Here's a thing that still gives me a small thrill to say: I grew up racing against Sam Bennett. When I was getting started as a senior, Sam was coming through the juniors, and in those Irish races they'd lump the categories together — Sam Bennett, Aaron Buggle, Philip Lavery, three lads you genuinely couldn't separate. One of them went on to become one of the fastest sprinters in the world and a Tour de France green jersey winner. So when Sam wins, I watch it differently to most people, and what I see is a masterclass that has very little to do with the thing everyone assumes wins sprints.
Because here's what nobody tells you about sprinting: it is barely about raw speed. Watch a Sam Bennett win — a stage, a one-day classic, any of them — and the lesson is hiding in plain sight in the final ten kilometres. Sprinting is chess on wheels, and the fastest legs don't win it. The smartest positioning does. Let me break down what sprinters actually do differently, because every bit of it scales down to your club run and your local sportive.
Try to find him in the last 10km
Do this the next time a bunch sprint is coming. Watch the closing ten kilometres and try to keep your eye on Bennett. You can't. He vanishes. There's a noisy move on the left, a noisy move on the right, his team takes the front, the bunch strings out — and somewhere in all of it, Sam is being shuffled, sheltered and protected, and you simply cannot pick him out.
And then here's the detail that tells you everything: in a chaotic finale, Bennett doesn't hit a single bit of wind until about 150 metres to go. The whole race, all that fighting and surging and jostling, and the sprinter himself is tucked away out of the wind almost to the line. By the time he appears, fires, and wins, the work that won it was already done. The sprint you see — the last 200 metres of flat-out effort — is the smallest, last part of a job that was actually completed over the previous ten kilometres.
That's the headline. The win is set up long before the sprint opens. The fastest man doesn't win; the best-positioned, freshest, most sheltered fast man wins. Raw watts get you in the conversation. Everything else is craft.
Why staying out of the wind is the whole game
Sit with the 150-metres point, because it's the most useful thing here for an ordinary rider. Every metre Bennett spends sheltered behind a team-mate is a metre he isn't fighting the wind, and fighting the wind is enormously expensive. A rider sitting in the draft uses dramatically less energy than the rider on the front punching a hole in the air. So while his rivals are burning matches just to hold position in the wind, Bennett is being carried to the line on a fraction of the cost, saving everything for the one ten-second effort that decides it.
This is the single most transferable lesson in all of sprinting, and you don't need a lead-out train to use it. In any fast finish — a club-run dash to the town sign, a sportive group rolling to a café, a local crit — the rider who stays sheltered and conserves until the last moment beats the rider who's been on the front feeling strong. Position yourself out of the wind. Let others do the work into the closing stages. Arrive at the moment of truth with matches still in the box. The same physics that win a WorldTour sprint win your Saturday bunch kick: drafting is free speed, and the wind is the enemy you avoid, not fight.
Position before the finish, not during it
The corollary is about when the work happens, and it's the mistake most amateurs make. The fight for position in a Bennett win happens before the sprint, in the run-in, while it's still relatively cheap to move up. By the time the road opens for the sprint, he's already where he needs to be. He's not clawing through the bunch in the final 300 metres; he's being launched from a position his team secured kilometres earlier.
Amateurs do the opposite. They sit in, comfortable, until the finish looms, then try to sprint through traffic from too far back, spending a huge anaerobic effort just to reach the front as the line arrives — and they've got nothing left for the actual kick. The lesson is to do your moving early, while the road is open and the sheltering is cheap, so that when it's time to sprint you're already in position and can spend everything on the effort itself. It's the same principle that decides a Paris-Roubaix or a mountain stage: get to the front before it matters, not during.
It's a team game — chess on wheels
The phrase I keep coming back to is chess on wheels, and it's worth dwelling on because it reframes the whole thing. Bennett's team-mates aren't just helpers; they're pieces with roles. One controls the front. One shelters him through the chaos. One delivers the final launch. Each is sacrificing their own race to position and conserve their man, and the team that plays the pieces best — the great lead-out squads are masters of this — usually delivers the win. The sprinter is the finisher, but the goal was built by the team.
You probably don't have a lead-out train. But if you ride with a club, with mates, in any kind of group, the principle is available to you. Riders can share the work, shelter the one who's going for the sign, take turns on the front to set up a finish. Even informally, two riders working together beat two riders racing each other. The pros turn this into an art form; you can borrow the basic idea on any group ride. Cycling is a team sport even when it doesn't look like one, and sprinting is where that's most obvious.
The green jersey is a different test
One more layer, because Bennett didn't just win stages — he won the Tour de France green jersey, and that's a different and arguably harder achievement than any single sprint. The points classification rewards consistency across three weeks: contesting intermediate sprints, finishing high day after day, and crucially, getting over the mountains inside the time limit so you're still there to sprint in the third week.
That last part is the one people miss. A pure sprinter who can't survive the climbs never makes it to Paris to collect the jersey. The green jersey winner is a sprinter with the durability to drag himself over the high mountains, recover, and still have the legs to win on the flat days. It's a three-week campaign of managing your body, your points and your survival — which is why it's such a prized prize. For the amateur, the lesson is that being good at one thing is rarely enough; the rider who can sprint and get over the climbs without getting shelled has a completeness that wins far more than a one-dimensional specialist.
The engine underneath
None of this means the power doesn't matter — it absolutely does, and it's worth being honest about that so you don't take the wrong lesson. Bennett can position perfectly and stay sheltered all day, but if he didn't also have a genuinely ferocious top-end, the craft would deliver him to the line with nothing to deliver. The positioning is what lets the engine do its job fresh; it doesn't replace the engine.
And the sprinter's engine is a specific, trainable thing: the ability to produce enormous power for a very short time, repeatedly, deep into fatigue. That's not the same fitness as a climber's, and it's built differently — through sprint and short, sharp efforts, not just long aerobic miles. If you fancy yourself a fast finisher, the racecraft above is half of it, but the other half is actually training the top-end, which most amateurs never deliberately do. The sprint work that builds it is a different session to your endurance riding, and you have to do it on purpose. Craft plus a trained kick is the full package; either one alone leaves you short.
What you can steal from a sprinter
You will probably never have Sam Bennett's top-end. Almost nobody does. But here's the good news, and it's the whole point: the things that actually win sprints aren't the top-end. They're positioning, energy conservation, staying out of the wind, doing your moving early, working with others, and reading a chaotic finale calmly. Every one of those is a skill, not a gift, and every one of them is available to you.
So the next time it comes down to a sprint — for a town sign, a Strava segment, a sportive finish, a bit of pride on the club run — don't just put your head down and hope your legs are fast enough. Ride it like a sprinter. Get sheltered, get positioned early, save your matches, and unleash them only when it counts. That's how the fastest man in the world does it, and the craft behind it is yours to learn.
Hear the Sam Bennett breakdown on the Roadman podcast, and read how to watch the Tour like a coach to see this play out on every flat stage. Talk tactics with us on Skool.