With the Tour of Britain having turned into a struggle for Sam Bennett, he still seems determined to try and get something out of it.
By Sam Bennett
Friday September 12, Stage 6: Bath - Hemel Hempstead 205.7km
Despite the fact that today was the longest stage on this year’s Tour of Britain, we left Bath at a blistering pace this morning and there were plenty of attacks from the gun.
With big groups constantly coming and going up the road it wasn’t long before cracks started to appear in the peloton.
Most of my NetApp Endura team got caught in a big split in the bunch on a climb after about 30km of racing and soon found ourselves a minute down.
As our best placed riders Leo Konig (8th) and Jan Barta (17th) were also in the back end of the split, the rest of us had to start riding at the front immediately to get them back up.
Advertisement
Although I’ve been feeling sick for the last few days and haven’t been able to contest any of the stage finishes, when I started riding hard this morning I actually felt good and put in a few big turns at the front.
Some of the An Post guys were working with us because their king of the mountains leader Mark McNally had punctured and so he also missed the split.
But there were groups all over the place and with no race radios allowed here it was hard to know what was going on.
Bennett's team found themselves the wrong side of a massive split and were forced to ride hard to get back on terms (Photo: Larry Hickmott – VeloUK.net)
Just as we were about to close the gap and rejoin the front of the peloton, I looked around to see that the group had shrunk considerably and half of us had ridden away from the rest, leaving Leo back there.
Just as the team car came up to tell us to go back and get Leo, a three man break went clear and there was a stall as a lot of riders stopped for a pee at the side of the road.
Related News
As I was only going to be crawling along waiting for Leo’s group to come up, I stopped too and took the opportunity for a natural break.
By the time I had remounted, Leo had regained contact in a large group led by the Giant Shimano team of sprinter Marcel Kittel.
Although there was a bit of calm for a while after that, the fact that the three man break contained a very strong time triallist, Alex Dowsett of Movistar, and had opened up over nine minutes at one point meant the rest of the stage consisted of one big relentless chase.
While I could feel a bit of response out of them when I needed it earlier on, after about 100km my legs just fell off.
I hung on for as long as I could but with my voice gone as well as my legs, I sat up with 20km to go and rode to the line at my own pace in order not to go any further into the red.
Shortly after, two Garmin guys who had been riding hard at the front earlier on caught me and I ended my day alongside them, 13 minutes down on stage winner Matthias Brandle of IAM, while Dowsett is the new race leader.
I spoke to him afterwards and he simply couldn’t believe they were allowed over nine minutes.
This has been a savage race for everybody so far but I thought I’d be suffering to compete here and get results rather than suffering to simply survive in the race.
I’m now getting up in the mornings and going to the team doctor to see if my throat infection has spread to my lungs. The first sign of that means I will have to go on antibiotics and that will be the end of the race for me.
Tomorrow is another hard day but if I can get through it, I can just ease my way through Sunday morning’s time trial and try to do something in the final criterium in the afternoon, which was always the plan anyway.
Only time will tell whether I make it or not.
Topics
