Belief

 Stage 10, Îl d’Orlèron to Îl de Ré, was the sort of race that makes the Tour de France different from any other. The racecourse took the peloton along the Atlantic coast in a beautiful yet extraordinarily stressful stage, one littered with traffic-calming obstacles – aka Road Furniture -  causing the peloton to bounce around the road as though racing inside a 100-mile long pinball machine. There were crashes galore in the perfectly flat, high speed race, with the only consolation, for most of the racers anyway, being the lack of sidewinds coming off the Atlantic, an occurrence which would have turned the already tough day into a massacre.

 With 2.5-kilometers to the finish the young German Sunweb team lined their entire squad up on the right-hand side, taking control and creating a “sprint train” to launch their 6’4” fast man Cees Bol to the line. It was there that the inexperience of the youngest team in the Tour showed, by first of all taking a too-early lead into the headwind, compounded by their taking the wrong side of the road. At the 1,200-meter mark the racecourse turned left for about 200-meters before returning due north, and at that moment the Sunwebs found themselves being blasted by sidewind which weakened their collective effort, sheltering their rivals and allowing them to dive inside on the left, begin to disrupt the train which managed to lose Cees Bol in the confusion. The Sunwebs, not knowing that Bol was MIA, kept up their efforts but the best lead-out man in the world, Denmark’s Michael Mørkøv, architect of countless sprint wins for his Deceuninck-Quikstep team, with his sprinter Sam Bennett firmly on his wheel, lurked in 4th position, profiting from the Sunweb’s now futile efforts. Mørkøv timed his move to perfection – as he always does - holding, holding, holding Bennet until 120-meters to go when the Irishman launched into the wind. Behind, Caleb Ewan, who had won a positioning battle with Green Jersey Peter Sagan for Bennett’s wheel, began his sprint, but the combination of the perfect lead-out and Mørkøv’s little move at the end – when drifting back after cutting his effort, the Dane closed oh-so-slightly into the space that Ewan was using to pass, causing a millisecond’s hesitation and the loss to Sam Bennett.

Mørkøv on the left squeezes Ewan - in red

 The win, and the reclaiming of the Green Jersey, ripping it off of Peter Sagan’s back for the second time this Tour, but now with a win, caused a combination of powerful emotions in the Irishman as we all witnessed in that beautifully raw post-race interview. Emotional, because Sam Bennet’s voyage to the top has been littered with as many obstacles as were found on the road to Îl de Ré.

 Sam Bennett is a product of the same rich cycling community that gave us the great Sean Kelly. Carrick-on-Suir, near the southern Irish coast, has been a racing hotbed for over 50-years. Community members such as the Sheehan and Power families  and a man described to me as the “Godfather” of the clan, Tony Ryan, have all worked together over the decades to create the atmosphere of this Irish cycling jewel. The riding levels are high – when Sam comes home to visit from his home in Monaco he’s give no quarter on the group rides – and when Sean Kelly visits, he’s treated as one of the boys, free from selfies and the other horrors of celebrity, able to relax and spin yarns with the rest of them. It’s said that when Sam need council, he always returns to his roots in Carrick-on-Suir for the truth. 

Bennett’s career has been plagued by insecurity, by a shaky belief in his own abilities. He’s also endured strings of bad luck, from being hit by a car while amateur, to his two failed attempts at the Tour de France. Sickness caused Bennett to barely hang on the back for most of the 2015 Tour before quitting on Stage 17, and 2016 was not much better due to a severely broken finger from a Stage1 pileup. His Tour dreams were then dealt another blow with the 2017 arrival of Peter Sagan to his Bora-Hansgrohe team and the blocking by the Slovak of Bennett from a Tour start. As we saw on last Friday’s side-wind stage, it’s all about Peter all the time: that’s how the champions are. 

 Of course it wasn’t all bad by any measure, Bennett is a great sprinter. He’s won stages in the Giro d’Italia, Paris-Nice and the Dauphiné – he seems to love racing the Turkish Presidential Cycling Tour -  lots of smaller races have come his way. But for a boy who grew up in the shadow of Sean Kelly, the Tour would always beckon.

 2017 dealt Bennett another setback as the German team brought in a talented young German sprinter, Pascal Ackermann, who developed quickly, winning nine races in 2018. Sam Bennett could see the writing on the wall and by 2019, when Ackermann took his place for the Giro and a promised Tour start was denied, he knew that his career was at a fatal crossroads. Enter Patrick Lefevere, the famed Deceuninck-Quikstep boss, who knew he could rescue the Irish talent but, yet again, Bennett found himself blocked by his own team. A long contentious dispute arose over his contract, so much so that when he was sent to the consolation-prize, end-of-season Vuelta a Espãna, Bennett’s Bora-Hansgrohe teammates were ordered to not help him in any way– he won two stages and finished third in the Points Classification just the same.

 After refusing Bora’s offer to swap Bennett for his sprinter Alvaro Hodeg, as Lefevere put it. “I’m not interested in trading cattle”, the Bora-Hansgrohe finally relented, releasing Bennett with a remarkably churlish press release, a form of “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.” 

 Bennett’s raucous, warmth-filled reception by the Wolfpack, as the Deceuninck-Quikstep boys term themselves, at the first team gathering of the 2020 season, overwhelmed the Irishman who had for so long suffered in a tough atmosphere. Being accepted by the Flandrians – no matter what the nationality, everyone is Flandrian in the Wolfpack – by the most expert, winning team in the world, was an affirmation of his great talent. He knew and felt the responsibility owed by having such men work their guts out for him, as seen through his tight-jawed media interviews throughout this Tour. He’d been second behind Ewan on Stage 3, blowing his perfect Mørkøv lead out, and third on Stage 5, taking the Green Jersey from Sagan in the process. The Hulk roared the next day, violently taking back his property on the windswept day, driving Sean Kelly, commenting for TV, into a state of apoplexy at Bennett’s poor positioning and loss.

 How delicious must it have been for the Irish Champion to take that jersey back again from Sagan, to beat him to win his first Tour de France stage. All of those years of struggle, all the of the will needed to overcome his lack of self-belief and the bad luck that accompanied it, all of that combined to create the flood of tears for the world to see. As Sean Kelly put it, “We all knew he could do it, we just never thought it would take this long.”