Sam Bennett has been left out of Bora-Hansgrohe’s Tour de France line-up for the second successive year, with Jordi Meeus preferred as the team’s sprint option in July.
Bora-Hansgrohe announced the first seven names their selection on Thursday morning, adding that the eighth and final rider “will be one more climber and decided on the weekend.”
Sporza suggested that 20-year-old Belgian Cian Uijtdebroeks could fill the final place after he finished seventh overall at the Tour de Suisse.
2022 Giro d’Italia winner Jai Hindley will lead the team’s general classification challenge, with Emanuel Buchmann, Marco Haller, Bob Jungels, Danny van Poppel and Nils Politt also included in the final line-up.
Bennett re-joined Bora-Hansgrohe at the start of the 2022 season after an acrimonious departure from QuickStep, where he won two stages and the green jersey at the 2020 Tour de France.
The Irishman was omitted from Bora-Hansgrohe’s Tour squad last season due to a lack of results in the build-up to the race, but he returned to finish the season strongly with a brace of stage victories at the Vuelta a España.
Bennett was again pencilled into Bora’s Tour plans from the outset of 2023, and he started the campaign on a high by winning the opening stage of the Vuelta a San Juan in January. He has been unable to add to his tally of wins since, however, despite near misses at the UAE Tour and Paris-Nice, while a crash ended his Milan-San Remo challenge.
He was second across the line behind Christophe Laporte on stage 3 of the Critérium du Dauphiné before he was relegated to 33rd for deviating from his line in the sprint.
In early June, Bora-Hansgrohe head of performance Dan Lorang suggested Bennett was likely to race the Tour.
“All is fine with Sam. When Sam stays healthy and will not have a big crack [drop in form] in the Dauphiné, he will be part of the Tour team,” Lorang told the Irish Times.
Instead, Bora-Hansgrohe have preferred to bring Meeus for his Tour debut, with no explanation why Bennett was not selected. The Belgian’s lone victory this year came at the Circuit de Charleroi Wallonie in May. He finished second at the Heylen Vastgoed Heistse Pijl and third at Brussels Cycling Classic in early June but was only sixth in the sprint stage at the Tour de Suisse.
It marks the third time in succession that Bennett has missed out on the Tour after he was ruled out of the 2021 race through injury. He was also overlooked for the Tour in the final three seasons of his previous spell at Bora-Hansgrohe, when Peter Sagan was the team's designated sprinter.
Bennett’s omission this time out means there is also no place in the Tour squad for Ryan Mullen, a key part of his lead-out train, and it also raises further doubts about his likelihood of remaining with Bora-Hansgrohe when his contract expires at the end of this year.
A report in Wielerflits on Thursday morning suggested that DSM sprinter Sam Welsford was set to join Bora-Hansgrohe for the 2024 season.
