Jan Ullrich is in a relaxed mood. Content to wander the streets of Palma in Mallorca for Cyclist’s photo shoot, he looks healthy and comes across as softly spoken and down to earth, the kind of guy you’d be happy to go for a beer with. As he sits soaking up some Mediterranean sunshine, it’s hard to see any signs of a cycling career that has witnessed triumphs, disappointments, scandals, recriminations and despair.
The young Jan
Jan Ullrich burst onto the cycling scene in 1993 when he won the Amateur World Road Race Championships in Oslo, Norway. At those same championships, the pro race was won by Lance Armstrong, and the two men would become fierce rivals at the Tour de France in the late 1990s until Armstrong’s (first) retirement in 2005. The years before and after would feature very mixed fortunes for both men.
Ullrich was born in Rostock in former East Germany in 1973 and, like so many riders before him, was inspired to take up cycling by a family member, in this case his older brother, Stefan. Their father had left when Jan was six. Aged 13, Ullrich was already considered gifted enough to join the Kinder und Jugendsportschulen – the children’s sports school in East Berlin, where they gave him a decent bike and set about turning him into a cycling superstar.
‘The support we received as athletes was very good,’ Ullrich tells Cyclist. ‘My mother wouldn’t have been able to afford a road bike for me because it was ridiculously expensive, so having one was something very special.’ Closed off from the West, Ullrich and his friends had to find their sporting heroes closer to home. ‘At that time, we were pretty much completely isolated from Western culture and its events, even in cycling. You got some information concerning the Tour de France, but it wasn’t the big cycling event in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]. Our equivalent was the Peace Race,’ he says.
That was a two-week stage race that ran each May from 1948 to 2006, predominantly in Poland, East Germany and former Czechoslovakia. ‘It was the “Tour de France of the East”, so that was where I found my first cycling idols: Olaf Ludwig [winner in 1982 and 1986] and Gustav-Adolf Schur,’ who was the first East German to win the race, in 1955, and who, like Ullrich, was Amateur World Road Race Champion, in 1958 and 1959. Later, says Ullrich, his big cycling hero was Spain’s Miguel Indurain: ‘He was the one rider I always admired.’
As things began to change after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ullrich signed a professional contract for the 1995 season with Telekom, and was quickly promoted to the German team’s Tour de France squad in 1996, aged just 22. Together with Danish team leader and eventual winner Bjarne Riis, Ullrich set about dismantling the hold his hero, Indurain, had had on the Tour since 1991.
‘No one really expected much, including me,’ remembers Ullrich of his first Tour de France. ‘At the beginning, I just rode, taking in every second of it, just trying to enjoy myself.’ But he was the revelation of the race, more than capable of helping Riis in the mountains, and still strong enough after three weeks to win the penultimate stage of the race – a 63.5km time-trial between Bordeaux and Saint-Emilion.
‘Of course, I still admired Indurain, even though he was my rival,’ Ullrich says, ‘but when I managed to beat him in that time-trial… I can’t describe how happy and proud I was. I still remember it as one of my biggest victories. I still think back to that Tour with feelings of joy. It had a huge impact on my whole career.’ Ullrich had finished second overall to his teammate Riis, and was quite rightly being touted as a future Tour winner. Indurain’s reign was over. Ullrich’s all-powerful Telekom team had relegated the Spaniard to 11th place, almost a quarter of an hour down on Riis. Indurain retired at the end of the season, aged 32. He was a five-time Tour winner, and it was time for a new generation to shine.
Rising to the top
The following year, in 1997, Ullrich was expected – and expected himself – to ride in support of Riis again, to help the Dane make it two in a row. ‘Sure, the pressure was bigger and the expectations higher, but I wasn’t the captain of my team. That was still Bjarne, which took a lot of weight off of my shoulders,’ Ullrich says. But on stage 10, a major day of climbing with a summit finish at the Andorra-Arcalis ski station, Ullrich’s class shone through, too brightly. The German was strong enough on the final climb to ride away from everyone, and he won the stage by more than a minute from Italian climber Marco Pantani and French favourite Richard Virenque. It was enough to give Ullrich the yellow jersey.
In Riis’s autobiography, Riis: Stages Of Light And Dark, he writes, ‘The team’s hierarchy had been decided, as it had been impossible to follow Jan in such form. It was a relief for him, too, as it at last spelled an end to what had seemed like endless speculation. There was no reason for me to show any bitterness when I talked to the press.
‘“Jan was the strongest,” I told them, then added, “and no, it hadn’t been planned. I simply couldn’t keep up with him. I’m pleased that he was able to show how strong he is, and that no one else could follow him. It was great to see, and now I can just be pleased that we’ve been able to keep it in the family.”’ Ullrich enjoyed full support from Riis and the Telekom ‘family’ from there on in, and, less than a fortnight later, Germany could celebrate its first (and still only) Tour winner. At the tender age of 23, it was a life-changing moment for Ullrich.
‘In the weeks following the Tour, I was on the road for most of the time and didn’t really have any time at home. It wasn’t until the beginning of the next year that I really noticed how much things had changed,’ says Ullrich. ‘And in the beginning, it was really great. However, as it is with many things, there were two sides to the story. Suddenly everyone recognised me. I couldn’t set foot outside my house without people wanting to talk to me, take pictures and everything. I’m a pretty calm and introverted person, and I like my privacy, so that was a huge change for me.’
And then came the weight of expectation, as everyone wanted more of the same: ‘The media expected me to perform, as did the people. It took me a while until I learned to handle that pressure.’ Whereas the British cycling boom came thanks to success from multiple riders – including Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Bradley Wiggins on the track, and Nicole Cooke, Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome and Wiggins on the road – back in 1997, Ullrich almost single-handedly ‘boomed’ cycling in Germany.
The press nicknamed him ‘Der Kaiser’ – ‘The Emperor’ – just like another of Germany’s other sporting heroes, footballer Franz Beckenbauer. But Ullrich would never reach such heights at the Tour again. First, Pantani showed him a clean pair of heels at the murky 1998 race, and then, from 1999 onwards, it was all about Armstrong. Pantani emerged from that 1998 Tour as a ray of hope after Virenque’s Festina squad had been thrown off the race after a member of the team’s staff, Willy Voet, had been stopped with a car boot-load of drugs, destined for the riders, three days before the start. Despite the gloom that pervaded the first week, which all but ruined its Grand Départ in Dublin, Ullrich and Pantani set about animating the Tour. However, just a year after his Tour win, and just halfway into the race, Ullrich seemed like a spent force.
On stage 15 – a filthy wet and cold day in the Alps – Pantani attacked on the Col du Galibier. Ullrich looked paralysed and spent the rest of the stage in some distress, grinding his pedals around in the vain hope that he could keep Pantani in sight. Riis, who had been left behind, rejoined Ullrich on the climb up to the finish at Les Deux Alpes, doing his best to shepherd his young teammate home. They finished almost nine minutes behind Pantani.
Hero to zero
The next day, on stage 16, Ullrich gritted his teeth – the French TV cameras showed it, literally – and set about trying to make up some of the time he’d lost. But Pantani, now in yellow, matched him pedal stroke for pedal stroke, and they arrived in Albertville together, just the two of them, where Ullrich sprinted to the stage victory. The race, however, was already over. Pantani’s almost six-minute buffer was too much, even for Ullrich.
The Tour can do that to people – what it gives one year, it takes away the next. Indurain had been superseded by Riis, who was superseded by Ullrich, and then it was Ullrich who had to give way in 1998 to Pantani, who never won the Tour again and died of a cocaine overdose in 2004. Like the Italian, Ullrich had his demons. In June 2002, while suffering from a knee injury, he tested positive in an out-of-competition test for amphetamines – claimed to have been taken recreationally. That came just a month after Ullrich had been banned from driving after crashing his Porsche in a drink-driving incident.
Having professed his horror at his own behaviour, fans and the media appeared willing to forgive him. What seemed less forgivable, perversely, was his propensity to gain weight during the off-season, only for him to arrive at the Tour each July in top condition and at fighting weight. ‘How good could he have been if only he’d been able to conduct himself more professionally?’ they cried. It was an argument levelled at him his whole career.
Having failed to defend his Tour title in 1998, when he finished second to Pantani, Ullrich finished second another three times to Armstrong between 1999 and 2005. He was in real danger of being forgotten as ‘Der Kaiser’, and becoming ‘The Eternal Second’, the French media’s nickname for Raymond Poulidor, who in fact only finished second at the Tour three times in total in the 1960s and 70s. As for the man who most often kept him in the shadow, Ullrich says of Armstrong, ‘Our relationship was pretty much non-existent. We didn’t talk much or really have any contact at all. But when we did, it was always respectful. Lance always said I was his biggest threat and I always treated my rivals equally respectfully.’ And when Armstrong retired after his seventh Tour victory in 2005, the way looked clear for Ullrich to return to winning ways.
Then Operación Puerto happened. Suddenly, the sport was plunged into as much – if not more – chaos as it had been in 1998. A Spanish doping investigation into ‘sports doctor’ Eufemiano Fuentes had cited various cycling star names, including Ullrich and the other favourite for that year’s Tour, Ivan Basso. Their teams were forced to pull them out of the race before it had even started, and while Basso eventually made a comeback after serving a two-year ban for his ‘intent to dope’ – and is still racing today with Tinkoff-Saxo – it spelled the end of the road for Ullrich. He announced his retirement in February 2007, still adamantly denying that he had ever doped.
In June 2013, five months after Armstrong’s doping confession on Oprah, Ullrich felt it was the right time to admit his doping involvement with Fuentes, having already been found guilty of doping in February 2012, when he was stripped of all results from May 2005, which included his third place at that year’s Tour de France. Armstrong had beaten Ullrich again – albeit in the ‘race’ to be first to admit that they’d doped. The stress, and possibly the guilt, in the years since his retirement led to Ullrich being diagnosed with ‘burn-out syndrome’ in 2010, and he spent the next few years trying to recover. ‘I managed to pull myself out of that difficult situation, with the help of my family. I’m proud of that,’ he says. Now he’s come out the other side, and a retroactive two-year ban (imposed in spite of his being already retired) ended in 2013. Ullrich is philosophical about the rights and wrongs of what he’s done, even if what he did, and when, remains hazy.
‘I’d certainly do some things differently,’ he admits. ‘Of course it’s easy to talk about mistakes you’ve made in the past, because, with hindsight, you can see them as mistakes. But the individual athlete didn’t play a major role back then. It was the whole system around you: the teams and the people you had contact with. It would have taken a lot to have gone against the grain, and to most likely have sacrificed your own success as a result.’ Ullrich is contrite, and remains humble, which appears to be enough to have gained him some forgiveness in Germany. Certainly no one has tried to take his 1997 Tour title away from him, just as Riis, who admitted in 2007 to having doped, has been allowed to keep his 1996 title.
‘I mean, it’s never good for the sport if you just cross out several years of victories as if they didn’t happen,’ Ullrich says of Armstrong’s seven docked Tour wins. But there is no talk of Ullrich being handed the titles for the three years he finished second to the American, which would have made the German a four-time Tour winner. Until the time comes when Ullrich says more, you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.
Looking ahead
As a result of further doping cases in German cycling, national broadcaster ARD ceased coverage of the Tour after 2011. But now, thanks to the perception that the sport has gone some way to cleaning up its act, the world’s biggest race will be back on German television in 2015. ‘Now that ARD has decided to show the Tour again, it’s great for the sport,’ Ullrich says. ‘It will be back in the public eye and hopefully lots of people will tune in again. German cycling will benefit from it, I’m 100 per cent sure.’
Currently, Germany doesn’t boast any riders who look like they could win the Tour any time soon, but instead the nation’s strength in depth of top-notch sprinters and one-day specialists – headed by Marcel Kittel and John Degenkolb – bodes well for the future. And Ullrich doesn’t rule out returning to German TV screens himself, but for the moment he knows that his relationship with German cycling fans is still a complex one, so don’t expect to see him behind a microphone when the Tour rolls out from Utrecht this year.
‘I talked to the people involved and we agreed to leave the past behind,’ Ullrich says. ‘But the directors decided to play it safe for this year and they don’t want to make any mistakes. After everything that happened, I’m still a polarising person and they don’t want to offend anyone. I get that. Maybe we can work together in the future.’
Ullrich is well aware that more time may need to pass before he is pardoned for past transgressions, but he remains hopeful that the cycling community will come to see him in a more forgiving light. ‘People say to me, “You haven’t changed much. You’ve always been yourself, during both the good times and when everything seemed to be crumbling around you.” I really hope people will remember me like that and say, “Ulle always stayed true to himself and was always down to earth.” I’d like that.’