'For Healy, it’s better to have a strong Pogacar' - Vaughters on his leader’s weird paradox

To get there, Vaughters starts not with one rider, but with an honest assessment of his team’s season in the Domestique Hotseat.

“The big races, I give us a ten out of ten,” he says. “The smaller ones, probably more like a five.” He does not frame it as bad luck. He frames it as what happens when a team is built the way EF is built. “We’re the youngest team in the WorldTour,” Vaughters says, and with that comes volatility. The ceiling is high, the floor sometimes shows.

From there, the conversation narrows to Healy, and Vaughters is careful with the temptation to overdefine him. 

“We don’t know,” he says, when asked where Healy is heading, and the warning follows immediately. “To box him into like, okay, we’re going to ride a much more conservative race.” Healy finished ninth overall at the 2025 Tour de France, but Vaughters describes the path as almost deliberately unconventional. 

“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.” he says.

Also the time trials were treated as something else. “He rode both the time trials easy in the Tour de France,” Vaughters says. “Like took them as like kind of rest days.” He pauses on that because it breaks the normal logic. 

“But you don’t do that if you’re really riding GC,” he adds, before explaining the trade that made it rational. Rest the time trial, then go hunting. “Two days later, he’d be in a breakaway and he’d get five minutes,” he says. “Well, you’re not going to get five minutes in the time trial.”

This is where his hesitation about the orthodox model becomes explicit. Vaughters sketches the classic conversion plan, then almost recoils from it. “To take that away from him and say, no, we’re going to put seven guys around you. You’re never going to touch the wind,” he says. “And then you’re just going to have to go up hills really fast and go really fast in the TT.” 

He does not deny the appeal of that structure, but he doubts the fit. “I don’t know if that’s really his style of racing,” he says. “I’m not really sure. But I don’t think it is honestly.”

He explains what he means by that style, and he does it with the clarity of someone describing a repeatable pattern. “Pogačar likes his team to basically like force it into a race of attrition,” he says, “that like there’s only 10 people left by the time Pogačar actually attacks.” 

The attacks are what people remember, the headlines about eighty kilometres or fifty kilometres out, but Vaughters is talking about what happens before the attack. “By the time he does that, there’s only 10 or 15 riders left, if that many,” he says, because the race has been “whittled down to nothing.”

The key consequence is not just fatigue, but the absence of control. “When he goes away, well, like there’s no team to chase,” Vaughters says. “There’s just a bunch of individual riders that all consider them leaders themselves.” 

And when everyone is a leader, no one wants to do the work. “They’re like, well, I’m not going to chase, you chase,” he says. “So I’m not going to chase.” The group becomes “disorganised,” and in that disorder, the gap holds.

This is where Healy fits. Vaughters calls him “great” in “this highly attrition based race that basically forces everyone to just ride flat out for hours on end.” That kind of racing suits his engine and his instincts. It also gives him a route to relevance that does not depend on being the best time triallist or the most controlled climber.

The twist is what happens when Pogačar is not there. Vaughters says the difficulty for Healy is not a stronger Pogacar, but the opposite. “Where you’d see it difficult for him to continue improving is if, you know, if all of a Pogačar vanishes,” he says, and races become less torn apart. 

He gives a concrete shape to that scenario. “You get groups of, you know, Liège-Bastogne-Liège is a group of 10 coming to the line because there’s nobody that just ripped it all to pieces.”

A group of ten sounds manageable, until you remember what Healy is not. “That’s trickier for Ben because he doesn’t sprint so well,” Vaughters says. In that more normal finale, Healy has to change the equation again. “He has to get away on his own in order to win in that scenario.”

The conclusion lands softly, but it lands. “We’re all waiting for Pogačar to get tired or bored or retire,” Vaughters says, noting how often the idea floats through the media. “But I don’t know if like, that’s a good thing for Ben.” Then he says it plainly. “I feel like for Ben, it’s better to have a strong Pogačar.”

He even sketches the kind of day he imagines Healy winning, and it is not the day Pogačar vanishes. It is the day Pogacar is slightly off. “One of these days,” Vaughters says, “he’s gonna like mess up his feeding a little bit or he’s gonna have a little bit of a head cold or whatever it is.” 

In that moment, he believes Healy can be the rider who makes it count. “I think Ben’s like well positioned to be the guy that like, even after the big surge catches him back,” he says, “and then attacks in Ben Healy way.”

It is a strange posture in modern cycling, almost a reversal of how most riders talk about the sport’s dominant figure. Vaughters knows that. “Yeah, it’s weird,” he says. “It sounds crazy, but I think it works for Ben.”

Watch the full episode with Jonathan Vaughters in the Domestique Hotseat 👇