When Oscar Onley lines up for his Tour de France debut on Saturday, he'll do so with plates and pins holding his collarbone together.
It's a bone that cyclists know well, a common fracture among the bunch, but dsm-firmenich PostNL's young Scot knows it better than anyone. In an eight-month period this past year, Onley suffered three crashes, each of them leaving him with a broken collarbone.
When he received his race calendar in December, one race stood out: the Tour. "I knew that, if things went according to plan, then I would be here," Onley tells Cycling Weekly, poolside at his team hotel. Things, of course, did not go according to plan.
After abandoning the Vuelta a España, his first Grand Tour, with a broken collarbone on stage two last August, the 21-year-old repeated the injury twice, first at January's Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, and then again at the Amstel Gold Race in April, two months before the Tour.
"It's been a bit of an up and down season, but I know roughly how long it takes to come back from each injury, so I wasn't too stressed about the form or coming back in time," he says.
"I think the most recent [collarbone break] was the quickest. I think I had three days off the bike, and then got on the trainer for a couple of days. I was on the road within the week."
Onley pulls down the neck of his t-shirt to reveal a grisly, pink scar on his left collarbone, decorated by dashes left from the stitches. He shows the same on his right side, slightly smaller in size. Each recovery, he says, was easier than the last. "Now I'm quite used to it," he smiles.
Although this year's Tour will mark Onley's debut, it won't be the dsm-firmenich PostNL rider first time at the race. "I went in 2013," he says. "We were on a family holiday, and the TT started nearby, so we got to go around all the teams and watch the riders warming up."
His earliest cycling memory came three years before, watching Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck exchange blows on the Tourmalet at the Tour. "From there, Andy Schleck was kind of the first idol, I guess, that I wanted to be like growing up," Onley says.
"I think if you went back and looked at my results as a youth and a junior, nothing really stood out," he adds. "I had some OK results, I was quite consistent, but I was never winning the big races, or winning many races, really. It was quite a bit of a gamble that the team signed me onto the devo team in 2021."
The gamble paid off, and before long, Onley was tussling with a Tour winner himself. Racing with DSM at the 2022 CRO Race, just 19 years old, the Scot went toe-to-toe with Jonas Vingegaard, pushing the recent yellow jersey winner to his limits.
"From there, a lot of people had expectations on me, and a lot of them were pretty unrealistic going into my first season as a pro," he says, "but myself and my team knew my level. We didn't try to go for things that were unrealistic.
"Just because I was close to [Vingegaard] there didn't mean I was going to be close to him in the Tour the following year. It's quite a big difference between the races, but obviously racing against a name like that gives you a lot of confidence as well."
Onley would have to wait another 15 months before his breakthrough win came, when he surged away on Willunga Hill at the Tour Down Under, claiming the stage and his first professional victory.
Now, he's hoping to repeat the feat on the biggest platform of them all. "It's like a childhood dream [being here]," he says of the Tour. "Everything's just five times as big [as other races I've done], I would say.
"My personal, and the team's, goal is to try and get a stage win," he says. "I can say that I'm coming for experience, but you can also get experience trying to go for the win. I'll be looking for breaks throughout the three weeks, and hopefully I've got the legs to at least be up there and show my face on the stages that suit me." He has already earmarked stage two into Bologna - "It's quite a good one for me."
Afterwards, the aim is to "keep trending upwards," Onley adds. No more collarbone breaks, just a smooth trajectory to fulfilling his potential.
"Hopefully, next year, I'll be at a level where I can start to aim for GC in a Grand Tour," the 21-year-old says, but he won't be drawn on naming a single ambition. "I just have to see where I'm at," he says. "I could say I want to win the Tour, but I don't know just now if that's reasonable or not. I have to see when the time's right."
