Ben O’Connor tried to follow Tadej Pogacar on Oropa: “I was the dumbest rider in the race”

No one in the Giro peloton dared to follow Tadej Pogacar when the Slovenian made his expected attack on Oropa on Sunday. No one, except Ben O’Connor. The Australian made a valiant attempt to catch up with Pogacar, but completely blew himself up. “If you get too close to the sun, you will burn yourself,” he said afterwards Global Cycling Network.

“I was brave. I wanted to try it Pog to follow, but I was probably the dumbest rider in the race,” said O’Connor. “I hung on for too long. Then I simply exploded. It’s a shame because I think I was definitely the second strongest rider. But probably the least intelligent.”

O’Connor felt ‘great’ during the first kilometers of Oropa. “So I thought: why not? You are here to race. I never look at my abilities during a climb in a race. Maybe when I ride solo, but when you attack you never look. You just race on instinct. Maybe it would have helped me a little if I had looked at my screen and seen what I was doing.”

Lesson learned
The Australian from Decathlon AG2R said he only realized too late that he was driving too far in the red light. “Pog looked back, saw that I was on his wheel and clearly wanted to go solo. So then he accelerated again and I hit my limits. I thought I could stay with him, but I gambled a bit too much and made a pretty big mistake. (…) I learned a big lesson today.”

Ultimately, O’Connor crossed the line in thirteenth place, one minute behind Pogacar. He lost 33 seconds to Daniel Felipe Martínez, Geraint Thomas, Lorenzo Fortunato and Florian Lipowitz, who managed to stay closest to Pogacar. O’Connor is now tenth in the rankings.