Ben Healy follows Elliott, Kelly and Roche in wearing yellow jersey

Irish Daily Mirror

5 days ago

BEN Healy has become just the fourth Irishman to wear yellow at the Tour de France after his stunning performance into Le Mont-Dore Puy de Sancy.
The two-time national champion follows Shay Elliott, Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche in leading the Tour's general classification.
He bridged a gap back to 1987 when Roche rode into Paris in yellow to win the Tour — the last Irishman to wear the famed jersey.
Fellow Dubliner Elliott was the first to do it — holding the jersey for three days in 1963 after winning a stage into Roubaix to take the race lead.
Kelly rode the Tour 14 times between 1978 and 1992, winning five stages and the green jersey on four occasions. But in a glittering career, he only held the Maillot Jaune for just one day.
Kelly took the general classification lead after a stage into Pau at the 1983 Tour, but endured a nightmare in the saddle on the next leg to Bagnerés-de-Luchon.
The 201km stage covered four mountain passes in the Pyrenees and the Carrick-on-Suir rider suffered on every one of them.
'It was a mountain stage and that was a horrible day for me,' Kelly told me a few years ago. 'It was one of my bad days on the Tour and immediately in the early part I was starting to struggle.'
Kelly admitted the pressure and increased media focus of being race leader impacted him that day. Something Healy will have to deal with now as race leader.
'The press come to you and they're asking: 'How long are you going to keep the jersey — do you think you can hold onto it?'' he recalled.
'The tension is building, it does put a certain weight on your shoulders. The motorbikes, the photographers are taking pictures as you're rolling out.
'When you get into the mountains and you get dropped, then of course you have the cameras all around you, showing you starting to lose the jersey. And the TV stays with you for a long time.
'But I wasn't devastated. I think I had experienced that sort of day previously.'
To rub salt in the wounds the yellow jersey he wore on the podium in Pau was then stolen from his car after the final stage in Paris.
Sam Bennett was the last Irishman to lead one of the Tour's four classifications when he finished the 2020 race in the green jersey.
With a rest day on Tuesday, Healy will wear yellow when the peloton departs Toulouse on Wednesday for stage 11 with a 29 second lead ahead of Tadej Pogačar. The 24-year-old also holds the white jersey for the leading young rider.
He will be hoping to following in the footsteps of Roche, who came out on top after a titanic battle with Pedro Delgado to become the only Irish winner of the race.