'It's not something I expected' - Oscar Onley finishes third to Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard at Tour de France

He's the surprise of the Tour de France: Oscar Onley was sixth on stage two, fourth on stage four, and then third on stage seven at the Mûr-de-Bretagne. His direct competitors? Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard. Even he can't believe it.

After arriving back at the Picnic PostNL team bus to little fanfare following his latest impressive performance, the 22-year-old pulled up, passed his bike to a waiting mechanic, before then climbing onto a turbo trainer to complete a warm down in the shade provided for him behind the bus.

Fans slowly approached him for autographs – he's becoming a bigger name with each passing day – before two team staff members quietly asked them to wait in order to afford the Scotsman a brief quiet moment of contemplation after finishing third on the podium to the two best male Grand Tour riders this decade; company that Onley seems to be at ease with as his stock continues to rise.

After completing his warm down, Onley spoke with Cycling Weekly and reflected on another big result. "It was just about hanging on really," he said. "I think they were playing about a bit in the front, and there was a bit of a headwind so that kind of helped, but it was already split from the corner so that made it pretty hard."

"It’s not really something that I’d ever expected to be able to do from the bunch," he added. "It's always nice to be up there. But that’s these kinds of stages over with and now it’s onto the real mountains [beginning on Monday] which is really something quite different."

Onley’s kick in a reduced sprint to the line even drew admiration from Pogačar: "Oscar showed what a superb rider he is with a punchy kick, he is riding super well so far."

Picnic PostNL spoke before the race of their desire to keep Onley under the radar, with minimal pressure in what is just his second Grand Tour. However, as the Kelso-born rider himself stated, his ambition to get into the breakaway in the mountains in the coming days may prove tougher to achieve now he sits seventh in the general classification, 2:49 off the race lead.

"The team has been really good and helped me a lot," he said. "Each day we’ve taken different approaches, sometimes we’ve sat a bit further back and then today on the smaller roads we’ve really tried to take it on from the front."

"Hopefully I’ll get to Paris," he joked, when asked whether he will now aim for the podium in the Pyrenees and Alps. "But I don’t know to be honest, we’ve not had a climb over five minutes yet so there’s a long way to go."

Onley is a modest, down-to-earth bike rider, reserved in his answers and cautious to publicly state how much belief he has in his own ability to continue to fight for success. However, behind the quiet demeanour, sports director Matt Winston explained that Onley’s confidence in his own ability is growing.

"I think he can take a lot from this," Winston told Cycling Weekly. "I think his confidence and self belief is growing as he’s seen himself up there on several days with the best guys in the world and we can only be happy with that."

"Today was a stage that we’d targeted from the start of the race," Winston explained. "We thought when we were looking from the outset that we’d be a little further down the GC at this point and then from there we could maybe come into the stage a bit fresher. But obviously we’ve raced full gas every day since we’ve been here, we still wanted to target this stage today and the boys really looked after Oscar. They did a really good job and made sure he was in a good position to get me a nice result."

Whatever now happens, Winston said that the team wouldn’t get carried away: "We want him to take each day as it comes and we’ll see how far we can go. We have our plan and we’ll stick to it. We’ll just keep focusing on the stages for now and when we come into the third week we can then see where we’re at."