Sam Bennett had an expletive laced exchange with Bernie Eisel, but the Irish man tells us here he quickly pulled his horns in.
By Sam Bennett
Thursday September 11, Stage 5 : Exmouth - Exeter (177.3km)
Having felt unwell for the past few days I was kind of glad to be told by the team doctor last night that blood tests after the stage revealed that my white cells are low and my body is still fighting the virus I got after the Tour of Norway.
Although there's not much I can do about it, at least I wasn’t just going bad yesterday for no apparent reason.
My sore throat meant I didn’t sleep that well last night and I knew almost as soon as I got up this morning that today was going to be one of those days.
The first moment I noticed that I wasn’t completely with it today came at breakfast, where I proceeded to pour orange juice on my breakfast cereal.
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Although I snapped out of my trance after a few seconds, it wasn’t quick enough to stop Paris-Roubaix winner Niki Terpstra of Omega Pharma Quickstep having a good laugh at my expense.
My teammate Daniel Schorn was feeling too hot today either and Scott Thwaites had a sore shoulder and back after being hit by a motorbike the previous day, so we decided to try and set up Paul Voss to go for the stage at the finish today.
This week is perhaps not going to plan, but Sam Bennett has settled in nicely with NetApp-Endura and has another year with them next season.
When I say ‘we’, I really mean ‘the rest of the lads’ because, to be honest, I spent most of the day hanging on and wasn’t much use to them.
I was suffering all day, especially when it came to the climbs and never really saw the front of the peloton at all.
Most of the day was spent on really small twisting roads which enticed the breakaway to go away early and the narrow winding roads made it feel a bit like a classic
My computer clocked 100kph maximum speed today on one of the descents but the problem with these descents was that you invariably hit a wall again at the bottom as the road started to rise again.
In the second half of the stage, I went back for bottles but as the road was really narrow, the team cars couldn’t get past each other to come up so there was a queue of riders behind me.
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As we began to climb another drag, Bernie Eisel of Sky came back for bottles for his teammates too and we began to get caught up in guys who were struggling at the back of the bunch.
Suddenly, the Austrian roared in my direction.
“Hey! Hold the wheel and move up. I’m trying to go back for bottles here!”
I was already in bad enough humour without somebody shouting at me, so I let him have it.
“I’m waiting for f****ng bottles as well!”
A bemused Eisel just looked at me though before nodding towards a rider on my inside
“Not you mate. The other guy.”
I didn’t even know there was another rider the other side of me, but apologised to Eisel before drifting back to my NetApp Endura team car and stuffing my jersey with six bottles.
Having started the day in a bit of a daze, by this stage I was well and truly frazzled but began to ride back up to distribute the bottles to my teammates.
Having handed out five of them to Leo, Daniel, Jan, Scott and Vossy, I actually spent the next five minutes riding around the bunch with the last bottle wondering where the hell the sixth rider was, before I realised it was me.
When I got to the last climb I knew there was no point in trying to hang on and sat up with 5km to go in the hope that it will help me recover for the next few days.
Tomorrow is the longest stage of this Tour of Britain though and with the transfers pretty long after each stage, it means I might not get to recover as much as I’d want.
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