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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A stage of the tour with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius at times like on Tuesday is just awesome. If you haven’t been given a water bottle to pour over your head for a few minutes, things start to bubble under the helmet. You have to try to keep yourself cool all the time. The ice packs are very important.
You have to imagine it like tights filled with ice cubes the size of a water balloon. You put eight to ten of these on the back of your neck throughout the day so that a little cool water always runs down your back. You should definitely drink ten to twelve bottles of isotonic drinks. And you tip at least as many water bottles over your head and legs. It then cools down quite well with the wind.
Recently, our team has a “Cooling Team” at the track. These are supervisors who hand out water and ice packs at points set by the team leadership. They also have a slush machine in their car so they can serve us frozen drinks by the bottle. Such an ice-cold drink regulates the body temperature well.
Infographic The 21 stages of the 110th Tour de France
And then Tuesday was a really, really demanding stage. With wise foresight, I sat down on the roller for the first time on this tour to warm up. It was necessary to prepare the body for the hard start immediately after the rest day. Everyone in the field knows what the hour has come when a stage promises success for breakaways and leads practically from kilometer zero into the first climb.
Paid for attacks
But I hadn’t thought that it would escalate to such an extent that even all the classification drivers would attack each other. Our captain Romain Bardet initiated a group in which Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard also rode. Then teams like Bora-hansgrohe and Ineos were under pressure because their captains were not represented there.
So the race has become ultra-fast. Unfortunately, Romain had to pay for his attacks and fell back into the group I was riding in. That was a tricky situation for our team, because a deficit can pile up so quickly, jeopardizing all goals in the overall standings.
Luckily for us, fellow French favorite David Gaudu had the same problem. So we were able to work together with his team Groupama-FDJ. Of course, I also went full throttle and at times drove full throttle in the wind. In the end it was a matter of catching up two minutes behind.
Thank god we managed to close the gap. I felt really good about it, but I was also happy when my job was done and I was able to drive to the finish line with a twelve-man group as effortlessly as possible. The particularly nice thing about the tour is that even as a driver who is left behind, you are still cheered on enormously by the many spectators along the route.
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In the end we didn’t finish that far ahead of the group of sprinters, which also included our fastest driver Sam Welsford. The sprinters were already left behind on the first climb, on a hot day with over 3,000 meters of altitude to overcome, where the roads felt not a single meter flat. In the end I was glad that we were able to pull the cart out of the mud.
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