to the plate in the Vuelta as the way to go.
"Even though you might not have a super-star team, you can control a race, so we were able to control the Vuelta super-well," he says. "It's not like Decathlon was a team full of superstars, but the boys were good, they're not nobodies, either.
"You look at the UAE team in the Vuelta this year - it was something else compared to what we have. But our boys were some of the strongest guys in the race, too, because they had a set job, a set role and they were able to do it.
"No matter what the scenario, if you're very clear about what you can do, the whole team can step up to that mark.
"And Jayco's been a team that's been on the front a lot, too [Simon] Yates has won WorldTour stage races, they've done big sprints with Dylan [Groenwegen] and Caleb [Ewan], they've won big races with Gero' [Simon Gerrans]. They know what to do. I don't think there's anything to be worried about that score."
Nor can it be forgotten that just as it's hugely important for O'Connor to be the first Australian Grand Tour leader of Jayco-AIUIa, that feeling is something of a two-way street. For his fellow countrymen on the squad in particular, and for the team in general too, the chance for them to help O'Connor battle for GC is surely hugely motivating as well.
And if they, like O'Connor, can help inspire some aspiring young Australian racers to try to impact that bit more in the sport - just like Durbridge did with O'Connor back in the day - then so much the better.
