INTERVIEW: MAXIMILIAN SCHACHMANN
The irrepressible German on his Paris-Nice win, his aggressive style and his ambitions for the future
Max Schachmann can’t help it if he enjoys the work. “I’m not stupid, I don’t do this in training,” he joked after sprawling onto the roadside on a hilltop in Portugal. It was at the Volta ao Algarve last spring, and his chest was still heaving from having tried to outmatch Remco Evenepoel on the Alto do Malhão, but he could already laugh at the intensity of the effort he had just summoned.
Professional cycling may demand ever increasing levels of asceticism, but the German manages to retain his enthusiasm for the endeavour. In those heightened moments when the peloton’s rivets come loose, Schachmann typically wears a grimace that looks a lot like a grin. Maybe it’s both.
“I like it when you don’t have to play the normal game with the team, when you just can try something,” Schachmann explains now to Procycling. “I like to entertain the spectators, all the people at home watching, because this sport is better if someone tries something instead of just being there and waiting for the final 100 metres.”
Schachmann left a calling card for his gently bobbing style at Flèche Wallonne in 2018, and his stock has barely stopped rising since he all but rode to a standstill on the Mur de Huy that afternoon. A Paris-Nice win last spring underlined his status as German cycling’s coming man and convinced Bora-Hansgrohe to offer him a contract extension of striking length: along with Tadej Pogacar and Wout van Aert, Schachmann is among the happy few in the peloton with employment through 2024.
News of the deal broke shortly before Schachmann restarted the pandemic-interrupted season with third place at a riotous edition of Strade Bianche. “A really nice race, action from kilometre zero,” he grins, but his year risked coming to a halt two weeks later when he was beset by a less welcome kind of disorder at Lombardia, and was knocked off his bike by a car that was somehow on the course.
The outcome could have been much worse, but he was still left with a broken collarbone and doubts over his Tour place. Yet Schachmann responded to the absurd crash in measured tones. “I don’t want to become a rich man because of this. I just want to have safer races,” he said, and even now, his first thought is for his team manager, who had already seen Emanuel Buchmann fall heavily at the Dauphiné that same afternoon. “I think it must have been one of the worst days of Ralph Denk’s life,” he says.
The Tour, understandably, proved an ordeal, even if Schachmann’s perseverance brought him close to a stage win at Puy Mary. “I learned once again that a broken bone takes a lot of energy” he smiles. He prefers to focus on how 2020 maintained his career’s upward trajectory rather than dwell on the disappointments of an interrupted spring and a compromised Tour: “In the end, I was really happy with everything I did that was under my control, so I made another big step forward.”
STEADY PROGRESSION
When Schachmann was 13 in 2007, his father brought him to see the Tour. They waited in blazing sunshine on the Col de la Colombière, rapt by the sound and sight of the caravan, and when the race came past, a fellow countryman was out in front. Linus Gerdemann would win the stage and don yellow, but that afternoon did nothing to arrest the painful unwinding of German cycling.
A year earlier, Jan Ullrich’s career had ended in ignominy with Operación Puerto and shortly before the Tour, Erik Zabel had made a partial doping confession. By the time Schachmann got home to Berlin, the race was no longer on state TV, with live broadcasts withdrawn after Patrick Sinkewitz’s positive test. T-Mobile left the sport, and Gerolsteiner and Milram would later complete the exodus of German sponsors. Boom had begotten bust.
Schachmann had been too young for Ullrich-mania – “I never had a role model,” he says – and though 2007 was German cycling’s darkest hour, he was undeterred. “I never thought about it. I remember Zabel doing that interview, but I didn’t care about it. I was busy with school and cycling,” he says. “I just know that as a junior, I told myself that I didn’t want to do a dirty sport. If I had to do something that is in the end criminal, I would stop.”
By then, it was already clear where Schachmann’s future lay. He had started racing aged 12, encouraged by his ease on two wheels during his
school commute in the outer borough of Marzahn. Living on Berlin’s eastern fringe meant he had open countryside in which to train and the skills developed in the flatlands beyond the city limits swept him to bronze in the 2012 Junior Worlds TT.
Shortly before his Tour debut in 2019, Schachmann, who counts building loudspeaker systems as a hobby, confessed to Bild that his dedication to cycling had limited his social life so much that he had never attended a concert. “I am boring,” he laughed, though his teenage years were hardly one-dimensional. Strong results in the Abitur, Germany’s school finals, meant he could pursue a university degree of his choosing, and he picked engineering management in Erfurt.
The new town was not selected by chance, given that it was home to Jörg Werner’s Thüringer Energie amateur squad, which had hothoused Marcel Kittel, Tony Martin and John Degenkolb. Within six months, however, Schachmann realised he couldn’t balance study with Werner’s elite finishing school. “To do them both seriously, I would have needed a 28-hour day, so I decided to focus on cycling,” he says. “I said if I didn’t turn pro in four years, I’d go back to university.”
That year in Erfurt, Schachmann’s legs did not yet match his aspirations, but the potential was evident. When Thüringer Energie disbanded, he remained under the tutelage of Werner, who became his agent. A season at Giant-Shimano was followed by two in Quick Step’s U23 structure, Klein Constantia, and each campaign brought progress.
Silver medals in the U23 time trial at the Richmond and Doha Worlds reinforced his credentials as a rouleur, while victory ahead of Pavel Sivakov atop Piani di Tavagnasco in the Giro della Valle d’Aosta showcased his improved climbing. “It’s been a linear progression through all my career,” he says. “I’ve never had a year that was worse than the previous one.”
Patrick Lefevere likes his riders to aim high, so he could only approve when Schachmann confessed a lofty dream soon after turning pro at Quick Step in 2017. “Some riders laughed when he said that one of his goals was to earn so much that he could one day buy an apartment block in Berlin,” Lefevere told Het Nieuwsblad in 2020. “He is not too modest, but I like ambitious young riders.”
Quick Step, in turn, provided a structure that allowed Schachmann to sink firm foundations. “On some teams, you sometimes just ride your bike during a race, but I always had a task, whether it was in the final or somewhere in the middle,” he says. “It was quite hard at first, because you felt a kind of pressure, but it developed you as a rider, because you had something to do.”
Early on, Schachmann made a spirited contribution to Philippe Gilbert’s Amstel Gold Race victory, and within the team, he won admirers for his rapid recovery from the broken heel that ended his debut season prematurely. By his sophomore year, he was ready to win. Stage victory at the Volta a Catalunya was followed by a signature triumph at the Giro d’Italia, where he punched his way clear of the break on the final climb to Prato Nevoso.
That Giro success increased Schachmann’s market value, and Bora-Hansgrohe had already been a persistent suitor. Lefevere blamed his eventual departure on his agent Werner, though Schachmann maintains he was ultimately persuaded by the prospect of racing for a German team. “As a German, that fits together,” he says. “But it wasn’t an easy decision, because almost everyone who left Quick Step didn’t improve any more.”
Schachmann speaks secure in the knowledge that he has been a rare exception to that rule, beginning with a remarkable sequence in April 2019, when he took a hat-trick of stage wins at Itzulia Basque Country and then capped an all-action week in the Ardennes with third at Liège. A German national title as Bora swept the podium only reiterated the success of the homecoming. “I’ve never regretted it,” he says.
ALL- ROUND ABILITY
These days, Schachmann makes his home among the German expats on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance, where he counts Jumbo-Visma’s Tony Martin as a neighbour and training partner. At Bora, meanwhile, he now cohabits with four German contemporaries – Nils Politt, Pascal Ackermann, Emanuel Buchmann and Lennard Kämna – though none of them can quite fathom how they all seemed to blossom at once. “We don’t really know the reason for it, because I think in the German youth system, there is still space to improve,” he notes carefully.
This German core has seen Bora wean itself off its Peter Sagan dependence, yet one wonders if their ambitions can all be sated. Another star-studded Bavarian team, Bayern Munich, was dubbed ‘FC Hollywood’ in the 1990s due to the constant airing of dressing room grievances, but Schachmann insists the mood music is harmonious aboard the Bora bus.
“We’re a good group, we have a good atmosphere and I think everybody’s ready to sacrifice himself for a team-mate in a race, because he knows he will get it back,” he says. “If you’re in good form, you’ll get your chance”
Schachmann has developed the useful habit of seizing the chances that come his way, and his ParisNice victory seemed a watershed. Winning the rain-soaked and hilly opening stage in Plaisir was typical of his pugnacious style, but the assured, week-long defence of his yellow jersey suggested a man on the verge of something bigger. He’s had to linger on the threshold a little longer, but he approaches this April with considerable expectation.
“It opened a new door. I brought myself into a new role in the team,” he says. “In most of the races I do this year, I will also be in a leader’s role, with a chance to fight for big successes in races like the Ardennes.”
Schachmann’s all-round gifts mean that he is reluctant to restrict his range to hilly classics and weeklong races, however, preferring instead to take on as much variety as his bandwidth can handle in the years ahead. “I’m not just focusing on one, two or three races,” he says. Last autumn, he came away from his Tour of Flanders debut vowing to return, while his ability against the watch hints at still untapped potential in the grand tours. He has only ridden three in his career to date, after all, and his two Tours were blighted by broken bones.
“I will probably not be the fastest climber in the world. Probably. Maybe I will be, but I don’t know. You should never say never, you know…” Schachmann says. Moments later, he is thinking out loud. “I’m 27 now, so even if I try next year, there are many examples of riders who only started to be a GC rider at 28 or 29. I think, why not? I have to try. I have to improve in the high mountains, that’s not a secret. But if I make that step, then maybe it’s even possible.”
Whatever happens, he gives the impression he’ll immensely enjoy finding out.