John Degenkolb has said that Marcel Kittel’s departure from Team Giant-Apecin affects the way the team will race, but it wont personally affect him and his race programme for the year.

“It changes the character of the team of course because we’re missing Marcel one of the best sprinters in the world. We will see how it happens,” Degenkolb said to Cyclingnews.

“For me personally it doesn’t change so much because I wasn’t doing so many races with Marcel. In the other years you never saw Marcel do Classics, he was always preparing for Scheldeprijs but at all the other Classics he was not really the leader there. I think for the Classics season it won’t really change much.”

Degenkolb led the team at the Tour de France, but the 11 time Grand Tour stage winner recorded seven top tens in the race, but the first Tour stage still eluded him.

“The Tour de France was a disappointment,” he said. “I was going into the Tour with so much pressure on my shoulders. I was in the sprints alone and maybe it would have made a difference if Marcel was there but that was the situation and I had to handle it. I never gave up and in the end at the Vuelta I won a stage and also in the World Championships I tried to win a race but it was not a good end.”

Despite not winning as many races as he has done in the past, another Grand Tour stage, along with his first Monuments at Milan-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix make this Degenkolb’s most successful year.

“It was the most successful season of my career and I’m happy to have achieved this. It was a big step for me to get a victory in a monument and then to have two, it was something very special,” said Degenkolb.

“It changes a lot, it makes me proud of course but it also puts more pressure on my shoulders. I think it won’t influence me negatively because my growing process was really steady. It was every year a little bit. It wasn’t zero to 100 in a few seconds. I think it was really healthy the growing process.”

Degenkolb agreed with the claim that with himself, World Champion Peter Sagan and Alexander Kristoff, who won Flanders, this is a new generation of Classics stars, all of whom can win bunch sprints and then do the same in 250k races too.

“I think it can be something like a change. I think Alexander, me and also Peter [Sagan], we are similar. I think that Peter is maybe more complete as a rider than we both are, for the moment. We will see how we all develop during the season but I do think that it is a new generation.”