00:00Ben Healy of EF Education Easy Post. Irish eyes are smiling in Via Normandy.
00:06Brilliant Ben. Stage winner in the Tour de France.
00:13To get a win at the Tour is always hard. I think this year it's going to be harder than ever for breakaway teams.
00:19What Ben did I think is nothing short of exceptional.
00:22Those are his characteristics and that's how he has to use them.
00:25But to actually be able to put it into practice is quite remarkable I think that it did today.
00:30You never want to believe it until it's done you know.
00:32Even when you get to two minutes finished like that you just don't want anything to go wrong or so.
00:38Once we got to the last climb with 1 minute 55, it was only a kilometre climb.
00:43Then it was pretty, I would say it was in pretty good hands.
00:48Ben executed exactly his plan that he said on the bus this morning.
00:52Get in the breakaway ideally with a teammate that didn't happen.
00:56But he said the exact climb that he wanted to go on or even in the area.
01:01And then yeah I mean he just executed it to a tee.
01:05And I think we didn't actually hear very much on the radio.
01:09We just heard the time gaps 20, 25.
01:12His resistance to fatigue is amazing because everybody knew the start of the race would be hard.
01:18But that was I think even harder than anybody would have expected.
01:21Extremely high quality breakaway and to leave them behind like that takes some doing.
01:27It's huge.
01:28I mean we've been discussing how hard it's going to be for a lot of teams to win stages here with the way the race is playing out.
01:33The way the favourites are racing.
01:36So to get a win in is always going to be really difficult.
01:39But to do it early is even more important because it gives you the freedom later on to hopefully do more.
01:45Until you first strike it's hard to comprehend that he can do something like that.
01:50And I think it will have confirmed it for him, confirmed it for us that we're here for stages.
01:55And yeah it's really, really good for motivation.
