Sam Bennett won a stage in last year's Tour of Britain and today he got close to repeating that feat. After another strong NetApp-Endura showing, he finished third in stage 2 of the race.

 Team NetApp-Endura’s sprinter Sam Bennett completed the second stage of the Tour of Britain, which covered 200 kilometers from Safari Park Knowsley to Llandudno, with an excellent third-place finish. After the perfect prep work done by his team, the 23-year-old native of Ireland was beaten only by Mark Renshaw (Omega Pharma – Quick-Step) and Ben Swift (Team Sky) to move up to fourth place in the general classification. Mark Renshaw is now the overall leader. 

“Since the roads were narrow on the last few kilometers, we wanted to stay tightly together up at the front. No one was supposed to lose any time and we wanted to keep the option open to support Sam along the final stretch. Leo [König], Daniel [Schorn] and Paul [Voss] were assigned to be part of the attacks on the final climb. All of that worked very well and our strategy went according to plan all the way up to the finale. We just couldn’t get anything more out of the final sprint today. Sam got sick before the Cyclassics. He couldn’t ride in that race and also had to miss five days of training. In a sprint like today’s, he was just missing that extra punch. But the team and Sam showed that we are capable of reaching the podium every day in this tour. We thus have every reason to be satisfied with our performance,” Enrico Poitschke, Sport Director of Team NetApp-Endura, said after the stage.