WELCOME BACK
John Degenkolb’s emotional “primetime” stage victory on the Roubaix pavé put right two-and-a-half difficult years of injury and illness
STAGE 9
Redemption for John Degenkolb
On this of all days. John Degenkolb’s desperate, successful gritted-teeth sprint on the street outside the Roubaix velodrome was cathartic and emotional and begrudged by no one. Mark Cavendish’s affectionate congratulations to his former HTC team-mate summed up the peloton’s generosity of spirit towards the German rider. No one familiar with Degenkolb’s journey back from the brink of the career-threatening training crash in January 2016 could quibble with the notion that one of the most anticipated stages of the year had received a most deserving – and popular – winner.
On January 23rd, while training near Calpe, Degenkolb and five team-mates were hit by a British driver. Among the injuries: a portion of Degenkolb’s left index finger was all but severed.
His team manager at Trek-Segafredo,
Luca Guercilena, witnessed his journey back from the very start. Through the spring and winter of 2016, Guercilena had watched from afar because Degenkolb had been the Italian’s transfer target. Then, after successfully recruiting him, he watched the German persevere at close quarters. “When I contacted him the first time he was still affected by the accident, but he had a great motivation to get back as soon as possible,” Guercilena said. By March, the German was riding four hours some mornings, having lunch, and following that up with three hours of physio.
He returned to racing in May. At the Tour of California he explained how the splint
immobilising his index finger meant he had to brake and change gears with his middle finger.
“It’s not that easy, especially in a sprint where you react automatically,” he said. Degenkolb’s training and racing brought his condition back. His determination to get a result and prove he was back revealed itself at the Dauphiné. Balked on the stage into Tournon-sur-Rhône, Degenkolb’s long, loud f-word made the team bus shudder in the shady Rhône-side square.
His first win since the accident came at the Arctic Race of Norway, which he described merely as a “great relief”.
“It took a lot of energy, almost as much as winning a monument,” he said. By then, Degenkolb was Trek-bound and he set about his winter training regime with the same vigour he applied to his initial recovery. “He came back on a very high level and was competitive immediately,” remarked Guercilena. In the 2017 Classics, he was top 10 in San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem, Flanders and Roubaix. But in cycling’s world of results, few remembered such placings – especially from the rider who, in 2015, had become the first in almost 30 years to win Roubaix and San Remo in the same year. At the 2017 Tour, he survived the stage 4 crash in which Mark Cavendish abandoned and Peter Sagan was disqualified. He rode the rest of the race with an injured shoulder. He finished the Tour with three stage top fives, including the sixth second place of his career. That came in Bergerac where Marcel Kittel, once his long-term team-mate, had beaten him. “He’s on another planet now,” Degenkolb remarked.
The late 2017 season was built around the Bergen World Championships. But as he prepared at the Vuelta a España, he went down with bronchitis. He left the race but returned to racing too soon. He abandoned the Tour of Denmark. Hospital tests confirmed pneumonia.
In January, he described the pressure he had put on himself to return to the top. It felt like someone “standing with a pistol behind me,” he said. Two wins in late January at the Majorca Challenge were big pluses but the setbacks kept coming down
Pure happiness. So much pressure has fallen off my shoulders now
the track. It was a case of one step forwards, one step back.
“The worst was this year when he was back at a high level in January but then got bronchitis in March,” recalls Guercilena. The illness which forced him out of Paris-Nice effectively derailed his Classics. “Then in Roubaix he crashed and hit his knee. Then I saw it was really tough for him to deal with. It was an injury that should have kept him busy for 10 days but it turned into a month.”
Guercilena noticed tension building up in his cobbled Classics leader. Where he had first met the challenge with ferocious determination, now setbacks breached Degenkolb’s spirit. At the Tour de Suisse Degenkolb was fighting for a Tour place.
WELCOME TO PRIMETIME
Degenkolb made it into the team – and in certain form too. By the start of stage 9, he had five stage top 10s. Stage 9 to Roubaix dawned hot and dusty.
While the day was drama-filled, most of it came from crashes. As the race developed, an uneasy truce settled on the GC riders. Even perennial agitators such as Vincenzo Nibali stayed largely dormant. Some riders said they had monitored the wind for weeks, but in the end they needn’t have bothered: it was straight in their faces.
Not until the penultimate section of pavé at Camphin-en-Pévèle did Yves Lampaert prise open a meaningful gap that fellow Classics specialists Degenkolb and Greg Van Avermaet rushed to jam open further. The three worked well together, while the chase behind was tempered by the presence of GC riders. Caked in a fine slurry of sweat and dust, the trio made it to the line with an advantage that invited an edgy, nervous sprint. Degenkolb, pinned at the front, had no choice but to hug the barrier and watch over his shoulder. A feint and a parry and he opened up his sprint in his bobbing, scampering style. But this one, this victory, was his. A triumph of the will, some of the papers in Germany called it.
All that had gone before, the struggles and the setbacks, fell away in what he called a moment of “pure happiness”. As the cameras homed in, he pinched away tears that washed away the dust. In Roubaix’s modern, covered velodrome he said: “So much pressure has fallen off my shoulders now.” He dedicated the victory and his perseverance through the previous winter to Jörg, a friend of his father, who had died after a work accident late last year. “He always supported me when I started cycling. From the beginning he was helping us out and going to any race in Europe. He was always there.”
Following the charter flight from northern France to Annecy in the Alps, where Degenkolb had embraced his wife and children, the magnitude of his win started to settle in. In the team’s rest day press conference, 24 hours after the win, the raw emotion was replaced by something more circumspect. In that quiet, confident, gravelly voice of his he said: “It was primetime. It was Sunday, it was a cobble stage which everyone watches and it was just before the final of the World Cup. There were not so many people who were not watching.” He smiled at this.
Afterwards, as the German press cornered him to add more flesh to the bones of the story of a day when the GC battle was trumped by the visceral reaction of the winner, his friend and team-mate Koen de Kort noted: “I’m not sure you can call it a comeback. He’s been back for a while, he just hasn’t had that big win. He was getting close. But then, it’s not unlike John to go out and win the biggest one.”