Class is permanent: Why Sam Bennett’s Vuelta victories show Bora Hansgrohe should have taken him to Le Tour

“Form is temporary, class is permanent” is one of the oldest and most established maxims in sport. It serves as a call to assess an individual on who they have been over the entirety of their career, and not allow that judgement to be clouded by short term ebbs and flows. It is most often uttered in connection to supposed games of “skill” such as football and cricket (believed to be its earliest sporting association.) This weekend Sam Bennett reminded audiences around the world that it is no less applicable to cycling.

He is not the first sprinter to do so. Mark Cavendish, a rider who has had more comebacks than Lazarus, springs to mind even more readily.

Perhaps it’s because there’s always someone younger, and cheaper. Perhaps it’s because the “skill” of sprinters, their abilities to manipulate their machines into winning positions, is undervalued compared to more measurable metrics like VO2 max.

Bennett’s two Vuelta wins this weekend, the first of which came 699 days after his last Grand Tour success, have not been quite as eye-opening/surprising as the four Tour victories the Manxman claimed last year. They ought, however, to serve as a similar kind of call to arms to teams to reconsider how they evaluate two-wheeled talent.

Just as Cavendish left plenty of teams wondering “what if?,” when it comes to Bennett, Bora-Hansgrohe ought to be at least a little rueful of their decision to leave him out of their Tour de France line-up.

Before we continue, a qualification: La Vuelta is not the Le Tour. A rider who is able to take victories in the former, even two in a row, is not necessarily able to do the same at the latter, especially if they have never managed it before.

On the other hand, a rider who has previously won on the Champs Elysees, the unofficial World Championships of sprinting, who has succeeded in every Grand Tour he has started since 2018, ought to have been given far more of the benefit of the doubt than Bennett has.

It is true that in his presentation, the way he comes across off the bike, the Irishman has not always – or often – exuded confidence in his own abilities. When he returned from the 2018 Giro d’Italia with three stage victories to his name, including one in the shadow of Rome’s colosseum, he sometimes seemed as embarrassed as proud. If it was as if he felt he owed the wins more to blind luck than brilliant legs, and the remarkable judgement of the brilliant racer he was.

His morale has strengthened with every subsequent victory at the highest level. Still, his reaction to that definitive, dominant finish in front of the Arc de Triomphe in 2020 was not those of someone who believed they belonged.

Which is not to say he ought to have kept his emotions in check. We love the sport more when riders show us how much it means to them. We appreciate riders more when they reveal their raw humanity. Nevertheless, if his employers have lacked faith in him, it may in part be a mirror of his own self-doubt, but that is no excuse.

Just as he should not question his abilities, nor should they, as his own uncertainty is only human. You would expect the bosses to be more calculating.

If they had paid more attention to what he has done than what he has said, less in the short term than across the course of his career it would have been almost impossible to leave him out of their Tour de France side.

His record is that of a rider who has rarely failed to deliver and never in the biggest (sprint) stages of the sport. And it is not despite who he is as a person but, arguably, due to it. He is a humble guy, so grateful for the chance to sprint against the very best riders in the world that he feels he cannot allow himself to let down those – the managers and the team-mates – who have given him that opportunity.

There are plenty of riders who you could argue are better than the results they have achieved would indicate, who have failed to live up to their physiological talent. Sam Bennett is not one of those. He has made the most of every opportunity, and paid back those who believed in him every time.

Though this year’s Tour was not one for the sprinters, all the evidence is that Bennett would have won at least a single stage. That would have been one more than they ended up winning, and would have been immensely more valuable to their sponsors than the fifth place on GC (and almost zero screentime) achieved by Aleksandr Vlasov.

Bora-Hansgrohe almost left Bennett out of their Vuelta squad in favour of providing Giro d’Italia champion Jai Hindley’s GC ambitions with greater firepower. Given Hindley has a good chance of winning the overall title, that actually makes more sense than the decision to exclude him from their Tour de France squad. It still makes no sense at all.

Class is permanent. More than any other rider around, Bennett is class. Until he has shown for sure that he can no longer win, letting him down, leaving him out, will always be a mistake.