Ben Healy ends contract uncertainty with EF Education-EasyPost extension

Since joining the team in 2022 as a 21-year-old, Healy has built a record that spans stage wins at the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Itzulia Basque Country, plus Irish road and time trial titles. He has also hit podiums at the World Championships, Amstel Gold Race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, often by lighting up races from long range, a style that has made him one of the peloton’s most popular riders.

That all reached a climax last summer, when he took the yellow jersey on stage 10 of the Tour de France and, for a moment, became the centre of the cycling world.

Healy pointed in the statement of the team first to the day to day environment when explaining why he wanted to stay. “I’m close mates with the guys on the team, and that creates an infectious atmosphere that brings everyone closer together,” he said. 

“It’s not just us guys, it’s everyone, all the staff. There’s not a race or a training camp you go to where you are disappointed to be there. It’s always good fun and the dinner table’s always a great laugh. We spend so many days on the road, so that is super important. It makes you work that bit harder for each other.”

Team boss Jonathan Vaughters framed the extension less as a reward for what Healy has already done and more as a bet on how he races. “Ben is what we want as a leader,” Vaughters said. “He is thoughtful and always seeking to improve. Most importantly, he is always willing to risk.”

He went a step further on the Domestique Hotseat Podcast recently, describing Healy’s 2025 Tour de France as a kind of controlled chaos, not a traditional GC project, but a rider using the race on his own terms.

“He did that by losing, you know, 14 minutes on Hautacam and then gaining back four minutes in breakaways. He did it by racing GC in a way nobody else was racing it,” Vaughters said. Even the time trials, usually non negotiable in any GC plan, were treated differently. “He rode both the time trials easy in the Tour de France,” Vaughters said. “Like took them as like kind of rest days.”

The most striking part of that conversation, though, was Vaughters’ conclusion on Tadej Pogacar. Rather than hoping the sport’s dominant figure disappears, he argued the opposite might suit Healy.

“Where you’d see it difficult for him to continue improving is if, you know, if all of a Pogačar vanishes,” he said, because races can then arrive with larger groups and more organised finishes. “That’s trickier for Ben because he doesn’t sprint so well,” Vaughters added, before spelling it out: “I feel like for Ben, it’s better to have a strong Pogačar.”