George Bennett claims race organisers ‘stage’ breakaway drama with camera motorbikes

The 36-year-old NSN rider, fresh from completing his sixth Tour de France, is the latest rider to weigh in on one of the season’s most persistent controversies: the influence of television motorbikes on the racing itself.

“What I think is happening a lot of the time is that the organisers are actually staging a bit of this,” Bennett told The Agenda, a podcast by the Alternative Commentary Collective.

“They’re going, ‘Right, let’s just keep that camera motorbike quite close to them until we think that it’s in danger territory.’”

Bennett did not accuse organisers of fixing results. Instead, he suggested camera motorbikes may be kept close to a breakaway to sustain the tension, then moved away once the escape threatens to stay clear.

Bennett believes the effect has already changed the way sprint teams approach flat stages.

He said sprint stages had often been criticised as predictable, with breakaways given several minutes before being caught near the finish.

“The breakaway used to get five, six, seven minutes, and then they would just fall apart and they would catch them with two kilometres to go.”

That strategy became less reliable when breakaways started surviving.

“The sprint teams caught on and went, ‘Right, we’re not going to give these guys 15 minutes. We’re going to give them one and a half minutes and we’re going to peg them there.’”

Bennett recalled one Tour stage when several riders were working at full effort in the chase but made almost no progress.

“We were just swapping off, full gas behind,” he said.

“We couldn’t take ten seconds out of them for 30 or 40 kilometres.”

The gap then fell by around 50 seconds in the space of a few kilometres. “We think, ‘Okay, the motorbike got out of the way,’” Bennett said.

His team decided not to take the same risk again. “We’re going to keep this breakaway under a minute the whole day,” Bennett said.

“It ends up in this crazy arm wrestle where the teams at the front are racing basically against a car and a motorbike.”

Bennett also referred to the Giro d’Italia when discussing the impact motorbikes can have on races, and appeared to be describing stage 15, where Fredrik Dversnes won in Milan from a breakaway despite a full scale chase.

“We saw it really badly in the Giro,” Bennett said. “A breakaway of three riders that were not big riders were being chased by 15 of the big peloton sprint teams. They weren’t catching them.”

“They were meant to bring the motorbikes out so it would be quite dramatic and they’d catch them in the last couple of kilometres, but they held on and won the stage.”

Bennett was not alone in questioning the role of the motorbikes that day. Lidl-Trek’s Max Walscheid, who had spent the stage working for Jonathan Milan, said afterwards that “motorbikes took it away” and insisted the peloton could not have ridden any faster.

Dversnes rejected the suggestion that his victory had been shaped by outside assistance. “There were actually four very strong motorbikes inside the breakaway,” he said, referring to the riders who had driven the move.