Stephen Roche has said he experienced negative comments being made about him from within his own team during his career and, because of that, he understood what Sam Bennett has endured over the last week.
On Monday it emerged Bennett would not be riding the Tour de France. While his knee injury had improved, the Carrick-on-Suir man said he could not yet be certain it was fully recovered.
He added he had also lost condition after missing training over a two-week period due to the injury, and he was simply not properly prepared to start the Tour, which gets underway in Brittany tomorrow.
The Irishman’s Deceuninck-QuickStep team boss, Patrick Lefevere, questioned if Bennett
not riding the Tour was down to performance anxiety, or a fear of
failure, rather than his injured knee.
Advertisement
Stephen Roche told stickybottle it was
wrong of Lefevere to say what he had, but he also believed it was typical of
the Belgian team boss and directeur sportifs in general.
“Sam is responsible for himself and he knows best what he can and cannot do,” Roche said. “Sam’s body is also his bread-earner, if we can put it like that.
“And the only way of ensuring Sam's 'machinery' is going to keep performing, so he can continue to make his living, is by protecting that machinery. And if you start abusing a machine that is already slightly damaged, then you could have a very short ending.”
Roche also completely dismissed the notion, suggested by Lefevere, that Bennett (30) was embellishing the injury so he could miss the Tour as he did not want to ride it.
“Sam is a professional cyclist and his
bread and butter is winning races, that’s how he makes his living, not lying at
home with an injured knee,” the 1987 Tour winner said. “So when Lefevere more
or less says ‘has he really got a badly injured knee?’ that’s codswallop.
“It’s typical of a directeur sportif losing one of his top riders because he couldn’t keep them. I like Lefevere and he is very good at what he does… but Sam Bennett does not lay at home with a false knee injury.”
Related News
Roche, who himself held the green jersey going into the final day of the Tour in 1987 only to lose it to Jean-Paul van Poppel (Superconfex-Kwantum-Yoko), said Bennett specifically was a rider who applied himself fully to racing.
“We saw Sam last year in the Tour even
throwing himself into early breakaways,” he said of Bennett battling with Peter
Sagan for the green jersey.
“He is always trying to progress as a rider and he has really hardened up over the last few years. He’s shown that to everyone. So it’s disrespect for the man; shooting him down like that.”
Roche said he could relate to what Bennett was going through as he had his own taste of being disrespected by team management on the 1991 Tour de France when he missed the start of the stage 2 team TT. He had to ride the stage on his own, finishing outside the time limit and being eliminated from the race.
He said his own team - Tonton Tapis -
gave him the wrong start time and when they realised they had gotten the time
wrong nobody informed him as he warmed up alone, so he missed the start.
“That evening, as I am going back to the team hotel in the car, I turn on the radio and there’s my team boss saying I had faked a toilet break, or whatever it was, before the start,” Roche recalled.
“He was saying I didn’t want to face the
Tour de France due to being unhappy with the team and that I wanted to go home.
It was total bullshit, so I can understand what Sam is going through.
“The best race in the world is coming up, Sam is the outgoing green jersey and you don’t fake an injury. If Sam misses out on the Tour, he knows that’s a big chance missed,” Roche added.
“It’s a missed chance for more stage
wins and winning the green jersey, enhancing his profile, getting better
contracts. There’s no way a cyclist, especially Sam Bennett, is shying away
from the Tour or doesn’t want to go because he is changing team.”
Looking to the months ahead, when Bennett will continue to race for Deceuninck-QuickStep before leaving the team at the end of the year, Roche said Lefevere had many riders capable of winning races that he could pick for major events, like La Vuelta. That meant “he doesn’t have to depend on Sam”.
However, Bennett was a proven winner and it would be “a bit stupid and very evident” if the Belgian team boss deliberately overlooked Bennett for selection for big races because of the events of the last week. He did not think Lefevere would want to look petty by adopting those tactics during the final months of Bennett's tenure with the team.
Topics
