After a Paris-Nice where Ben O'Connor's and Jayco-AIUI's promising early performance spiralled into a much more disappointing finale, the Australian is back at the Volta a Catalunya, a race where he's taken some top results in the past and where he's determined to set things back on the right track once again.
Second in the Paris-Nice team time trial for Jayco-AIUIa was a hugely encouraging moment for O'Connor and his team, pushing them into fourth overall and within striking distance of the lead. However, O'Connor's GC bid subsequently collapsed completely, with him losing a couple of minutes on the hilly stage 4 that was partly neutralised because of poor weather and even more in the echelon stage 48 hours later.
O'Connor's frustration and anger at how badly things had gone was visible, and very audible on a Youtube video of him storming onto the Jayco-AIUIa bus after one Paris-Nice stage defeat, a cry of 'fuck' ringing through the air as he did so.
But if O'Connor had the sense of a missed opportunity in France which ended with a 14th place overall in Nice, it's only reinforced his motivation to put things back on track in Catalunya where the terrain is much more in his favour.
"I'm feeling good, I feel like hopefully there can be a bit of progress since Paris-Nice, this is a race I've always enjoyed and it's probably the first true mountain stage race that you do, and the next one isn't really til the Dauphiné or Suisse," O'Connor told Cyclingnews just before the Volta start on stage 1. "So it's one of the lucky stage races that suits me perfectly.
"My goals are just to be good again, I had a bit of a rough Paris-Nice. I made a couple of mistakes, I was pretty sick after Valencia like a lot of the boys in general in the peloton and I was a bit far from where I should be.
"So hopefully I've come past that and I should be good here. Hopefully."
O'Connor made no secret that he would like to win again in La Molina, the stage 3 summit finish that also enabled him to claim the overall lead for a single day, his first at WorldTour level. But he warned that La Volta is a race where there is no down time, and where even the slightest of errors can carry a high cost as a result.
"This is a tour where you have to focus really hard on every day," O'Connor said before the stage 1 start. "Today [Monday] is rainy, tomorrow it'll be really windy round Figueres: basically, it's endless.
"Even stage 5 down in the flatlands round [the region of] Empordà, it can be windy as hell down there. So you have to stay concentrated."
Having been caught out on the wrong side of a split when the front part of the bunch shattered on the rain-soaked, technical descent to San Feliu de Guixols, O'Connor was of several favourites, including 2021 Volta winner Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and his brother Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike), who lost 15 seconds to the lead group of 22 riders, including Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe). But the man from Perth remains well inside the GC battle.
O'Connor's race programme for 2025 is gradually filling itself out, too, with the Ardennes Classics now pencilled in to precede his Tour de France preparation, he said. It's not clear if he'll return to the Vuelta a España, where he had a memorably successful GC performance last year, or do the Canadian World Cups.
"But right now, the most important thing is I do well here," O'Connor concluded. "Catalunya has always been a goal of mine, so I want to make sure I do well."
