After almost losing his index finger in the awful pre-season crash Giant-Alpecin suffered, John Degenkolb has made his return to racing at today’s Rund um den Finanzplatz-Eschborn-Frankfurt. His teammate Koen de Kort has no doubt his captain will be at his best for the Tour de France.

“He can get to that at level again. I have a lot of faith in him to come good again for the Tour de France,” de Kort told Cyclingnews. “He obviously still needs time but he’s been training hard. I speak to him frequently and he’s feeling good. Doing races is still a bit different to training so he needs his time. He’s not going to win his first race back but I’m pretty sure it wont be long until he’s back to his peak level."

De Kort spoke about the difficult start to the season his team has had as a result of the injuries sustained in the horror crash.

“It’s been a difficult start to the year, obviously missing some key riders from earlier on in the season was really hard. I think that we’ve done relatively well but obviously winning races and missing these kind of guys like John, and Barguil involved... that’s two our main riders. Then Dumoulin has had his injuries so we’ve missed three main guys for a part of the season,” de Kort told Cyclingnews.

The result: so far not a single win in 2016, something the team is very keen to remedy as soon as possible. However, the team has not put any pressure on the riders as they know what they have went through.

“We’ve let our heads drop. We’ve kept fighting and done what we do best and raced as a team. It’s not resulted in a win yet and that’s a bit difficult and not great for morale. Then again we’ve not had any real pressure from the team. I think that a lot of people realise and understand our situation.”