Amid the elation of his Milan-San Remo victory, John Degenkolb (Giant-Alpecin) appeared in something of a dream-like state when asked to describe his winning sprint on the Via Roma, admitting that he could scarcely recall the final two kilometres of the race. On beginning his cobbled classics campaign at E3 Harelbeke a week later, however, he was brought – rather too literally – back down to earth. Welcome to Belgium.
The German was among the fallers in the early crash that ended Fabian Cancellara’s spring prematurely and he was still feeling the effects of the incident when he lined out at the windswept Gent-Wevelgem two days later. Speaking to Cyclingnews as he travelled from his home in Frankfurt back to Belgium on Wednesday evening, Degenkolb was confident that his injuries will not affect him this weekend at the Tour of Flanders.
“I’m not perfect yet but I still have some more days to get better. My leg and my hip and my knee are still sore, so it’s not really comfortable but I’ll be alright,” Degenkolb said. “I haven’t done a big training ride yet. I did two hours on Tuesday, three hours on Wednesday, and then I’ll do a longer ride on Thursday.”
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If Degenkolb can largely shrug off his Harelbeke crash, he was altogether more concerned by events at Gent-Wevelgem on Sunday, where high winds wreaked havoc and several riders were simply blown off the road by the gusts. He lined up in Deinze with designs on landing a second successive Gent-Wevelgem win, but quickly revised his ambitions to staying in one piece. The race, he maintains, should simply never have taken place.
“It was really on the limit or over the limit. In other sports, you consider the weather conditions and then you make a decision about whether it’s a calculated risk to make a competition or is it just stupid,” Degenkolb said. “And in my opinion, on Sunday it was just stupid.
“We are professional cyclists and we are all crazy of course, but people should not forget that we are also normal people and we have family at home. I was fighting to stay on the bike, I wasn’t thinking about fighting to be in a good position. I was just busy trying to stay alive.”
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