A devastated Sam Bennett has been forced out of this year's Tour de France by a lingering knee injury, just five days before the Grand Depart in Brest.
ast year's green jersey and double stage winner, Bennett has been battling to be fit enough to ride after a seemingly innocuous training incident when his chain slipped and his knee banged off his handlebars a few weeks ago.
"It was a really simple accident," said the clearly bereft Carrick-On-Suir sprinter of the incident that has ruled him out of defending his green jersey this year.
"I was just riding along and my gears slipped. I hit my knee off the bar. It's something that's happened before. I've banged my knee off the bars before, but nothing ever came of it."
Bennett though, knows a thing or two about knee injuries. His road to the professional peloton was paved with ups, downs, twists and turns and his fledgling career almost came to an end before it started when he was hit by a car while training as a teenager.
"Because I've had a knee injury in the past, I know the difference between pain from a knock and pain that's going to damage it," he said.
"At the beginning, it didn't feel like anything that would damage the knee so I trained away but, all of a sudden, three days later it came on."
The latest knock forced Bennett out of the recent Tour of Belgium but he had hoped to be able to recover in time for the Tour de France, which begins on Saturday. A return to training however indicated that more time was needed.
"There's no mark on me," he says incredulously.
"I don't have pain when I'm walking around, but on the bike I could feel it. It's crazy how something so simple can set you back.
"I had two weeks off, then did a few three-hour spins, so I wouldn’t even count that as training. Basically I've had two weeks off and have lost all of my fitness. I'm back to square one and it'll take a few weeks to get that fitness back."
As a sprinter, Bennett could have bluffed his way through the flatter first week of the Tour, had a go in the sprints and maybe got lucky. But that's not his style and with Mark Cavendish waiting in the wings, he felt it would be unfair to take another rider's place in his current condition.
"I don't have pain now, which is the most frustrating thing," he says.
"The knee is pretty much there now, but it's one of those small things that could come against me after a few days, so it would be unfair to the team to start.
"I probably wouldn’t get through the first week. They were building a team around me. For the whole year, the target for me was the Tour and, up until the weekend, the objective was the same. I don't want to go the Tour to ride around. I want to be there to win.
"I’m at the top of my game now and these opportunities don’t come around too often but I had to call it a day at a certain point.
"The level is too high to go there undercooked and it wouldn't be fair to me, it wouldn't be fair to the other riders on the team and it wouldn't be fair to the race."
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A clearly disappointed Bennett had to take time to compose himself when the realisation sunk in that he wouldn't be on the start line in Brest next Saturday, but tried to remain stoic in the face of adversity.
"When I started training again I wasn't comfortable with it and I need more time to make sure that it's one hundred percent. I want to have a long career and don't want to take any chances either. I need to build everything up again and just need to have a bit of common sense about it, a bit of maturity," he said.
"Even though you work your whole career to get to this point... you just have to say... 'Look there will be other races' and try and go again next year."
