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Sam Bennett has said while transferring to Deceuninck-QuickStep
was a dream move, it changed his status in the sport and in the sprints, and
not always for the better.
The Carrick-on-Suir man has enjoyed brilliant success in
the last 12 months with the team, not least his two stage wins and the green jersey
at the Tour de France.
And racing into Paris with the green jersey on his back
to take the most iconic sprint win the sport of cycling on the last day of the
race was perhaps the highlight of Irish sport last year.
However, while he went to the team in a bid to gain support
in the sprints and take his career to the next level, he said he was nagged by
a fear he may be the first sprinter to join Deceuninck-QuickStep and not make a
success of it.
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The QuickStep sprint history may be a rich one that brought pressure for Sam Bennett when he joined the team, but the Irishman has now written his own glorious chapter like Viviani, Cavendish, Kttel and Boonen before him
He thought to himself: “I don’t want to be the first sprint to come in and not win at the Tour… I don’t want to be the first one that’s an imposter, who doesn’t do the business.”
That fear was perhaps understandable when one considers riders like Tom Boonen, Mark Cavendish, Marcel Kittel and Elia Viviani have all written chapters of the team's history; each taking win after win in the sprints on the biggest races.
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But Bennett said the team support last year had proven so strong that his team mates were always able to move him into a potentially race-winning position.
“If you’re there more often, you just have those chances to win more,” he explained of the power of the team on increasing his chances.
Bennett said he also noticed that once he joined to Deceuninck-QuickStep
the dynamic in the sprint changed for him in that he became more of a focal
point for his rivals.
“The thing that I didn’t expect… in each sprint I find
there’s a reference point of where I need to be positioned and the timing; when
to sprint and when I need to be in a certain area. And I always judged that off
other guys.
“But then when I came to QuickStep I found that I was
that reference point. So then if I fucked up the sprint there was another
three, four, five guys ready to take advantage of that.
“That was a different approach to the sprint I had to get used to. And I think I had to train differently to be able to hold it longer."
Bennett was speaking to The Social Distance Podcast, which you can view on YouTube by following this link.
The Irishman will start his season at UAE Tour later this
month and his next bit targets will be Paris-Nice and Milan-Sanremo, Gent-Wevelgem
and Scheldeprijs.
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