In contemporary cycling, where every watt and every gram have to be accounted for, bunch sprints continue to exist in a place pleasingly beyond measurement. Somewhere in the final kilometre, calibration gives way to a form of divination. Teams draw up detailed schemes for their sprint trains, but victory usually owes more to a rare form of alchemy than to precision engineering.
So how often does a plan actually work? “Oh, nearly never,” Sam Bennett laughs.
It’s January, and Bennett is sitting in the corridor of a hotel in San Juan on the eve of his first race of the season, content to have a full winter of training behind him after his injury troubles of last year. His key lead-out men Danny van Poppel and Ryan Mullen have made the journey to Argentina with him, reconnoitring the relevant parts of the course and poring over images of finishing straights. Everybody knows the plan and they know, too, that it probably won’t survive much contact with their rival trains. But that’s when the fun truly begins.
“I don’t care if someone else is quicker or has more power or more punch, the only thing you have to do is get to the line first, so you just have to figure it out as it goes,” Bennett tells Cyclingnews. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it beforehand, but when you’re fit enough, you’re able to think clearer, you’re always in the right position and you’re able to make it happen. I know who’s faster than me, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to beat me.”
Two days later, Bennett lands his first victory of 2023 at the first attempt, after Mullen and Van Poppel pilot him to the finishing straight and he unleashes a searing finish. It rarely comes off that smoothly, and he will endure near misses for the rest of the week, but trial and error is all part of the game, especially at this time of the year.
“As a climber, you can’t accidentally win a mountaintop finish, you either have it or you don’t. But as a sprinter, you can be better at positioning, maybe you can go longer than others, maybe you can kick harder… You just have to figure it out. It is like chess on wheels,” Bennett says.
“But the thing is, it’s hard to do that on the limit and I think that’s what separates the good guys from the average guys: they’re able to figure it out when they’re on the absolute limit and make it work.”
“I think people think I’m a certain way because I have a soft demeanour, I never come across as too arrogant. But…
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