Sam Bennett happy to be back in the saddle for Tour de France return

For Sam Bennett, the waiting has been the difficult thing.

He’s waited four years to return to the Tour de France. He’s waited for his form to rebuild after confidence-eroding periods of frustration. More recently he’s been nervously waiting for the race to begin, counting down the hours and minutes until the Tour gets under way.

The final days before Saturday’s start have seen him in a limbo of waiting and wondering.

Will he be good enough? Has he done enough? Is a new less-is-more approach the way to go?

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“In terms of fitness, I’m definitely coming to peak,” he tells The Irish Times. “But it’s hard to know now because I really backed off coming up to this race. That’s to taper and to have me fresh. I suppose in one sense, that’s good. Sometimes athletes can panic train when it is coming to a big event. They try to do more, to try to get lighter and get more fit.

“And yes, you do have to peak and have all this right. But at the same time, you just have to keep the rhythm and retain what you have. When you’re there, you’re there. The work is done. It’s just about coming in fresh.”

That’s what logic suggests. But emotions and doubts, they can fizzle away in the background too.

“You start to panic when you back off the gas. You feel like you have to go all in until the race,” he admits.

Bennett can be excused for feeling nervous. He won two stages plus the green jersey in the 2020 Tour de France, and was the sport’s predominant sprinter until the following May. Then things got messy. A knee injury ruled him out of the 2021 Tour, and injury, illness and team doubts saw him miss selection the past two years.

He’s hugely motivated to get back on top but periods of frustration and countless near-misses have chipped away at his self-belief.

“I should be there,” he says of his race fitness. “Like, my engine is as good as it ever was. The sprint, I still would have liked a little bit more, but it’s still good enough to win at the Tour. You just want to see certain [power] numbers, but it’s close enough. I think I’ll be ready.”

Now 34, the sport has moved on since Bennett was on top. Younger riders like Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) and Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) have become the most successful sprinters in recent seasons. At the same time Bennett’s win-rate has been much less than been before, prompting a lack of faith in him from his Bora-Hansgrohe team.

This in turn led to a fresh-start move to Decathlon-AG2R la Mondiale over the winter. He linked up there with Irish coach Stephen Barrett, and things finally started to turn around.

“He’s been incredible,” Bennett says of Barrett. “This year, I’m doing less hours each week, yet the form is better.”

Hard work saw him build a very high aerobic base early on, with his strength and climbing ability stepping up a notch. More recently it’s been about fine-tuning things, doing gym work and high-intensity sessions to hone his sprint, and to try to get his anaerobic power as high as before.

The fruits of that were seen in the Four Days of Dunkirk race in mid-May, ironically a six day race. Bennett won four out of the six stages and took the first general classification win of his career. Since then he’s continued building, riding the Criterium du Dauphiné to bolster his climbing form, then knuckling down to more anaerobic work since.

“I’ve been doing more gym and some sprints,” he said on Tuesday. “And not a lot of hours. For me, that’s a weird thing, because I would get my training program in the past and I’d add an hour or two on to the day. It’s all about training certain capacities but you feel like, ‘is my fitness still there?’

“But it is, you just have to trust the process. Like, I feel like I haven’t done anything but I really have. It’s a strange one.”

The Tour begins in Florence in Italy on Saturday with the first of two hilly stages. The first of eight possible sprint opportunities will come early next week, but Bennett feels it might take time for him to really click. What he gives up to some other sprinters in terms of pure power will be balanced by his greater endurance and climbing abilities.

“Coming into the second and third week, I’ll be getting stronger and also I will be fresher than the other sprinters. So that’s going to play in my favour,” he says.

And the goals? First off, a stage win. After that he’ll chase a second, and also look at the standings of the green jersey competition. If he’s in range to bid for that again, he’ll target that.

If not, he’ll focus purely on stage victories rather than disputing each intermediate sprint to chase points. What’s obvious is his hunger to do something big again.

“Sitting here before the Tour, you’re like, ‘yeah, I want one stage win’. But if you came out with just one, you wouldn’t be happy,” he says, laughing. “You always want more. But that’s the mentality you have to have.”

Fellow Carrick-on-Suir cyclist Sean Kelly has known Bennett for years, guiding him in the early part of his career when he was part of the An Post-Sean Kelly team. The former world number one is looking forward to seeing him back in the Tour.

“If his form is like in Dunkirk, if the confidence is there, I think he could win a stage,” he told The Irish Times. “He certainly can do that. And if he can win one early, then the floodgates will open again. That’s Sam. We know that since his days when he was with us and the team. If he was going bad, he was so bad. But when he goes good, he can go so good . . .”

Bennett will be joined in the race line-up by Ben Healy, a multiple Irish national champion. Still just 22, he is making his Tour debut with the EF Education-EasyPost team. The second year pro won a stage of the Giro d’Italia last year and will now target the same objective in the Tour.

“The Tour is the biggest race there is and I am really excited for it. It’s a pretty big milestone,” he said this week. “I’d love to try and win a stage. That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I want to try to do.”

If things click for both of them, it could be a standout few weeks for Irish cycling.

The Big Race Favourites

Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates)

The Slovenian took the Tour de France in 2020 and 2021, and has been runner-up the past two years. He’s having a sensational season, racking up 14 wins thus far including a near 10 minute overall victory in the Giro d’Italia. News of a recent Covid positive emerged on Thursday but he says he has fully recovered and was minimally affected.

Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike)

The Danish rider beat Pogacar in the past two editions of the race but suffered a big setback in early April when he crashed in the Itzulia Basque Country race. Multiple fractures plus a punctured lung kept him out of competition since, and raised question marks about his form.

Primoz Roglic (Bora-Hansgrohe)

Slovenian Roglic also crashed in the Itzulia race but escaped serious injury. The recent Criterium du Dauphiné winner will have the full backing of his new team in trying to take his first Tour crown.

Key Stages

Stage 9: Troyes to Troyes (199km)

A day ripe with possible complications sees the riders bash it out over 14 sectors of gravel roads. Totalling 32.2km in length, the risk of punctures and crashes will be high.

Stage 14: Pau to Saint-Lary-Soulon Pla d’Adet (151.9km)

The first big summit finish of the race will occur on this three peak stage. The riders will scale the legendary Col du Tourmalet and the Hourquette d’Ancizan prior to the gruelling final mountain.

Stage 21: Monaco to Nice (33.7km)

For the first time since the legendary 1989 finish, the race will conclude with a final day time trial. On that prior occasion American rider Greg LeMond pulled off a huge upset to overhaul French race leader Laurent Fignon by just 8 seconds. A similarly tight finish will be hoped for by Tour organisers during the first-ever Tour finale in Nice.

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