Sam Bennett stole back into the green jersey in the Tour de France, after taking his debut victory on stage 10 from Île d’Oléron to Île de Ré on the Atlantic coast. Bennett has now won stages in all three of Europe’s Grand Tours. Racing for Deceuninck-Quick-Step, the Irish sprinter had so far been the 2020 Tour’s nearly man, frustrated by rivals such as Caleb Ewan of Lotto Soudal, Wout Van Aert of Jumbo-Visma and Alexander Kristoff of UAE Team Emirates. This time, however, there was no mistake and he edged ahead of both Ewan and the multiple green jersey winner Peter Sagan to take the stage and the lead in the points classification from the Bora-Hansgrohe rider. “I forgot to throw the bike at the line, and I thought maybe he’d got me,” he said of Ewan. “I thought I’d be in floods of tears and now I’m in shock. I want to thank everyone that’s been involved, everybody it took to get to here. “You dream of it and you never think it will happen,” Bennett, struggling to compose himself, said. “It took me a while before it hit me. I thought maybe I was waiting too long and maybe I was in too big a gear. Sorry, I don’t mean to be a cry baby.” Bennett is following in illustrious wheel tracks. On stage five, into Privas, he became the first Irish rider to wear the green jersey since Sean Kelly in 1989. Both Bennett and Kelly are from the same Tipperary town, Carrick-on-Suir, but Bennett acknowledges that he will face stiff competition on the long road to Paris from multiple points classification winner Sagan. “I’m proud to be representing Ireland at the biggest bike race in the world, so I’d love to bring the green jersey home, but Sagan knows what he’s doing,” he said. “I suppose today is a confidence booster, but we’ll take it day by day and see how we get on.” A stage that was long expected to be nervous, on a route peppered with roundabouts and street furniture, had added tensions as the race resumed in the aftermath of a battery of Covid-19 testing that saw four teams lose a member of their backroom staff. Those four teams – Ineos Grenadiers, Cofidis Solutions Crédits, AG2R La Mondiale and Mitchelton-Scott – will now be even more vigilant over the next seven days before the next round of testing, scheduled for the second rest day on 14 September. A second positive in seven days would lead to their exclusion from the Tour. Yet the peloton sped onwards through the lanes and fishing villages of the Charente-Maritime without as much as a backward glance, even after the race director, Christian Prudhomme, was one of those to test positive for Covid-19 and leave the race. Prudhomme’s role is as much ambassadorial as logistical and there will be some anxious VIP guests and sponsors now hurriedly booking swab tests. Crashes punctuated the stage with Tadej Pogacar of UAE Team Emirates, Guillaume Martin of Cofidis and Nicolas Roche of Team Sunweb among the numerous fallers. Further falls, on the approach to the windswept bridge leading to the Île de Ré, saw the former race leader and Bennett’s teammate Julian Alaphilipe delayed, alongside Richard Carapaz of Ineos Grenadiers. After threading his way through the chaos and ticking off another day in the yellow jersey, race leader Primoz Roglic appeared untroubled by the Covid-19 protocols. “If I’m honest I didn’t really think about it,” Jumbo-Visma’s Slovenian leader said. “We are all healthy and racing hard. I’m happy that the race goes on. I just hope Prudhomme recovers as quickly as possible.”