A sprinter’s stock drops far quicker than it takes to rise. It can take years to get to the top, but one bad season and you’re yesterday’s news. Just look at Caleb Ewan: retiring at 30, just a few years after he was deemed the fastest man in the peloton.
Sam Bennett has also had his issues recently. Winner of two stages and the points jersey in the 2020 Tour de France, aside from picking up two wins at the 2022 Vuelta a España, the Irishman has struggled for both form and consistency on the big stage since leaving Deceuninck-Quick Step in 2021.
But he goes into this year’s Giro d’Italia as one of a few big-name sprinters on the startlist, and he’s also full of confidence after a spring campaign that has seen him win four times for Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, albeit in smaller French races.
After a couple of years away from the spotlight, could the 34-year-old be about to take a seat at the top sprinter’s table once again? “I still have that same hunger, I still want it as bad, and I still get pain in my gut every time I lose a race,” he told the press ahead of the Giro. “I know the want is still there and I have to try to go out and get a few stages.
“Stage one would be nice to win and if we could achieve that it’d be a career highlight, but it will be very difficult because a lot of riders want that. I think stage four will be the first main one [for the sprinters] and then there are a lot of sprints. I hope I can get a stage win earlier as then it takes away that bit of pressure and we can get into a flow quite easily.”
In attempting to rediscover his form of old, Bennett and his coaches have gone back to the drawing board, ripped everything up and started again. So far, it’s working.
“I’ve changed my training quite a bit in the last month or two," he revealed. "We saw that in the last three or four years I’ve been training my sprints because we thought I was missing speed in the sprint, but we did more digging and saw that it was more torque I was missing. So I’ve added more torque and power as well as the speed to get a lot stronger.
“I am more old-school and want to do more hours on the bike and have a bigger base, and I think the fundamentals of cycling don’t change, but I don’t really miss the endurance so much to be honest. At my age that’s something that is pretty much built in. I saw recently that my engine is still there – it’s not that I’ve given up training everything else, but it’s just been more of a case of focus in another direction.
“We’ll see how it goes but so far it’s been quite good. I’ve had some good results and in Pays de la Loire I had good numbers so I have to trust the process. But there is a fear of the unknown.”
Though Bennett hasn’t taken a WorldTour win since the 2022 Vuelta, he finished second to Jonathan Milan on stage seven of March’s Tirreno-Adriatico, a result that reassured him that he’s on the way back to the top.
“I think that was a more important result than [the two] wins at Pays de la Loire because I didn’t feel good that day but still had the legs, felt I had speed, and was only missing a bit of torque and pulling power into the headwind because of the gear I chose,” he said. “It gave me confidence because he [Milan] is top dog at the moment and I was testing him right up until the line.”
Olav Kooij (Visma-Lease a Bike), Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) and Milan Fretin (Cofidis) are expected to be Bennett’s principal sprint rivals at the Giro, with Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) the main contenders for the points jersey.
“It will be quite difficult [to win the points jersey],” he said. “We have to see how the first week goes, see what Mads and Van Aert can do in the sprints, and then see the points deficit. The key is always collecting points, keeping yourself there.
“But the first objective and priority is a stage win. You can’t be wasting energy trying to win an intermediate sprint and then walk away with no points jersey and no stage win. The main thing is a stage win.
“It’s been a while [since his last Grand Tour stage victory] so it’d be something quite nice and would also back up the changes we’ve made in the last couple of weeks and months. It’d show we’re going in the right direction.”
