A NEW BEGINNING
Sam Bennett caught the Irish imagination with his Tour green jersey. Can he spark a renaissance for the sport in his home country?
Tony Soprano once observed that ‘remember when’ was the lowest form of conversation, but nostalgia still exerts a pull. When Ireland began its first covid lockdown last year, repeat broadcasts of RTÉ’s retrospective programme Reeling In The Years – archive news footage soundtracked by the hits of the era – regularly featured near the top of the ratings. Maybe it was inevitable that the throwback feel to Sam Bennett’s subsequent achievements at the Tour would play so well to an Irish audience.
A self-effacing man from Carrick-onSuir winning stages and fighting for the green jersey bore obvious parallels with Sean Kelly’s heroics in the 1980s. Bennett’s success last September was the madeleine that evoked memories of those halcyon summers, attracting daily interest in the Tour from a wider Irish public for the first time since Kelly and Stephen Roche retired.
To those returning, casual observers, the fact that Bennett hailed from Kelly’s hometown and had raced for his team might have hinted at a carefully planned development structure. In truth, not unlike Irish cycling’s greatest generation, Bennett didn’t travel along a clear pathway to the top so much as follow an orienteering course.
Kelly and Roche inspired a surge in cycling participation, but few lasting foundations were sunk to sustain it. There were no Irish pros in the peloton by the time Dublin hosted the 1998 Tour’s grand départ, and at amateur level, the number of riders holding racing licences had more than halved since the peak in the late 1980s.
Come the new century, competitive cycling in Ireland had receded largely to its traditional outposts. Bennett might never have raced a bike had he not grown up in Carrick-on-Suir, where cycling remained imprinted in the DNA thanks to Kelly. It meant that a youngster might at least drift into the sport in a way that wouldn’t be possible in most provincial towns.
Yet even in Carrick, cycling wasn’t an obvious endeavour for a teenager. The generation that had taken to two wheels in imitation of Kelly in the 1980s had grown old together, racing on to veterans level, but the Carrick Wheelers’ juvenile ranks
were almost bare. Bennett had an appetite for competition, but he could only get a full diet of racing by going elsewhere. He was dispatched to race with another notable cycling nursery, Kanturk CC in north Cork, which later produced Eddie Dunbar. In Ireland, cycling struggles to compete with the popularity of Gaelic football, hurling and soccer, but the flame is kept alive by a network of like-minded evangelicals.
Bennett returned to Carrick Wheelers as a junior, with club-mate and Olympic coach Martin O’Loughlin imparting vital lessons in sprinting. He competed on both road and track, a discipline Cycling Ireland had recently begun to emphasise despite the country’s lack of a covered velodrome. In 2008, Bennett was among a cohort dispatched to sample the track in Gent. A few weeks later, he was the surprise European junior points race champion.
But if Ireland’s facilities lagged behind, the country punched above its weight with the ambition of its events, and Bennett cut his teeth at two of the most important. In 2008, he landed the Junior
Tour of Ireland and the following year, his first as a senior, he became a stage winner at the country’s great bike race, the Rás Tailteann.
Having announced himself on home roads, Bennett was now ready for the next phase in the traditional maturation ordeal of the Irish cyclist: the French amateur circuit. Shay Elliott had been the first to survive that winnowing process in the 1950s, and men like Kelly, Roche and Martin Earley followed, but many more returned home with only broken dreams.
VC La Pomme had become the finishing school for ambitious Irishmen, with Mark Scanlon, Philip Deignan, Nicolas Roche and Dan Martin all passing through en route to the pros, so Bennett headed for Marseille. His displays there earned him a stagiaire spot at FDJ in late 2010, but knee injuries prevented him from taking it up.
It was a sliding doors moment. From the cusp of the WorldTour, Bennett slid down to the third flight in 2011, signing for an Irish team, An Post-Sean Kelly. An Post styled itself as a Belgium-based talent academy, though Matt Brammeier was the only Irish rider from the programme to reach the WorldTour before Bennett.
It looked a regression for Bennett, but considering the nagging knee concerns, those three years under Kelly and Kurt Bogaerts might have been what was required. The team had modest means, but Kelly’s name ensured invitations to decent races. Above all, it had the merit of affording Bennett the chance and the time to try again in a supportive environment.
Bennett didn’t arrive in the peloton off a systematic Cycling Ireland production line, yet he is still irrefutably a product of Irish cycling and its culture. Figures like O’Loughlin offered guidance. Events like the Rás inspired belief.
An Post provided a safety net. No one element was the making of Bennett, but every contribution counted.
A self- effacing man from Carrick- on-Suir fighting for the green jersey bore obvious parallels with Sean Kelly’s heroics in the 80s
An Post’s withdrawal ended Kelly’s team and eventually forced the Rás into hiatus. And while Cycling Ireland’s membership numbers mushroomed a decade ago thanks to sportives and government incentives to buy bikes, it remains to be seen what kind of bounce the competitive sport will enjoy thanks to Bennett, whose Tour success garnered considerably more mainstream coverage than anything Dan Martin has achieved in his outstanding career.
The echoes of Kelly and the daily narrative of the green jersey helped, but the Irish public also responded to Bennett’s modesty, which recalled that of national sporting treasures like Paul McGrath and Sonia O’Sullivan. Conversely, when Bennett was nominated for Irish sportsperson of the year, RTÉ mistakenly displayed a photograph of his teammate Rémi Cavagna, and the state broadcaster’s reports of his displays – sample headline: ‘Bennett still pointless as Pogacar stretches UAE Tour lead’ – highlight that cycling is still some way from a marquee sport, let alone one in which the mainstream appreciates its nuances.
But the value of Bennett’s success to the existing cycling community is immeasurable. As Paris drew closer last September, cyclists and clubs across Ireland sifted the archives and began posting pictures from a decade or more earlier of a young Bennett sprinting for finish lines chalked across roads in places like Fermoy, Camross and Currow. ‘Remember when’ never felt as relevant to the conversation.