Sam Bennett travelled to the Tour of Guangxi for his final race with Bora-Hansgrohe more in hope than expectation after repeated illness ruined the latter part of his season. Third place in the sprint in Beihai on the opening stage offered some encouragement, but his travails when the road climbed in Nanning two days later were a reminder that these things always take time.
“I kind of got false hope from the first two stages, because they were super easy and I could kind of take the slipstream of the other guys and try to come late,” Bennett told Cyclingews. “But on stage 3, I was found out. I was dropped early, and then I came back about four times before I was definitively dropped. I was suffering and tired, and I was really tired the day afterwards. I’ve just spent too much time off the bike due to sickness in the last few months.”
Although Bennett responded to the disappointment of missing out on Tour de France selection by winning a stage of the Sibiu Tour, his season has been something of an ordeal ever since. Illness forced his abandon at the BEMER Cyclassics and he was still struggling at the following Deutschland Tour.
Bennett tried again at the Tour of Britain, where he succeeded only in digging a deeper hole for himself. “When I came out of that, I got really sick again for ten days so that was a lot of time missed, and when I tried training again, I was just empty,” he said.
Sprinters are hardwired to believe in tomorrow, but Bennett admitted he might have been better served by calling time on his season last month rather than making the expedition to China, though the trip has at least allowed him to mark the retirement of his friend and teammate Shane Archbold, as well as the end of his second spell at Bora-Hansgrohe.
“I think it would have been better for me not to do it, but I want to finish on a good note with Bora-Hansgrohe, it’s Shane Archbold’s last race, and it’s a race I haven’t done before, so it’s nice to be here,” Bennett said. “I do think it would have been easier to stop the season and then have a long winter to really build. But you just adjust to the situation, and you make it work.”
Change
Bennett’s 2023 season got off to the perfect start with victory at the first attempt at the Vuelta a San Juan, but he would endure a series of maddening near misses thereafter. Across the UAE Tour, Paris-Nice, the Tour of Hungary and the Critérium du Dauphiné, the Irishman was always in the picture in bunch…
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