A Bike Rack Ruined Sam Bennett’s Chance at Milan-San Remo Glory

Just as the longest race of the year was reaching a fever pitch, Sam Bennett, with aims of hanging on over the Cipressa and the Poggio to hopefully find himself in a sprint finish, was taken out of Milan-San Remo in a crash. The culprit? An unmarked roadside bike rack.

Saturday’s nearly 300-kilometer Monument proceeded with little incident over its first several hours. As most of the early stages of the race wound through flat Italian countryside, it was business as usual; a nine-man breakaway followed by the mass of the peloton.

But inside 50 kilometers to go, as it does every spring, the intensity of Milan-San Remo ratcheted up. And with about 34-kilometers left, Bennett, along with a group of three other riders—one of whom was Bora-hansgrohe teammate Cesare Benedetti—found themselves in a pile at the roadside.

Benedetti appeared to take the brunt of the fall and Bennett was able to at least get a foot down before crashing to the pavement. Still, both riders stayed on the ground for a while before climbing on new bikes and limping into San Remo. According to a Bora-hansgrohe spokesperson, however, Bennett didn’t follow the course to the finish line. Rather, he abandoned the race and rode back to the team bus through town.

A few hours after Mathieu van der Poel won La Classicisma with an instant-classic attack over the Poggio, Bennett tweeted a photo of himself laying on the ground between his and another racer’s bike.

The caption read in part, “Thankfully this looks worse than it was. Gutted to miss the finale but happy to have bounced OK.”

Bennett is slated to appear next in Wednesday’s WorldTour race, the Classic Brugge-De Panne, which he won in 2021. Bora-hansgrohe team spokespeople have said they’ll monitor Bennett’s health before sending him to that start line. Following that, he’ll race in Sunday’s edition of Gent-Wevelgem.

Road hazards are a reality of bike racing. And most of the time, they’re dealt with sufficiently; either a race marshal waving a flag, warning riders of a coming island or feature of the road that could end a racer’s day, or with plenty of signage or warning lights to draw attention to potential hazards.

However, the bike rack that ended the day of Bennett, Benedetti, and others was not only jutting out into the parcours, it was completely unmarked and, judging by the crash, virtually impossible to see in the throes of an excited peloton.

Not every road hazard can be accounted for, of course, especially incidental hazards such as potholes or road debris.

But bike rack sticking into a road where a group of nearly two-hundred cyclists would be racing, just a handful of kilometers from the finish? Seems like a big oversight and one that ended the hopes of at least four racers in the year’s first Monument.

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