HOME AND AWAY SAM BENNETT: SHANE STOKEStalks to a young man who is looking forward to another major test.

AT 18 he’ll be one of the youngest riders in the Tour of Ireland, yet Sam Bennett will face up against some of the world’s top professionals in the race. Despite expectations that it will be a tough event, he is determined to ride as well as possible and build up some experience for the years ahead.

With approximately an hour of racing left in this year’s seventh stage of the FBD Rás, Sam Bennett was questioning his reasons for staying in the race. Burning legs, fading morale and the general fatigue of riding such a tough event in his first year as a senior rider all added up to one thing: the temptation to stop.

“I felt like packing the race,” he admitted at the time. “People were coming around me in the line-outs and everything, I just didn’t have it. Things just got to me . . . it had been constant rain every day. Then the sun came out, and it brightened things up for me.” Prior to this year’s race, Bennett had never ridden the stage distances he would encounter.

“I’d never done more than 90 miles, either in racing or in training,” he told The Irish Times this week. Seven of the eight days of the race were above this threshold, which makes what happened all the more remarkable.

Simply put, he won. Heading into the streets of Clara, Bennett gave it everything he had. He’d placed sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth in previous stages and, legs coming around inside the final 25 kilometres, resolved to go early. Remarkably, he was strong enough to hold off all the other sprinters in the race, including four-time Tour de France stage winner Jaan Kirsipuu (Norway Giant Veolia) plus the eventually green jersey winner, Niko Eeckhout (Ireland An Post M. Donnelly Grant Thornton Sean Kelly).

And he did it in style. Going from the front is the hardest way to win a gallop, yet this 18-year-old did just that, thundering home as the youngest stage winner in many, many years.

On Friday the Carrick-on-Suir rider will line out in the second major stage race of his career. With some of the world’s top professionals taking part, including 10-time Tour de France stage winner Mark Cavendish and seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong, he knows that the Tour of Ireland will be much harder.

The goal this time round is to get through the race, building experience and racking up tough racing miles that will stand to him in the years ahead. Thus far, things have gone to plan.

Bennett took up the sport when he was nine, starting out in the local mountainbike league run near the famous Seskin Hill in Carrick-on-Suir.

In the heyday of Stephen Roche and local hero Sean Kelly, the big guns raced up that climb in the Nissan Classic; nobody can claim this inspired him, though, as he was born in October 1990, and grew up in the years after their careers came to an end.

“His father was a professional footballer but he could never get him to kick a ball,” said his longtime coach Martin O’Loughlin this week. “He had no interest in that, all he wanted to do was cycling. In every other town in Ireland people talk hurling and soccer, but in Carrick they talk a fair bit about the sport, and that got him interested. He happened to be born in Flanders, too – that’s the real centre of cycling.”

O’Loughlin said that Bennett took several years before showing his promise, saying that ironically he didn’t have a sprint until he was 15 or 16. “He just developed a phenomenal kick then,” he said, “and has generally been improving a lot each year.”

He finished second in the 2007 Junior Tour of Ireland, then won both that and the Irish national championship in 2008. Outsprinting then-Irish professional Ciaran Power and Brian Kenneally for a stage win in the Suir Valley Three Day when he was only 16 was also a very strong early sign, as was his superb victory in the 2008 European junior points race championships.

Bennett has continued to show strong improvement, settling in well after a move up to the senior ranks. That FBD Insurance Rás stage win came only a few days after finishing sport science exams in the Waterford Institute of Technology and reconfirmed his promise.

He moved to France at the start of July for a trial with the VC La Pomme team, and has been based in Aubagne, near Marseille, since then.

That has gone well, as his performance in the GP Alleins showed earlier this month. “I bridged across to the breakaway group in the race, then inside the final 15 kilometres there was a four kilometre climb,” he said. “Four of us got away there and I won the sprint at the end.”

Bennett makes it sound almost matter-of-fact but it’s anything but. Moving abroad at 18 is a test in itself, but when you are dealing with a strange language and competing at a high level, it compounds the difficulty. Yet he has been faring well and is hopeful that the team will take him on for the full 2010 season, enabling him to go full time.

Before then, he’s got the chance to do more good racing. Although it’s five days shorter, the Tour of Ireland will be a step up from the FBD Insurance Rás in terms of the standard of the field. He and Ireland team-mates Philip Lavery and Sean Downey will be amongst the youngest in the field, and he knows it will be tough.

“We are going into a race with hardened pros that have years under their belts,” he said. “We are talking about the very top riders in the world, so I would be delighted to finish it. Going up against Lance Armstrong and Mark Cavendish won’t be easy. I won’t be afraid, though – I will still race and do my best. And if I can get up on a stage, I definitely won’t shy away from that.”

A minute's silence before race starts at Powerscourt

The Irish national team will head into the race shocked and saddened by the sudden loss of Paul Healion.

The 31-year-old national criterium champion was due to participate alongside Bennett, Sean Downey, Philip Lavery, David McCann, Martyn Irvine and Paul Griffin, but was tragically killed in a car accident on Sunday.

A minute’s silence will be observed before the race start in Powerscourt on Friday, then the riders will begin the first stage to Waterford. Healion was the only other Irish rider to win a stage of the FBD Insurance Rás this year, and was looking forward to the chance to sprint against the world’s best riders.