Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was

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The 1997 Tour win is symbolic for a country trying to reunite, easterners could see one of their own winning, westerners can celebrate their gain as the first – and only – German Tour winner, it was an act of unification itself. Yet this put him on a pedestal and the move from cheer to adulation, and the risks this brings are well set out in this book. Things fall apart slowly.

The only disappointment is I was left empty by the fact that Jan declined to be interviewed, which really just mirrors the disappointment I repeatedly felt when discovering the number of times Jan could have chosen a different path, and the emptiness I feel that he seems to still be turning the cranks with a dropped chain.

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Lance, though, feels something really big for Jan too. Talking to Friebe, he recounts how Ullrich came to the Team Discovery victory party in Paris at the end of the 2005 Tour, an unheard-of way for the vanquished to behold the victor. As he’s saying this, Armstrong breaks down and cries, sobbing, apparently, going deep into his own connectedness to his rival, an incomprehensible break from his alpha character. Friebe is there for this raw moment about the link between two people, both elite cycling champions, both deeply wounded in some way — by fame? by shame? by absent, unloving fathers? — and yeah, the resulting on-bike psychology could not be more different. Lance channeled his pain into becoming an unstoppable force, while Jan’s pain turned him into a jumble of contradictions and self-sabotaging behavior. But in the aftermath they discover how alike they are after all. If they end up later in life sharing an apartment together in Paris, overlooking the Champs-Élysées and just going through their daily routines, knowing that they share a bond nobody else can understand... I’m not sure that’s off the table. But there he was, in the cultural maelstrom of reunification the forward face of the new nation. Even the most confident, self-assured Easterner would have struggled to walk straight onto that stage, at that time, and defy all the stereotypes, belittling, and dehumanizing that came with the politics of that era. Ullrich was nowhere near such a person. Photo by Thomas Starke/Bongarts/Getty Images

I’m not saying the riders don’t deserve their share of the blame, but I will say this — they got way too much of the shame. The teams and the UCI did a lot to create the situation, but apart from Willy Voet and a few doctors, it’s the riders who got trotted out as the bad guys and who bear the shame of it all. Now, to be clear, you don’t have to feel bad for them if you don’t want. I’m just saying, shame is a factor for the Puerto guys. This leads to another topic... One touching aspect of the book is how Friebe ultimately ends up on a quest — which he describes in greater detail on The Cycling Podcast’s June 5, 2022 edition. His quest starts to mirror the subject he is covering, as Friebe talks about struggling with anxiety over the book and its ultrasensitive subject. But there is another interesting, endearing element I don’t believe he has mentioned: how this book and its creation resembles Richard Moore’s In Search of Robert Millar, the breakthrough book that put Friebe’s dear friend and eventual podcast partner into the mainstream of cycling media. If you want I could also name several doped ex-athletes in cycling and beyond who get moral and financial support today… without having ever had any relation with DDR, imagine that. From the outset Friebe makes clear he’s not out to condemn or to judge Ullrich, his search more for the truth and maybe even some reconciliation, to understand why in Germany today Ullrich is still viewed with some sympathy or else pity, or how so many promising things went so horribly wrong.Friebe’s own ghost-written Cavendish autobiographies. There the achievement was to give an authentic voice - sometimes it really sounded like a Cav interview recounting a sprint finish. Here it’s more complex: a revealing and sympathetic portrait of a man who does not articulate well, and did not speak to the author at all.

The pair became fierce rivals on the road despite sharing similar upbringings. One in Texas, and another a child from behind the Iron Curtain. The pair was almost mystically attached at the hip as they fought for dominance at the top of world cycling in the most controversial era of Tour de France history. What it is: A proper biography, and a quest to really rediscover the enigmatic former Tour de France winner, Jan UllrichCould it have been reversed in Ullrich’s favour, if the same ‘assistance’ was available?, this book appears to suggest it was a possibility. That would be telling in other ways — Armstrong later drew out all the worse insecurities in Ullrich thanks to his seven successive Tour wins; Ullrich never won another Tour after 1997 but made the podium seven times too, finishing runner-up five times, third in 2005, and might have won his debut Tour in 1996 if he wasn’t riding for team leader Bjarne Riis. Definitive performance The anxiety can be inherited or caused by damaging experiences,... not my profession, so I’ll just say that there is ample evidence that he could not cope with the overwhelming attention and pressure of being who he was, especially during the Tour. [And in a few other races, although he often thrived in big moments outside the Tour. He’d have made a spectacular one-day racer, with no next day to get stressed about.] He tried to retire several times, including early in 2001, and is described by Friebe’s witnesses as seeming relieved on the occasions where he had to skip the Tour (‘99 and ‘02, with knee injuries). Some people are not built for stardom, full stop. But with Ullrich, it is almost certainly more complicated than that. Another anecdote, from Peter Sager, one of Ullrich’s earliest sports coaches, talked about how the DDR might have had this reputation for the doping regime, but mostly what it did was train athletes from an early age using sophisticated sports science. While his western counterparts were poorly coached if they were coached at all, Ullrich and his friends were being organized into programs that had them racing constantly — a huge advantage over folks in the west. On balance, Ullrich was better coached and more well-rounded from his academy days than his western counterparts — hardly some monstrous robot at all.