Berlin in January and spring feels a million miles away. Low cloud suffuses the city from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden is flanked by icy stacks of sludge and the dead leaves of the Tiergarten are shrouded in a crisp white layer of snow.
Across the road from the wintry municipal park, however, there is a hint of warmer days. The Giant-Alpecin team presentation has drawn to a close in the Italian Embassy, and the boys of summer (and spring) are now earnestly outlining their ambitions for the year ahead to the waiting press.
One by one, riders quietly slip away from the melee, their duties to sponsors fulfilled, but almost three hours after the conclusion of the ceremony, John Degenkolb is still dressed in his team kit, holding court on a couch in his booming voice.
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Winner of Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix in 2015, Degenkolb received Germany’s Rider of the Year award during the presentation and has been fielding questions from an expectant home press since the lights went up, but he betrays no sign of irritation when asked to go through the process all over again for a small group of international reporters.
“A day like this is very busy and very exhausting but I think it’s also necessary. It’s just a part of the sport,” Degenkolb says of the additional demands brought about by last year’s success and by being the German star of the lone German WorldTour team.
Those victories on the Via Roma and the Roubaix velodrome were Degenkolb’s first in Monument classics, and he is aware that for the rest of his career, external expectations have been irrevocably recalibrated. As Fabian Cancellara or Tom Boonen could doubtless tell him, from now on any Spring campaign that passes without a Monument victory will, rightly or wrongly, be deemed something of a failure, but Degenkolb appears unfazed by the pressure.
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