'I had weird sensations' - Sam Bennett's Q36.5 debut delayed by heart ablation

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Bennett explained that he awoke in the middle of the night with heart palpitations during a visit to London in November, though he waited until the morning before calling the medical staff at his new team.

“To be honest, I didn’t want to annoy anybody. I kind of waited until I knew the doctors would be awake and I rang them then,” said Bennett, who had struggled for form in the final months of the season with Decathlon-AG2R before signing for his new team in October.

“Towards the end of last year, I wasn’t going great and I couldn’t understand what was happening. I started back training and I had some weird sensations for the first three days.

“I was thinking, ‘Whoa, I’m really unfit here!’ That night, I was in bed and started getting heart flutters, palpitations and an uneasy sensation in my chest. I could feel my heart rate rising and the fact that I didn’t know what was happening didn’t help.”

After being put in touch with a specialist in London, Bennett flew to Frankfurt to undergo a cardiac ablation procedure on November 18 after weighing up other treatment options. 

“There are different ways of treating it,” Bennett said. “Beta blockers would normally be the first stop. You can shock it back into normal rhythm, and the next step is ablation. We spoke for a few days and decided to go for the ablation. We thought it was the best way to treat it to ensure it doesn’t come back in the season.”

Following the surgery, Bennett spent eight weeks on blood thinners, which meant he was unable to train due to the risk of crashing. He has now returned to training on the road, though it remains to be seen when his season will start.

“I think it’s better to acknowledge it now rather than hide it because people are going to start saying, ‘Where’s Sam Bennett? Why isn’t he racing? What’s going on?’” Bennett said. “There’s nothing really planned, but I don’t want to be too relaxed about it. I’m setting myself the end of March to be ready so that I don’t take my foot off the gas, but I can only do what the body lets me do.”

Although Bennett won nine races in his two seasons at Decathlon-AG2R, he never recaptured the form that has carried him to ten Grand Tour stage wins over the years. The 35-year-old has been told that he may have been hampered by atrial fibrillation in recent seasons.

“In the past few years, I have had lots of these weird sensations,” Bennett said. “They said it could be possible that I was having mini-episodes that blocked me from going harder in the sprints. What happened with me was that the top two chambers were beating twice as fast as the bottom two.

“I was getting 30 or 40pc less flow, so when I went into sprints, I’d go to sprint and I’d have to sit down, which kind of matches up, but I won’t know if it was that until I start racing again.”

In a statement on Thursday afternoon, Pinarello-Q36.5 said that Bennett had participated in the squad’s recent training camp in Spain. “At this stage, there is no fixed timeline for a return to racing,” the team said. “The focus remains on continuing the process carefully and correctly, following medical guidance.”