Sam Bennett has scored his first Top10 result at his first participation in a Grand Tour.

The seventh stage over 190 kilometers from Livarot to Fougeres was relatively flat and was completed in perfect weather conditions. Today’s stage went as expected: an early break away quintet was caught in the last ten kilometers. From there, the sprint teams took over and prepared the finale.

BORA – ARGON 18 showed up with lead out rider Zak Dempster at the front of the field. There, he positioned Sam Bennett for the sprint in the slightly uphill finish. While Mark Cavendish (Etixx Quick Step) took the victory, Bennett sprinted on the 10th place. Chris Froome (Sky) takes the lead in the overall standings, Dominik Nerz moves up to 26th place.

"Today, no one should try to go in the group, but all focus on Sam. The whole team should and did support him. For the finale, as he says himself, not everything went perfectly. He had a good position, but then had to brake. Thus, he unfortunately finished only in 10th place. In spite of that though, an upward trend can be seen, which of course makes us very happy. Now we look at how he will manage the next few days and the first mountain stages. Maybe there will be an even better result sometime later but yet before Paris.", states Sport Director Enrico Poitschke about today's stage.

"Dominik of course was supported by the team as well and should save his energy today. Thus, everything happened as we had planned it. Tomorrow it'll be again a tough day for him regarding the uphill finish. There, we don't want to lose too much time. Therefore, we will try to bring him in a very good position at the bottom of the climb. It is certainly not what he particularly likes, those short steep intense climbs, but after the bad luck of the first days he stabilized and is in good spirits. So tomorrow we again will save our energy and don't invest too much, because we need this energy later.", continued Poitschke.