Jens Zemke drives bikes in racing all his life. The first decades of two-wheelers with the power of his legs, the following decades of four-wheelers with his foot on the accelerator. Of course, the fifty-six-year-old hasn’t switched to car racing, although sometimes you have to drive extremely fast behind a peloton. The man from Frankfurt has remained true to his sport, cycling – as one of the sporting directors of the top German team Bora-hansgrohe at a higher level than he was able to achieve as an active player.
On the bike, he says with a smile, “I wasn’t one of the greats”. It was still enough for a solid professional career. In his role as a planner, organizer and motivator from the team vehicles, he has already reached many cycling summits. With the win of the Giro d’Italia by the Bora pro Jai Hindley last year as an “absolute highlight”, as he says.
As a ten-year-old, he helped put up directional arrows
A highlight in his career, which began 46 years ago in Frankfurt’s Niederrad district, when he started cycling at the age of ten. A time when cycling had another dimension in the city with the cycle track at the stadium, the six-day race in the festival hall and “Around the Henninger Tower”. Zemke’s career is closely linked to the traditional race on May 1st. Many in Rhein-Main call Eschborn-Frankfurt their home race, for Zemke it is much more than that, namely home.
As a ten-year-old, he once helped with buddies from the cycling club in the Taunus to attach the direction arrows for the professional race. With cable ties on trees, masts or signs – only to remove them all again the next day. Zemke has taken part as a driver 25 times alone: starting with the former “Student B” class, through the juniors and U 23, to seven starts in the professional races in the former race “Around the Henninger Tower”. Never, even on the most difficult days, did he get out in all those years, he always reached the goal. However, he never stood on the podium.
In his second cycling career as a sports director after the end of his active career in 2001 – initially in women’s cycling, where he was also Giro winner – Zemke caught up on this. “It means a lot to me,” he says. He won the Frankfurt race three times from the support car, so to speak. 2011, when he guided the young John Degenkolb to his first big win with then-Team HTC Highroad; 2019 and 2022 at Bora-hansgrohe with the pros Pascal Ackermann and Sam Bennett.
Degenkolb, Zemke remembers, had to be persuaded to start at all. The young professional, who had just moved to Frankfurt for love at the time, was of the opinion that, as a classic hunter, May 1st didn’t fit into his schedule. “Back then, on a training ride, I told John that he could make himself immortal in cycling here in Germany by winning in Frankfurt. Luckily he listened to me,” says Zemke and laughs. He still has fond memories of the celebration that followed in Zemke’s regular apple wine bar in Alt-Sachsenhausen. It has been a tradition for the always friendly and approachable Hessian for many years to end the eventful May Day there with friends.
On the race track through Frankfurt and the Taunus, “I know every curve,” he says. Not least from countless training rides as a professional when he lived in Niedernhausen near Wiesbaden for a few years. “That’s why I know exactly what’s in store for the racers this year. The race has become a lot harder,” says Zemke.
The organizers have included a second Feldberg crossing in the program. Whether there will be a mass sprint in front of the Alte Oper like in the last few years is now “a really exciting question”, says Zemke, who resigned his additional position as men’s national coach after four years at the end of the year. A success in the biggest German one-day race would be important for the Bora-hansgrohe team, which was shaken this spring and had little success.
“I see parallels to Eintracht Frankfurt,” says Zemke, who has been an Eintracht member since birth and is a “hardcore fan,” as he puts it. He lives in Niederrad within earshot of the stadium. Last year, Eintracht’s Giro victory and Europa League triumph were only ten days apart. A year later, Bora and Eintracht “were asking the same question: How do we get out of the crisis?
Professional sport happens to move in waves,” says Zemke, whose children, like their father, drive bikes all the time. Zemke’s son is a member of the U-19 national mountain bike squad (Cross Country), his daughter is also an ambitious mountain biker. Regardless of the outcome of the race, Zemke will return to the bar in Alt-Sachsenhausen on the evening of May 1st. “And,” as he says, “as we say every year: Now it’s only 364 days until the next edition of Eschborn-Frankfurt.”
