Sam Bennett will be in action next month with his new squad Deceuninck-QuickStep; the team wasting no time in getting its big new winter signing into battle.
The Belgian WorldTour outfit has selected Bennett among
its line-up for its 2020 season curtain-raising events in Australia in January.
The first event he will take on as a Deceuninck-QuickStep rider is Race Torquay in Victoria on January 30th.
It will cover a 13km rolling circuit 10 times and the team believes the route will favour Bennett.
Deceuninck-QuickStep will race again in the southern Australian state on February 2nd in the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race in Geelong.
That second outing is a WorldTour race and Sam Bennett has said a number of times one of the things missing from his palmares is a victory in a one-day WorldTour event.
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While the race is undulating, it can suit a rider like Bennett, who can climb well and also sprint better than anyone in the world on his day.
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Taking a win there would be an amazing start to his year; though many other riders will go in with the same mindset.
The 171km event features three ascents of Challambra Crescent. However, that incline is one Bennett can handle comfortably on a good day.
Sam Bennett got his 2019 campaign off to a confident start with a stage victory in Argentina and never looked back. He will hope to do the same this time around.
Bennett and Dries Devenyns are the two riders favoured by Deceuninck-QuickStep for team leadership in Australia.
They will have a strong group of team mates for company
in the shape of João Almeida, Shane Archbold, Mattia Cattaneo, Iljo Keisse and Danish
Champion Michael Mørkøv.
“We are really looking forward to these two races.
Torquay is a new race, but we trained in the past in that area, so it’s not
like it’s unknown to us,” said the team’s sports director Rik Van Slycke.
“On paper, the up-and-down parcours shouldn’t be
selective, as could very well be the case in the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road
Race, where both attackers and sprinters will have a strong chance of fighting
for victory.
“We won the latter twice, and in Dries and Sam we have
two riders who can cover several scenarios, and that makes us confident we can
come out of these appointments with some nice results.”
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