Sam Bennett can fairly get on top of a big gear when someone is waving a chequered flag in his face

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Sam Bennett has hit the ground running this season by taking victory today on UAE Tour in a big bunch sprint after over 200km of racing on stage 4.

The Irishman made it look easy, but he was up against some quality rivals, with new name David Decker (Jumbo Visma) in 2nd followed by some of the most established sprinters in the world.

Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Soudal) was 3rd followed by riders like Elia Viviani (Cofidis), Pascal Ackermann (Bora–hansgrohe), Phil Bauhaus (Bahrain-Victorious) and Fernando Gaviria (UAE-Team Emirates).

The Irishman really had to be moving very quickly, and generating lots of power, to get to the line ahead of such a quality of group of sprinters.

And Bennett’s data shows just the kind of effort he put in; his Watts maxing out at 1,595 during the final sprint to the line. (His weight is list at 73kg by his Deceuninck-QuickStep team.)

Bennett’s 10-second average in the sprint was 1,595 watts while his average speed for 10 seconds was 68.9km per hour, with a maximum speed of 69.2km per hour.

The release of his data for today’s sprint reminded stickybottle of one of Bennett’s social media posts (below) back in 2014, which we wrote about at the time. He shared some of his data during the winter of that year, which was before he had made a big breakthrough as a pro though he had already won some races in his first season with NetApp-Endura.

Back then, in December 2014, when he weighed 69kg he said he had recorded a maximum of 1,716 watts in training and was hoping to reach 1,800 during the winter. At the time some people on social media questioned if his power meter was calibrated properly.

Everything is certainly still in order these days; Bennett on the road again for 2021 and bagging his first win of the new campaign in his first bunch sprint.

Bennett’s sprint training data from 2014…