George Bennett: Tour of California jury know they made the wrong call
17 May 2019 07:57
George Bennett (Jumbo-Visma) says that fighting for the overall win in the Tour of California will be more difficult thanks to the race officials' decision to award current leader Tejay van Garderen the same time as the peloton on stage 4 to Morro Bay. The EF Education First rider was chasing back from a mechanical and ran into the remnants of a crash outside the 3km mark, but the jury deemed he had made contact before the crash blocked his way. At the time, Bennett was 51 seconds up the road, finishing with the main bunch behind winner Fabio Jakobsen, and stood to be in a strong position just 29 seconds behind Jakobsen's Deceuninck-QuickStep teammate Kasper Asgreen, who would have been in the race lead.ADVERTISEMENT Van Garderen, who had a mechanical, then got on teammate Lachlan Morton's bike, lost control on a turn and went off-course because the brake controls were reversed from his own. When he came upon the crash in the peloton, he and his teammates had to slowly pick their way through the fallen riders. The decision to give van Garderen the same time was heavily criticized, with Deceuninck-Quickstep manager Patrick Lefevere calling the jury "incompetent". Bennett said he spoke to the head of the UCI's race jury and agrees they made the wrong decision. "I talked to the Belgian guy, I think he was a little sheepish about it. He wasn't ready to admit that he was wrong but I think he knew he'd cocked it up," Bennett told Cyclingnews. "He wasn't quite ready to admit that to me. He was pretty evasive and tried not to give a direct answer. By the look of him he'd been given shit all morning by a lot of teams and a lot of people.
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