{"id":261055,"date":"2025-07-13T07:56:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-13T07:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/261055\/"},"modified":"2025-07-13T07:56:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-13T07:56:18","slug":"seventh-in-the-tour-after-one-week-onley-even-takes-team-by-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/261055\/","title":{"rendered":"Seventh in the Tour after one week \u2014 Onley even takes team by surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

One week behind us. Two still to come. We have arrived at Saint M\u00e9en in Brittany. It is a small but pretty town, famous for being the birthplace of Louison Bobet, who won the Tour de France three consecutive times, 1953-55. Here there is a museum in his honour and it is because of Bobet that the Tour has come for the second time. To their credit, the organisers like to tip their beret to the old champions. <\/p>\n

In their thousands people walk towards the start because only vehicles accredited to the Tour are allowed anywhere near the town. Team buses occupy about half the available parking space. Standing outside Picnic PostNL\u2019s black monster is the team\u2019s English directeur sportif, Matt Winston. A queue of journalists forms. <\/p>\n

This is not something Winston would have foreseen when the Tour began but then he wouldn\u2019t really have expected his young Scottish climber, Oscar Onley<\/a>, to be seventh at the end of the first week. Perhaps we should have suspected Onley would do better than expected when he was given the 191 dossard, which meant he was the team\u2019s designated leader.<\/p>\n

\"Tadej<\/p>\n

Onley keeps an eye on Pogacar, in the Yellow Jersey, on stage six \u2014 the Briton is seventh overall after eight stages<\/p>\n

PETE GODING\/SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was the plan at the beginning and has it changed?\u201d someone asks Winston. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe plan was to try to win stages, not go for general classification (GC), and to be honest that\u2019s still the plan. But with the position Oscar has on GC, for now we\u2019re going to go with that but we\u2019re not going to make too much of it. Maybe he has a bad day and we will reassess after that.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Tour is not a race for wishful thinkers, so Winston sprinkles cold water over those suggesting that Onley can go on trading pedal strokes with Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard. Yet there are reasons for some excitement; Onley was sixth on the hilly stage to Boulogne on Monday, fourth on another hilly leg to Rouen on Wednesday and then, most impressive of all, third on Friday\u2019s race to the M\u00fbr de Bretagne. <\/p>\n

Eight riders got a gap on the two-kilometre M\u00fbr; Pogacar won the sprint, Vingegaard was second and then, Onley. Winston enjoyed that moment as much as anyone and Onley\u2019s prominence on the three toughest days so far ensured the team had an excellent first week. Winston, though, wants us to understand that the rider is taking on something that is entirely new to him. <\/p>\n

\"Oscar<\/p>\n

Onley\u2019s best result so far on this year\u2019s Tour has been a third-place finish behind Pogacar and Vingegaard on stage seven<\/p>\n

DARIO BELINGHERI\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

\u201cOscar\u2019s results in one-week races are very good. When you look at his career so far, he has done consistently well in them. Once a race goes beyond a week, it is unknown territory. Into the third week, if we\u2019re still in this position, we will be trying to hold on to it. Of course we will. But for now we\u2019re going to take it day by day. Oscar is 22.\u201d<\/p>\n

I mention that Onley\u2019s best performance on his debut in last year\u2019s Tour came in the middle of the third week. He was fifth on the 17th leg to D\u00e9voluy in the southern Alps. \u201cYes, he still had something in the final week last year, but the thing with last year, when you\u2019re going just for stages, you can recover on the days you\u2019re not [going for stages]. You can sit up, you can lose ten minutes, you can ride in your easiest gear. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo far in this race, Oscar has gone full gas every day, and that\u2019s why we don\u2019t know what week two and week three are going to look like. We\u2019re not going to put pressure on him.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was Winston who brought Onley, then aged 18, to the team. \u201cIt was \u00adactually during Covid when we signed Oscar. He hadn\u2019t done much racing. He was just a lad living up in Kelso. A tip-off came from Gary Coltman, who was head of Scottish Cycling at the time. We had worked at British Cycling together in 2007. Gary contacted me and said, \u2018I think you should look at this guy,\u2019 and when someone likes Gary comes to you with a name, you take that seriously.\u201d <\/p>\n

Coltman says the Scottish coach Mark McKay played an important part. \u201cMark came to me and said, \u2018Look, there\u2019s a rider who I believe will be a future Tour winner and I want to take him in a junior team to a race in the Alps.\u2019 I said, \u2018Mark, that\u2019s not what we do now, there isn\u2019t really a budget for it.\u2019 He said, \u2018This kid will go there, he will be seen there and he will get taken on by pro teams.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cSo we agreed to do it. There was some kind of mountain time-trial and Oscar just blew them all away. Two teams wanted to sign him. There was an offer from the AG2R La Mondiale amateur team and what I remember is that, as soon as the possibility of joining a French team arose, this 16-year-old kid from Kelso started learning French. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was very level-headed, very committed and very driven. What struck was the way he took control of his career.\u201d <\/p>\n

Onley is now in his fifth year with Winston\u2019s team, having spent two years with the development team before graduating to the World Tour squad. <\/p>\n

\u201cOscar is a quiet lad but he\u2019s quiet in an Oscar way,\u201d Winston says. \u201cHe won\u2019t be the guy putting on the loud music in the bus but he\u2019s not afraid to stand up and say what he thinks and tell the guys, \u2018This is what I need from you.\u2019 He shows leadership qualities without being the loud guy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is now competing with the very best guys in the world and he\u2019s 22 years old. Everyone is getting a little excited, which is fair, but Oscar won\u2019t get ahead of himself and, as a team, we\u2019ll keep taking it stage by stage.\u201d <\/p>\n

That process began two hours after we spoke as the peloton left Saint M\u00e9en and raced 171km east to Laval. Everyone expected the race to end in a bunch sprint and so it did, Lidl-Trek\u2019s Jonathan Milan proving too strong for Visma-Lease a Bike\u2019s Wout van Aert. Onley\u2019s aim was to stay sheltered and finish safely in the pack. He did just that, as the 36th rider to cross the line, two places ahead of Vingegaard and six ahead of Pogacar, with all the GC riders finishing on the same time as Milan. <\/p>\n

\"Jonathan<\/p>\n

Milan sprinted to victory in Laval on Saturday \u2014 he wears the Green Jersey of the points classification leader, although he is second in the standings behind Pogacar himself<\/p>\n

DARIO BELINGHERI\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Before the Tour, the expectation was that if Onley was going to achieve anything, he would do it in the high mountains. They are his terrain. Through the short, sharp hills of the first week he surprised us. Those efforts could be the forerunner to something even better in the second and third weeks but, on the other hand, they may have taken away the strength he needs for the Pyrenees and Alps. <\/p>\n

He remains seventh overall. Of the six riders above him, Mathieu van der Poel will soon drop out of GC contention because long climbs are not for him. The longer climbs may also be the undoing of the talented young French rider K\u00e9vin Vauquelin, who is third overall. There is a temptation to see Onley making the top five but, for the moment, it\u2019s one to resist. <\/p>\n

I asked Winston if he saw Onley as a future grand-tour winner? \u201cWe are in a golden generation of cycling and there are some really good riders that are competing for GC. One day maybe we can come to a point where Oscar is ready to challenge for a grand tour. Whether that\u2019s the next grand tour he rides or five grand tours down the road, who knows. We\u2019ll just keep focusing on his development.\u201d <\/p>\n

The directeur sportif will forgive the rest of us for being excited by the next two weeks.<\/p>\n

Leading overall positions <\/p>\n

After stage eight <\/p>\n

1 T Pogacar (Slove, UAE Emirates-XRG) 29hr 48min 30sec
2 R Evenepoel (Bel, Soudal Quick-Step) at 54sec behind
3 K Vauquelin (Fr, Ark a-B&B Hotels) 1min 11sec
4 J Vingegaard (Den, Visma-Lease a Bike) 1:17
5 M van der Poel (Neth, Alpecin-Deceuninck) 1:29
6 M Jorgenson (US, Visma-Lease a Bike) 1:34
7 O Onley (GB, Picnic PostNL) 2:49
8 F Lipowitz (Ger, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) 3:02
9 P Roglic (Slove, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) 3:06
10 M Skjelmose (Den, Lidl-Trek) 3:43<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One week behind us. Two still to come. We have arrived at Saint M\u00e9en in Brittany. It is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-261055","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114844859518778168","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}