John Degenkolb and the Giant-Alpecin team swapped goodbye messages via Twitter recently, the final act of their separation after five years together.
The German Classics rider joined the then Argos-Shimano team in 2012 when it was just a Professional Continental set-up and he had shown signs of his potential at HTC-highroad. Together they have both developed and matured, with Degenkolb winning numerous sprints and then Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix in 2015 and the team gradually becoming more and more successful in Grand Tours with Tom Dumoulin.
That gradual cosmic shift in objectives lead to Marcel Kittel moving to Etixx-QuickStep for 2016 and now Degenkolb has opted to join Trek-Segafredo for 2017. Giant-Alpecin will become Team Sunweb on January 1 with Dumoulin, Warren Barguil, Wilco Kelderman and new signing Michael Matthews as team leaders. The team will no longer have a big-name leader for the cobbled Classics.
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Degenkolb said goodbye to his longstanding teammates at the Abu Dhabi Tour before enjoying a brief holiday. He is about to begin training for the 2017 season, with the Classics the motivation to get him through the winter. He raced for a total of 59 days in 2016 but they were squeezed into six months and came via a long comeback due to the crash and the painful consequences of being hit by a car during that terrible day in January in Spain in the company of several teammates.
Breaking up is never easy to do
As Degenkolb explained in the first part of this exclusive interview with Cyclingnews, he has worked hard to recover from his physical and mental injuries caused by the crash. Now he focused on the future. Of course breaking up with a team is hard to do, especially after spending five years, enjoying lots of success and overcoming a career-threatening accident together.
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