Bennett falls short of expectation

George Bennett hoped for more. Creating history as the first New Zealand cyclist to achieve a top-10 finish at the Giro d’italia is not enough to satisfy a rider who had high ambitions to finish inside the top-five.

As long as he gets through the final stage without any hiccups, which he should as it is essentially a procession ride into Rome, Bennett will finish eighth He was 13min 17sec behind winner-in-waiting Chris Froome.

Bennett is the only New Zealand rider to achieve a top-10 finish at a Grand Tour, which came when he finished 10th at the Vuelta a Espana in 2016, so an eighth placing at the Giro d’italia, a race second only to the Tour de France, rightly deserves to be at the top of his list of career accomplishments.

Maybe one day he will see it that way. But Bennett will ride into Rome unfulfilled.

Bennett had high expectations for his first Grand Tour as a leader for Lottonl-jumbo, and for the first two weeks a top-five finish appeared a realistic prospect for the 28-year-old. But he simply did not have the legs on the crucial mountain stages, even if he did fare better than Simon Yates, Esteban Chaves and Thibaut Pinot, who imploded on some of the toughest climbs.

‘‘I came here for a lot more than that,’’ said Bennett when reflecting on the past three weeks.

‘‘But that’s all I could do in the end. I’ll take it and it’s better than 11th. At the start of the Giro I wouldn’t have signed up for it but some things were out of my control and maybe I got the build up wrong as I was a bit too good too soon.’’

One moment that was out of his control occurred when he suffered a mechanical on the stage 14 ascent of Monte Zoncolan. His bike went into ‘‘crash mode’’, a glitch which makes the bike respond by locking into the biggest gear. He lost almost two minutes while waiting for a replacement and slipped from sixth to eighth overall. That incident alone could cost him seventh place, with Patrick Konrad only 16sec clear of him on the general classification standings.

Bennett was reluctant to blame his equipment though, and said his strong form in the early stages of the year – finishing inside the top-10 at Tirrenoadriatico, Volta a Catalunya and Tour of the Alps – may have actually done him more harm than good.

‘‘I didn’t really have it in the last week as much as I thought I would,’’ he said.

‘‘I was never in trouble of imploding myself but I just never had that freshness. But that’s why we are here to practice those things.

‘‘This is the first Grand Tour I’ve done where I’ve started with GC ambitions and part of it was to learn. I think we’ve learned a lot.’’