July was a weird month for Irish cycling fans.
The Tour de France was a gripping race, regarded by many as one of the most exciting of recent years.
There was suspense, there was drama, and with Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar swinging haymakers at each other there was uncertainty about the outcome right up until the final few days.
But there were also no Irish riders. The year 2008 was the last time a Grand Depart happened without at least one competitor from Ireland at the race. Against expectations, that happened again.
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Sam Bennett and leadout man Ryan Mullen had looked set to be in the race right up until a few days beforehand. True, Bennett was on a long rebuild to top form following his knee injury of 2021 and he had only claimed one win this season.
But with his coach Dan Lorang telling The Irish Times more than once that he was sure Bennett would be 100% for the race, his participation seemed assured.
And then it wasn’t. When Bora-hansgrohe announced its team the Monday before the Tour start, the two Irish riders were absent from the line-up. The squad was, it said, going all in for a general classification challenge with the Russian Aleksandr Vlasov.
That meant Bennett, and Mullen would be staying at home.
“I think like any sprinter you’re disappointed not to be at the race,” the Carrick-on-Suir rider said, as he spoke publicly for the first time about missing the Tour.
“But that’s not my decision. It is a weird one when you have an idea in your head what’s happening and then the complete opposite happens. But on to the next things, I suppose . . .”
Bennett chooses his words carefully. He makes sure not to sound critical of the team. He returned there after two years with the Deceuninck-QuickStep squad, a period in which he won two stages plus the green jersey in the Tour in 2020, then started the season brilliantly in 2021 before developing a knee injury. This led to him being publicly, and unfairly, criticised by a team manager bitter at his decision to return to Bora-hansgrohe.
But even if he wanted to go to this year’s Tour, he can see Bora-hansgrohe’s position. The team had unexpectedly won the Giro d’Italia with the Australian Jai Hindley in May, giving it a general classification clout for the first time.
Chasing a Tour de France podium with Vlasov became a focus after that, even if he had caught Covid in the weeks before the race.
But still, missing out must have stung. How did Bennett cope with the initial disappointment?
“I took a few days [to adjust]. I took a quick trip down to the south of France, going to a hotel for two nights, just with the family, Benjamin and Tara,” he answers, referring to his son and his wife. “Just to get away from it all and reset, and then just try to start building again.
“I had to re-evaluate what I wanted from the year and what I could go for and what possibilities there were. It was really just sitting down and saying, ‘okay, what’s next?’”
Last year Bennett largely avoided watching the Tour. As the defending green jersey winner, he had been bitterly disappointed not to go back to the race then. His knee problem made his participation impossible but it still stung, not least because he had been riding so strongly before becoming injured.
This time around, he wasn’t so reluctant about seeing it on the TV.
“I watched a little bit. There were some amazing rides in it that you couldn’t take your eyes off,” he says. “It was quite interesting to see. It looked unbelievably hard. So I was quite comfortable looking at it on the sofa with a nice, cool, refreshing drink.”
He laughs while saying that and it’s clear that this time around there is a certain acceptance about things which was absent 12 months ago.
“Last year was a bit different,” he explains. “Because it was an injury that held me up. This year it was grand. Like, obviously, I wanted to be there. But … it felt familiar.”
The big debate is about how he would have fared. Bora-hansgrohe were targeting a top three overall in Paris. Vlasov finished fifth, and the squad missed out on a stage win. By their own admission, it fell short of their goals.
Bennett’s coach said recently that his participation would have been more likely had he won a stage in the Baloise Belgium Tour in early June. His best performance there was fourth in the final stage and, even if his training data was promising, that created a niggle of doubt for Bora-hansgrohe.
Does Bennett believe he would have hit the Tour in stage-winning form?
“I think it would have been good enough,” he answers. “I had the endurance. I think maybe the last sprint I did in the Belgium Tour was read into too much. It was a very difficult run in. And I was going first into a block headwind.
“Basically, I ended up just launching [rivals Jasper] Philipsen and [Fabio] Jakobson. So then it looked like I was sprinting quite poorly, but it doesn’t show the performance I was doing. The results there didn’t reflect that.
“If I was told that the result in Belgium was going to be a decider in the Tour, I would have approached it differently. But the Tour was the goal. Obviously the Tour would never be easy, and it would definitely be a hard one to go back to after two years. But at the end of the day, that was the goal.”
Bennett pauses, is clearly thinking about his answer and what wording to use.
“I don’t blame anybody for any decisions,” he says. “I have to understand the goals of the team, and what they were looking for out of the race too.”
Part of being a professional athlete is adjusting to disappointment. Even the greatest champions – well, particularly the greatest champions – need to be able to recalibrate after setbacks and to return to the top.
For Bennett, that meant knuckling down again. Training hard, following a monastic lifestyle, and also returning to the spare bedroom. Benjamin, their firstborn, is just 7½ months old. With sleep being so vital for an athlete, Sam and Tara have worked out a system.
“In December, January, I slept in a different room,” he says. “And then when I was getting ready for the Tour in May, June, I was in a different room. And then the last three weeks I was back in a different room again. Just to get my own sleep.
“But we actually got a sleep therapist and sleep trained him. Within four days now he’s in his own room and only waking once, so I’m getting my side of the bed back [he laughs].”
Bennett speaks very highly of his wife’s support. The couple have been together since they were teenagers and she has played a very big part in his success, encouraging and supporting him and helping him become the person he is. He’s relishing their family life as new parents and says it has brought many changes.
As he points out, Benjamin doesn’t care about his father’s life as a professional cyclist. “He just wants his mammy and daddy,” he says. Bennett embraces that role, but is also finding that he’s had to rebalance things.
“It’s a hard adjustment as well, because I obsess, with training and everything. When I’m targeting something, I go 24/7 towards that goal. I don’t go out for meals. I don’t leave the house. I don’t do anything. As a father now, that’s hard. And also as a husband.
“Being a husband and a father, it’s difficult to be that selfish now. So you’re kind of trying to switch on when you can, and then switch off when you can, while keeping everything together.
“It means that you become more obsessed in the moment, but more switched off when you go out of that. Tara always said I have this thing . . . she calls it race mode. Because I become almost non-responsive and kind of more cold and everything. But now I have to stay soft and cuddly [he laughs]. So it changes you quite a bit.
“Then again, you’re more hungry as well because you’re trying to provide for them as well now. It is not just about your ego any more. You have people relying on you.”
Bennett has worked hard to be ready for the next races and lined out on Saturday on the first stage of the seven-day Tour de Pologne in Poland. He’s hoping for a stage win in that race, while also being aware that he hasn’t competed in seven weeks. He accepts it could take time to get himself and the tightly-co-ordinated lead-out train of team-mates back up to full speed.
After Poland he will represent Ireland at the European road race championships on Sunday week.
“They are definitely races where we’d like to get good results,” he says. “There’s no reason not to get results there. They’re all races that should suit us.”
All going to plan, he will then line out in the Vuelta a España, the Spanish equivalent of the Tour de France, on August 19th.
For years Bennett had an annual target of ten victories. He notched up seven wins in just ten weeks in 2021 and looked set to greatly exceed that goal before suffering his knee injury in early June of that year.
That derailed things and so far this season he’s claimed one victory. That doesn’t sit well with him and does much to fuel his hunger.
“I am definitely motivated for wins,” he says, “because I desperately need them.”
