John Degenkolb from Oberursel has been a professional cyclist since 2011. His greatest successes were the victories at the cycling monuments Paris-Roubaix and Milan-Sanremo in 2015 and winning a stage of the tour in 2018. The 34-year-old family man is contesting his ninth Tour of France this summer.
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In the past few years I’ve hardly ever crashed in the races. Now it hit me on both days of the tour at the weekend with the difficult stages in the Alps. That was bad, but ended lightly.
I was right in the middle of the mass crash on Saturday on a wet road. I probably wouldn’t have fallen straight away myself, but the racers were lying all over the place in front of me and I couldn’t steer around them. I bruised my buttocks a bit on impact. The good thing is that it hardly bothers me while cycling. It’s also good that the race jury immediately neutralized the race. The decision was made within seconds, just as I was about to get up and look for a new position in the field. In the race, three ambulances follow us in a column. With all three on duty, none would have been available to accompany the continued race.
Unfortunately, our captain Romain Bardet also fell shortly afterwards at high speed – and had to give up the tour. That was obviously a major setback for us as a team. We had one goal in mind the whole time: to place Romain in the top ten. The morale in the team is still good, even if we haven’t had a strong result on this tour yet. Hopefully that will change now in the third week.
Infographic The 21 stages of the 110th Tour de France
During the tour, the field is driven so tightly that it can be enough if just one driver makes a mistake and triggers a domino effect. Both mass falls could not have been foreseen because they happened out of nowhere. The most important thing when drivers slide away like on Saturday is to stay calm at the moment. If you then panic or frantically try to dodge or go full on your irons, you are guaranteed to be the next to slip away. Sometimes there are still gaps to get through. Unfortunately I didn’t have any on both days. Although I took off on Sunday, I practically didn’t touch the asphalt. It was more of a rear-end collision where I ended up on other riders’ wheels.
The two stages in the Alps pushed me to my limit. Both from the more than 4000 meters of altitude difference and from the driving style. It’s and remains crazy what’s going on on this tour. The toughest bike race in the world demands everything from us racers.
That will do me good
On the rest day this Monday there was a nice opportunity to spend time with my family, which I really enjoyed. We also rode our bikes a bit and looked at the course of the time trial on Tuesday. It’s a lot heavier than it looks on the profile. Right from the start it’s two kilometers uphill, and it gets really steep at the end. A real challenge that awaits the classification drivers. I, on the other hand, can take it a little easier, which will do me good.
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