How to follow cricket during a Tour de France

New Zealand champion cyclist George Bennett has switched teams for 2022. After seven years riding for Jumbo-Visma, he moved to Team UAE Emirates to team up with Tour de France champion Tadej Pogacar.

He caught up with Phillip Rollo to discuss life in the peloton, why he turned down a free Lexus when he won the Tour of California in 2017, and where he would stage a WorldTour race here in New Zealand.

You have gone from riding with one Slovenian star to another by swapping Jumbo-Visma for UAE Team Emirates. What do you think sets Primoz Roglic and Tadej Pogacar apart?

Tadej is really outgoing. He’s a people person, let’s say, and a bit more carefree where Primoz is a super hard worker, he’s very methodical, got a bit of a Terminator vibe to him. They’re two quite different guys but very nice guys and slightly different riders. Riding for Primoz, you could rely on his punch at the end of a race but Tadej you can rely on his absolute strength.

You won the Tour of California and Gran Piemonte and were part of numerous team successes during your time with Jumbo-Visma. What result were you most proud of?

Second in Lombardy. On a personal level that was my proudest result, but as a team I think when we won the 2019

Vuelta a Espan˜a. We had to overcome a lot of ups and downs and that was a really mental race. Everything went wrong for us at the end. We kept falling off our bikes and breaking bones and we managed to drag ourselves through and win. With Jumbo we got paired up with these super freaks, Wout van Aert, Primoz Roglic, and sometimes winning seemed easy because these guys are just so good, so I think being proud of something is when you weren’t expecting to be the best and you were able to pull it off.

You were given a Lexus when you won the Tour of California in 2017. What ever happened to it?

You had the option of taking the car, or you could take $80,000, and because you give the prizemoney to your team-mates, it was easier to just take the money and give that to them. I would have felt bad if I said ‘thanks for helping, but I’m going to take the car. Cheers boys!’

You’re a keen cricket fan, so what did you do when the World Cup final clashed with a stage of the Tour de France in 2019?

There were actually two games. It was the semifinal versus India, which spanned over two days, and I was getting live updates via Matt White, who is a director at GreenEdge. I remember the first day was quite a hard stage, so it was quite hard to get updates, but every time I’d go back for bottles we’d find a GreenEdge rider and grab their radio talk to Whitey in the car. For the final, I was actually on the massage table when we lost, and that was a pretty heartbreaking day.

Do you have a record that you have set on Strava that you are most proud of?

I’d like to see someone take the Aniseed Valley Hill, because that’s my local hill where I grew up, and it’s only three minutes if you go really fast. But the most prestigious, let’s say, would be one of the climbs in Girona, where I live now, Els Angels. We did it with a few mates and they gave me a few pulls at the start of the climb and we put the record out of reach just for a laugh one day. That’ll last a few years. It’s 18:14.

There is a record number of Kiwis on the WorldTour now. Who of the new generation excites you the most?

Niamh Fisher-Black, she’s awesome, so obviously her, and Finn Fisher-Black and Corbin Strong as well. Those two guys are going to be carrying the torch for New Zealand going forward. Corbin is already showing he can cross over from track to road and win a lot of different types of races and Finn has a huge motor.

For the past few years you have been wearing shoes with special designs hand-painted by your girlfriend Caitlin Fielder at all of your races. What was the inspiration behind that?

She was a marine biologist and she quit her job and moved to Europe with me in 2016. She was a really good artist, but was trying to work out how to make it work and needed an identity. For one of my birthdays she made me this cool pair of shoes for the Tour de France and everyone loved them, and they were asking ‘how do we get these’? There’s a long, long waiting list now. Quite a few pros are wearing them; Mathieu van der Poel, van Aert, Roglic – they’re three of the biggest stars of cycling right there. As soon as that happens they’ll just go big.

Finally, if New Zealand could host a WorldTour race, where would you stage it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because it’s something that we’re trying to do. I don’t know what that looks like, if it’s an expansion of the New Zealand Cycle Classic or a whole new race or whatever. I think you’d probably have to go from Wellington, Rotorua or central North Island because as much as I’d love to see it in Nelson, I’d want to bring it to the city to get the people involved and to give the riders a good experience without huge transfers.