11
‘Doping, in my opinion, is when someone gets caught’
—Jan Ullrich
In the first months of 1999, Lance Armstrong did not figure among Jan Ullrich’s main preoccupations, for all that the American’s performances at the Vuelta the previous autumn had placed him among his likely antagonists for the Tour.
It was the previous year’s races and their aftermath that were mainly worrying Telekom and Ullrich, as the aftershocks of the Festina scandal continued to rattle the cycling world. Telekom’s palpable smugness at having ducked the most serious scrutiny, those ‘Well done, clean performance, boys!’ adverts in the German press, had not won them many friends. The Swiss rider Rolf Järmann summed up the mood in the peloton thus: ‘At the moment, everyone’s hoping that Telekom doesn’t win the Tour. No one’s demanding some sort of confession, but they shouldn’t be making out they’re the big, clean, paragons of virtue.’
If statements like this suggested cycling’s old law of silence had fractured, the deference, some would say complicity, of a media totally reliant on access also showed some cracks. German coverage of the scandal continued to be particularly strident. When, in December 1998, Richard Virenque was confronted with laboratory proof that he had in fact been doping just like his Festina teammates, Germany’s most stiff-lipped daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, greeted the news with the headline: ‘The liar Richard Virenque retires’.
As Telekom gathered for their annual post-Christmas training camp in Mallorca in January, bad news struck closer to home. A Danish TV documentary had laid out compelling reasons to believe that the Telekom team member who the previous July had acted as an unofficial riders’ spokesman, Bjarne Riis, was himself an inveterate user of doping substances. One of the programme-makers, Niels Christian Jung, had worked as a soigneur at the 1995 Tour of Denmark and collected used syringes left in the hotel rooms of several teams, including Riis’s – Gewiss-Ballan. Jung kept the needles and sent them off for analysis after the 1998 Tour. Some contained traces of EPO. There was nothing to indicate that Riis had been among the recipients of the drugs, but Jung’s colleague, Olav Saning, a Danish journalist of the year, had also gained access to Riis’s medical data from the 1995 Tour. His haematocrit on the rest-day had been 56.3 – a figure that could only be indicative either of EPO use or serious illness, Denmark’s leading EPO expert told the programme.
Long-serving Telekom riders like Erik Zabel remembered years when there would be exactly one picture taken at their annual Mallorca training camp: the team photo snapped by a member of staff. The media presence had naturally swelled since Riis’s Tour win in 1996 and Ullrich’s in 1997, but now, partly as a result of the revelations from Denmark, the team hotel in Palma was besieged. In a press conference, Riis said that he was ‘sick of being a toy for the media to play with’ and batted away their calls for him to publish his blood values. Meanwhile, Ullrich moaned that he was fed up of being stopped by reporters on his way out of the team dining room, of being asked whether he had time for ‘one question, just one question’, that was invariably about doping. Ullrich told one journalist he could understand why Riis wouldn’t want to release his blood values: his rivals might discover his ‘secrets’, ingenuous hacks like the one Ullrich now revealed – that he put on extra kilos over the winter to make his training harder. Ullrich also offered that the Festina riders may have been unwittingly doped. The 235 ampoules of EPO, 120 amphetamine capsules, 60 doses of testosterone and 82 vials of human growth hormone found in their soigneur Willy Voet’s car might have been meant for someone else, perhaps bodybuilders, he suggested. Never mind that Voet had been driving to the Tour de France. Or that Ullrich had spelled out a troubling credo in another interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine two years earlier: ‘Doping, in my opinion, is when someone gets caught.’
The relative serenity of previous years’ camps had been replaced by an all-encompassing paranoia. Questioned about his race programme, Ullrich said that he probably wouldn’t race in France before the Tour in case an aspirin got him arrested and put in jail. If he felt unduly scrutinized, it wasn’t helped by the fact that, having scrupulously watched his weight at training camps in Lanzarote in November and California in December, he had lapsed into familiar patterns after Christmas. In Mallorca, it was hard to tell where his cheeks ended and the double-chin spilling over his jersey collar began. The annual battle with the bulge suffered a further setback when he spent two days at the camp in bed recovering from a cold. This would be followed by more illness at the start of February, plus a wisdom tooth extraction.
Rudy Pevenage said later that the tone for a wretched start to the year had been set in Mallorca when, on the traditional walk with visiting wives and girlfriends, Jan’s partner, Gaby, stumbled and broke her foot.
For one rider in the Balearics, a troubling sense of déjà vu was hard to reconcile with the fact he had officially been with Telekom for only a couple of weeks.
The team had signed Jörg Jaksche for 300,000 deutsche marks a year on the back of the sinewy twenty-two-year-old Bavarian’s impressive debut at the Tour de France in 1998. Many observers had raised eyebrows two years earlier when Jaksche, one of Germany’s top young talents, turned professional in a team from Italy sponsored by the electrical goods manufacturer Polti. But it was, in at least one respect, an inspired choice: while other teams at the 1998 Tour de France scrambled to dispense with their drugs, Jaksche and his teammates found that the drum of a Polti vacuum cleaner used to clean their team vehicles was the perfect hiding place for vials of EPO.
Clean and naive when he arrived at Polti, Jaksche was quickly introduced to the grubby realities of cycling at the top level in the late nineties. When he rode well at Paris–Nice in the spring of his first season, Jaksche says his Italian team manager asked him what drugs he was taking. When he responded with a blank look, the boss gleefully announced that he was going to tear up Jaksche’s two-year contract and offer him one for five instead. Soon, Jaksche was ‘losing his virginity’ with a first dose of EPO before the 1997 Tour of Switzerland. An introduction to human growth hormone and testosterone followed soon thereafter. In fleeting moments of anxiety, Jaksche found comfort in the knowledge that bodybuilders took doses of growth hormone twenty times bigger. It was also about speculating to accumulate: at Polti the ‘bonus’ for a top-twenty finish was not having to pick up the tab for one’s own medicine.
Polti’s erstwhile manager, Gianluigi Stanga, has called the allegation that he in any way encouraged, oversaw or abetted Jaksche’s doping ‘absurd’. Nonetheless, at his first training camp for Polti, Jaksche says he had been taken aside to discuss legal vitamin injections, a gateway that he says ultimately led to him taking banned substances. Now, in Mallorca, Walter Godefroot summoned his class of 1999 to a conference room in the team hotel and appeared to Jaksche to do a similar dance around a subject that they all knew was unavoidable. Godefroot’s official line was that, after what had happened at the previous year’s Tour, no banned drugs would be taken, transported or tolerated. The message seemed clear – and yet Jaksche detected an underlying ambiguity exacerbated by its delivery. ‘Walter spoke in his hilarious Flemish-German hybrid. We’d end up turning to Rudy Pevenage and being like, “Rudy, can you please tell us what the fuck he’s trying to say?” Then Rudy, who spoke a few languages, would translate.’
Godefroot’s German, it should be noted, can’t be faulted in 2015 when, reacting to Jaksche’s recollection of events, he sniffs that Jaksche ‘was known in the team as “Der Mülleimer – the Garbage Can”. Why? He took everything.’
Regardless, Jaksche says, the months immediately following the Festina scandal had demonstrated that the prevailing lingua franca of professional cycling was one which rarely married actions with words. ‘In the 1998 Vuelta I heard that absolutely nothing had changed. In Spain, you could line up ten syringes on your windscreen and the Guardia Civil wouldn’t stop you. There was one well-known Spanish rider whose private courier for his drugs was one of the police motorbike escorts for the race.’
Jaksche meets me in April 2015 in a crowded, Italian-themed bar nestled just behind Munich’s town hall. Now thirty-six, retired and still single, he lives over the border in Austria and is a habitué of the Bavarian capital, though not particularly at home among the mink coat and Boss slacks brigade reputed to reign here. ‘You meet a girl here and the first thing she wants to know is what car you drive. And if it isn’t a Mercedes or a Porsche . . .’ he’ll muse later.
Jaksche didn’t immediately feel comfortable at Telekom in 1999 either. The educated son of well-to-do doctors, he suspected that he was simply too school for cool – or at least too different from the other riders. ‘When I came onto the team, from the first training camp the older guys mocked me because I was a potential threat for a place in the Tour team, but also sometimes because I came from a richer family. Some of the guys were stopping school at fourteen or fifteen and then just thinking about becoming a pro. It was a macho environment. There were times when you would be rooming with someone and he would just fart next to you, or burp next to you. For them it was totally normal.’
It was curious, though, how the usually boorish could become models of discretion regarding one topic in particular. After the warnings from Godefroot – which Jaksche had decided not to take at face value – he says that one day in Mallorca Pevenage quietly asked him what ‘other things’ besides training they had done at Polti. When Jaksche replied that he had taken EPO and human growth hormone, he says Pevenage casually instructed him to ‘talk to the team doctors’. This at least is Jaksche’s version of a conversation that Pevenage says never took place. Also according to Jaksche, the team doctor, Lothar Heinrich, later informed him that he could supply Jaksche with ‘EPO’ or ‘E’, as they referred to it. Over the next two years, on multiple occasions, Heinrich would use a post or courier service to send doping products from Freiburg to the train station in Ansbach in Bavaria, close to Jaksche’s home. Jaksche simply had to supply a code to collect his package.
Jaksche remembers two main sources of teeth-gnashing among the Telekom management at that Mallorca camp – one, the allegations against Riis and, two, Ullrich’s weight. The team had recruited a nutritionist for the 1999 season, nominally to help the whole team but with the primary brief of keeping Ullrich in check. But Jaksche says that the arrangement shed more light on the Telekom leader’s personality than it did centimetres from his waistline. ‘This lady came and gave everyone a set of scales and you had to weigh every meal and write down what it was before you ate. We were supposed to do this for seven days because she wanted to observe our habits. Well, on the first day Jan was very precise: he weighed and wrote everything down. Then on the second day he didn’t write anything. We asked why. “Ah, because every day I’ll eat the same thing,” he said. And that was Jan. That explains a lot.
‘Lance was always looking for the right people to have around him,’ Jaksche continues. ‘He wanted to have people around him who, in certain things, were much better informed than him. Jan just didn’t want any stress. He always wanted a Walter Godefroot or a Rudy Pevenage, because Rudy was like a father, whereas Lance didn’t care about that. He wanted the investment banker, the best doctor. He was always hungry for information. Jan was also curious . . . about ice cream. Red wine and ice cream. I saw him eating two litres of ice cream in under an hour at that training camp in Mallorca.’
It was therefore no surprise that the pattern of the previous spring repeated itself when Ullrich started racing. He grovelled through two stages of the Challenge Mallorca and three out of four at the GP Telecom de Portugal before pulling out of the Vuelta Valenciana, the Vuelta a Murcia and Milan–Sanremo. He then abandoned the Setmana Catalana after four days while lying second-to-last on general classification, fifty-seven minutes behind the race leader.
Publicly, Ullrich sounded sanguine about his second consecutive winter of discontent. He told Hartmut Scherzer of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that ‘no one cares if I am fifteenth or one hundredth in the Vuelta a Aragon in April.’ To believe, though, that these were the debonair musings of a man at peace with himself and his craft would have been naive. In March, Telekom were rocked again when an Italian judge summoned Riis to explain some of the evidence presented on Danish TV two months earlier. Meanwhile, a French former rider and doper turned whistle-blowing author, Erwann Menthéour, accused Ullrich of having diluted his blood to pass a UCI health check on the morning of the stage to Les Deux Alpes that had cost him the 1998 Tour. This, Menthéour told a major French newspaper, would explain why Ullrich’s face had looked so unnaturally swollen – and maybe why he’d performed so poorly.
Who knows which of these factors, if any, pushed Jan Ullrich beyond some kind of coping threshold. Rudy Pevenage thinks that he was at home in Geraardsbergen in Belgium watching a cyclo-cross race on TV when Ullrich called him with an announcement. That would place it before the end of February. In Ullrich’s own autobiography he refers to a ‘Sunday in April’.
What Pevenage does remember for sure is what Ullrich said.
‘Rudy, it’s Jan. I’m giving up. Retiring.’
If the question of how to coax the best out of Jan Ullrich had challenged and sometimes befuddled the Telekom bosses since he turned professional in 1995, now came the most critical test of their asset management to date. Ullrich would finally soon change his mind and carry on racing – but the wobble revealed much about the insecurities that would continue to dog him. It could also be argued that Ullrich would never have reached this existential impasse had his minders protected and learned how to nurture him sooner – and better.
Ullrich certainly knew by now that pity parties were not Walter Godefroot’s style. When I ask Godefroot about Ullrich’s crisis of motivation in 1999, his response is wholly, witheringly in character. ‘Jan wanted to stop several times. I just said, OK, if he doesn’t want to do it any more, don’t do it. I wasn’t going to earn any less money. Maybe Telekom would have pulled out. That’s possible. But I didn’t owe my livelihood to Jan. I owed it to the success of the team, to everyone’s work, the whole structure. I always say – it sounds extreme – but the masseurs and mechanics are more important than the rider. When someone offers a rider 1,000 euros more, off he goes, whereas I’d been working with some of the other staff for twenty, twenty-five years.’
Unlike him, Godefroot tells me, Pevenage, Becker and even Telekom Head of Communications Jürgen Kindervater were ‘Jan Ullrich fans’. Brian Holm goes even further: ‘Ullrich was also Pevenage’s son. I think Rudy fell in love with him a bit.’
But Pevenage’s devotion didn’t necessarily make him any more qualified or able to lift Ullrich either. Away from races, he would often call Ullrich’s number and the phone would ring out. Pevenage sometimes noticed how Ullrich’s moods seemed to mirror the weather and wondered whether he didn’t suffer from seasonal affective disorder, SAD, or clinical depression. It was also hard to know whether the eating and sometimes drinking were symptoms or causes of the same malaise. With so many diverging opinions about what was needed, set against Ullrich’s insistence that he knew best, a crossfire of confusion was frequently the result.
After the previous season’s debacle, it was perhaps also understandable that Godefroot et al initially defaulted to a disciplinarian, controlling approach. Within days of his phone call to Pevenage, Ullrich sat in an emergency meeting with Godefroot, Pevenage and Wolfgang Strohband agreeing that, yes, he would carry on riding – and that he would stick to a more rigid regimen than in previous years. Ullrich outlined the strategy in his 2004 autobiography: ‘We came up with the idea of the “babysitter system”, a round-the-clock system of care, control and motivation, involving my directeurs sportifs, doctors, manager, PR men and soigneurs. It was all absolutely perfect . . . but its success or failure would depend entirely on me.’13
The featherbedding may have offended Godefroot’s hard-nosed instincts, but he recognized that it was Telekom’s best shot at saving Ullrich. Freedom, he had decided, posed a bigger problem than discipline to someone who had grown up behind the Berlin Wall. As he tells me, ‘Ullrich had learned in the DDR that the boss was the boss, that an order was an order.’
As far as Godefroot and many others were concerned, one man, Peter Becker, embodied what Ullrich had brought with him from the East – everything that he had learned, the dogmas that had encoded themselves into his DNA and all that was hopelessly, risibly outdated behind Germany’s great divide. In a nation where four fifths of children were in all-day nurseries and being weaned on the precepts of the ‘socialist personality’ by their first birthday, it was true to say that pedagogy carried enormous influence – but a cliché to assume that every teacher or coach blindly, unthinkingly preached an identical doctrine. As detailed in Chapter 3, throughout his career Becker had struggled to reconcile the directives handed down by his superiors, steeped in their one-size-fits-all ideology, with what he observed in the gym and the velodrome. At SV Dynamo he had developed a habit of writing down two sets of figures in his training logs – one real that he kept to himself and one doctored to hit the targets and quotas ordained by his Sektionleitung. As also alluded to earlier, he was even banished to SV Dynamo’s boxing division for four years in the early 1970s after offering uninvited, unappreciated criticism of club officials in an appraisal. Becker maintains that, by and large, he based his method on ‘feel’. ‘It was all so dogmatic,’ he says. ‘And these buzzwords they always used – “Socialistic”, “The Collective”, “Knowledge Sharing”. There were so many contradictions in it all. Why did they have to make their and our lives so difficult?’
He was not, then, the Lenin-worshipping stooge that Godefroot and others perhaps imagined – and he also knew Ullrich the athlete better than anyone. Nonetheless, even he had been oblivious to some of the forces dragging Ullrich down.
‘I was down in Merdingen with him one day and he told me he had something to tell me. So he tells me he’s quitting, ending his career. He tells me he has so many problems, so many issues. I say, OK, we’ll do the 180 kilometres we planned for today, otherwise we’ll be behind our schedule. Then, I say, you can have a shower, come and find me in my hotel and we’ll talk it all out, get to the bottom of exactly what it is that’s bothering you. We pulled his bike out, went training as normal and talked everything through in the afternoon. And there he told me a few things that really shocked me. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. He told me none of it could leave the room. He ultimately took my advice and carried on racing. But who’s to say that these issues didn’t also prevent him from putting in the work he needed to put in on a more regular basis?
‘It had nothing to do with the team,’ Becker stresses. ‘These were private problems. It also had nothing to do with his girlfriend. But they were real, deep problems, and what he told me brought tears of rage to my eyes. Unbelievable. That was an example where I say that the lad had a personality that just wasn’t fully mature yet, that couldn’t stand back from a situation, take decisions, lead himself in the right direction.’
In a six-hour interview over two days at his house in Berlin, Becker will frequently criticize Ullrich and lament a partial breakdown in their relationship. Regrets and even recriminations still gnaw at him – though not at his loyalty.
‘I won’t say what the problems were,’ he says again, finally. ‘It was a promise that I’ll take to my grave.’
Whatever precisely was troubling Jan Ullrich in those early months of 1999, Peter Becker also knew that there were broader issues that possibly went ignored or were misunderstood. Common preconceptions about how life had been for East German’s pre-reunification were accompanied, ten years after its demolition, by similar platitudes about how Ossis now felt and what they needed to thrive in the West. But as the author Mark Scheppert, who meditated on the limbo of ‘Generation Jan Ullrich’, wrote, those born in the late 1960s and 1970s were in truth as different from their parents as their parents had been from their contemporaries in the East. ‘We were neither East nor West, meat nor fish,’ Scheppert says.
Ullrich’s fellow Ossi and roommate at Telekom, Jens Heppner, had wrestled with the same contradictions in a nowhere zone between different generations, beyond a new line bifurcating old fantasies about a promised land and a bracing reality. Scheppert’s assertion that ‘The Brandenburg Gate wasn’t a door to paradise’ rang equally true for Heppner. Having retired in 2002, East Germany’s last ever road race champion once owned two cheese shops in Aachen, but nowadays runs an altitude fitness centre in the basement of his house in Kelmis, on the other side of the German–Belgian border. On a wet morning late in 2015, we sit in his dining room overlooking the dank fields of eastern Wallonia, contemplating the fundamental misconceptions that had given birth to the ‘babysitter system’ and, equally, before that, to Wessis’ ideas about their estranged cousins on the other side of the river Elbe.
‘When Jan called Rudy and told him he wanted to give up, I can remember that at that point he was really heavy and he had no more motivation, partly because of the pressure he was being put under, I think,’ Heppner says. ‘Walter wanted me to go and stay at his house, but I couldn’t watch him twenty-four hours a day. It got so bad that the soigneurs started sneaking into our room to check whether he had cakes or gummy bears in his suitcase. He didn’t take that well at all. He railed against it, said he was a free man, that he should be left alone, left to live his life. Maybe there were some echoes of the DDR as well – he felt like he was back there, where everything was a duty and an obligation. I also had that at first, after the Wende. In the East everything you did seemed like an obligation, then the Wende came and a directeur sportif was still coming and telling you to do certain things. That was hard for us to get our heads around. We’d been sold this idea of a free society. You still knew that you were responsible for your own future, that if you didn’t work you would lose your job, but that idea of obligation still jarred. I know that Jan hadn’t spent as long in the system as me, but that legacy and that mentality shift also played its part with him, I think.’
Some of Ullrich’s lack of discipline and self-leadership, Heppner nevertheless concedes, may have had more to do with nature than nurture.
‘Whenever he wasn’t allowed to do something, it became a problem,’ Heppner says. ‘Any obligation – be it to train, to win, to lose weight. He’d go home, shut himself away and everyone could go whistle. He wanted to be left alone. I always used to say he needed a longer leash – that you couldn’t be prescriptive with him. Or he needed to be talked into things in a different way. Ideally, Jan would have been able to communicate to Walter what worked best for him, but Walter was also a businessman and he was under pressure from Telekom, who had paid a lot of money and wanted bang for their buck. Also, from Walter’s point of view, if a guy says that he’s spending his days eating chocolate but he’ll stop as long as you don’t nag him, how do you take that leap of faith?’
If Walter Godefroot, Rudy Pevenage et al believed that one meeting of several minds was all it had taken to give Jan Ullrich’s career a hard reset in April 1999, early signs of an upturn in his performances were hard to discern.
The Amstel Gold Race, the Rund um den Henninger Turm and the Rund um Köln all came and went without great encouragement. At the Bayern Rundfahrt in May, Ullrich did rather better, finishing fourteenth on the final general classification and playing a key role in teammate Rolf Aldag’s overall victory. The Deutschland Tour was to set out from Berlin the following week. Ullrich declared that his goal was at least one stage win.
His race ended up lasting two and a half days. At the Berlin team presentation, Telekom’s riders had walked on stage to the theme music of the hit German detective series Der Kommissar, The Police Inspector – but 30 kilometres from the end of stage three in Bielefeld, Ullrich sat on the tarmac, bloodied and dazed, looking like a victim of grievous bodily harm. A touch of wheels with another Telekom rider, Udo Bölts, had sent him sprawling, head first and without a helmet to protect him. Lothar Heinrich, the Telekom doctor, said that he had been fortunate to escape with just some cuts and mild discomfort in his right knee.
Ullrich returned to the Black Forest hopeful that this latest setback was a minor one. Meanwhile, a reminder of the long, still haunting shadow cast by the previous summer’s Festina scandal arrived from Italy in the first week of June, as Marco Pantani was sensationally kicked out of the Giro d’Italia thirty-six hours before what looked like a certain victory. Pantani had failed a blood test, strongly indicating that his feats in the Alps and Dolomites had been fuelled by EPO. In Italy, where Pantani’s Giro–Tour double in 1998 had turned an already popular cyclist into a national icon, the news caused a seismic shock.
The same weekend, three investigative journalists working for Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, were doing final checks and tweaking the last proofs of a story that had been in the works since the Festina scandal the previous summer. It would finally go to press on 14 June, the eve of the Tour of Switzerland. ‘Die Werte Spielen Verrückt’ – ‘The Values Are Playing Tricks’ – was the title. The text, spread over several pages, was devastating for Telekom and Ullrich.
Drawing on information from multiple sources and ‘team insiders’, the authors laid out persuasive evidence for a systematic doping programme at Telekom. A shuddering first line set the tone: ‘In the doping-plagued world sport of professional cycling, Team Deutsche Telekom presents itself as an oasis of clean sport, but now the facade is crumbling.’ There followed details of a doping programme on a par with Festina’s, described to Der Spiegel by ‘former team members’: injections of EPO, or ‘Vitamin E’ as it was internally known, that had begun in 1994 and since become de rigueur; copious use of human growth hormone, or ‘Vitamin G’; a cocktail of other drugs – nineteen in total – administered according to a monthly timetable reproduced in the article; a system designed and funded by the team management but executed by the soigneurs with nicknames like ‘Dr Schiwago’ and decades-long experience as syringe-wielding factotums; well-practised protocols for disposing of used needles and diluting riders’ blood to avoid the fate just suffered by Pantani.
Far from being spared the guilt by association, Ullrich was the target of specific allegations. In August 1997, Der Spiegel claimed, Ullrich’s unusually high haematocrit on the day before the Luk–Bühl Cup one-day race in southern Germany had sent Walter Godefroot into a panic. ‘Jan’s values are going crazy,’ were supposedly Godefroot’s exact words, giving Der Spiegel their headline. Ullrich was immediately booked into a hotel away from the rest of the Telekom team, just in case the UCI testers or ‘vampires’ came calling. Telekom’s official excuse, if required, would be that Ullrich had been delayed by an autograph-signing session after a criterium race in Aachen. Thus they could forego the emergency measures that Ullrich and other riders had used in the past, which included lying with ones feet in the air, against a wall, for fifteen minutes. On more than one occasion, Ullrich had allegedly dropped off to sleep while performing the manoeuvre, forcing his roommate to duck as he keeled over.
Jaksche says that Walter Godefroot now broke one of his golden rules: he directly addressed the issue of doping with his riders. Specifically, according to Jaksche, Godefroot told him to stop whatever he was doing, whatever he was using, and that they couldn’t take any risks whatsoever at the Tour de France starting in just a few weeks. Jaksche maintains that he obeyed the command – but that others at Telekom did not.
The journalists behind the scoop were enduring a few sleepless nights of their own – and not only because Ullrich’s manager, Wolfgang Strohband, had vowed to sue Der Spiegel. One of two main sources for the story, Dieter Quarz, had worked for five years in Cologne’s world-famous anti-doping laboratory while at the same time coaching and dispensing his knowledge of drugs and testing to under-23 racers, effectively a gamekeeper moonlighting as poacher. When one of his clients, Dirk Müller, scored a contract with Telekom for the 1998 season, Quarz was allowed to attend the team’s pre-season training camp in Mallorca – and it was there that he had garnered much of the information that had now appeared in Der Spiegel. Not only was Quarz not exactly the ‘team insider’ described in the magazine, he had also purportedly asked for several changes to the story’s first draft – and Der Spiegel had not made them. Even worse, the day after the story’s publication, Quarz heard a knock at the front door and found police with search warrants waiting outside. The original matchmaker between Quarz and Der Spiegel, and a man who over the next few years would become Telekom’s nemesis, the microbiologist Werner Franke, had tipped off Düsseldorf’s public prosecution service about Quarz’s links to doping.
The credibility of Der Spiegel’s exposé was in jeopardy, and Quarz soon completely distanced himself from the allegations. Meanwhile, Ullrich had retained a libel lawyer who had fought and won cases for, among others, Claudia Schiffer and Princess Caroline of Monaco. There could only be one outcome, one winner of the case finally filed in September. Der Spiegel would finally have to print a long apology and a statement under oath from Ullrich that he had never taken banned substances and ‘particularly not EPO’. They also undertook not to accuse Jan Ullrich or Telekom for the next fourteen years. This despite the fact that, independently of the legal case, the authors of ‘Die Werte Spielen Verrückt’ had travelled to Belgium in September 1999 and met with the former Telekom masseur Jef D’Hont, who gave them even more damning material than had appeared in the first article. D’Hont, though, would finally go cold on Der Spiegel’s offer of a book deal, coincidentally – or not – around the time Telekom took on his son as a soigneur.
The Telekom team itself had also filed a lawsuit against Der Spiegel. This led to the magazine’s publisher finally settling out of court. Perhaps even more damagingly, three years after inviting a group of Der Spiegel journalists on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris to see Ullrich win the 1997 Tour, Telekom cut 1.3 million euros from their expenditure on advertising in Der Spiegel and sister publications for the year 2000, although claimed this had nothing to do with editorial direction.
Going forward, rather than incentivizing other media outlets to look more closely at Telekom, the whole saga did the opposite. Meanwhile, Telekom could continue a charm offensive that had begun in 1998 after the Festina scandal. In January, one of the team’s best friends in the highest of places, the German defence minister Rudolf Scharping, had been a guest at the team’s training camp in Mallorca at exactly the time when Danish television was accusing Bjarne Riis. Scharping told the press at the time that Telekom was the victim of some form of media vendetta. Within hours, the head of Telekom’s medical team, Joseph Keul, was emailing Scharping to invite him for a guided tour and full suite of health checks at the Freiburg University Clinic.
Three days after Der Spiegel had tried to take an axe to the team’s reputation, Jan Ullrich pulled to the side of the road and climbed off his bike close to the Areuse Gorge, a majestic canyon criss-crossed by ancient stone bridges near Neuchâtel. Stage two of the Tour of Switzerland was just 70 kilometres old and they had been painful ones for Ullrich. The right knee that he had bumped in his crash in the Deutschland Tour still throbbed; the bigger the gear he tried to push, the worse his discomfort. ‘If it doesn’t go away in the next few days and I can’t train then we’ll have to see about the Tour de France,’ he told journalists.
By the weekend, after scans, he and Telekom had their answer – Ullrich had damaged the meniscus in his right knee. Riding the Tour was out of the question. As it was for Bjarne Riis. The Dane had crashed on the ride to a stage start in Switzerland, prolonging Telekom’s wretched run.
As much as he sounded beleaguered, privately, Ullrich may have felt a lapping wave of relief. The Der Spiegel article had awoken old fears and, above all, the same compulsion to escape that had taken hold during the spring. He intimated to Gaby that perhaps his enforced lay-off should melt into an early retirement. She listened sympathetically – but also asked how else he intended to spend the rest of his life. This, Ullrich couldn’t answer.
The next morning, regional German newspapers covered the Ullrich story alongside a half-page advertisement taken out by Telekom, crowing ‘WE STAND BY OUR TEAM!’ Referring to ‘an article in a magazine that tried to connect our team to doping’, the missive went on to request that members of the German public ‘do not jump to conclusions about a single rider or the team’.
As they tried to control the narrative off the road, on it, the team’s Tour was saved by the Italian climber Giuseppe Guerini’s stage win at Alpe d’Huez and Erik Zabel’s fourth consecutive green jersey. In the race for yellow, in Ullrich and Pantani’s absence, and with the race organizers heralding a ‘Tour of Renewal’ after the bloodbath of the previous year, Lance Armstrong obliged with what he called a ‘miracle’ and others hailed as the greatest sports story ever told – but was to some minds, already, a shameless exercise in science fiction, a grim fairy tale.
Ullrich observed Armstrong’s ‘comeback of the century’ from afar – and with a certain emotional distance. He enjoyed holidays in Austria with Tobias Steinhauser, a journeyman pro from Bavaria, then stayed for a few days with Bjarne Riis in Tuscany. Riis said he was crazy to be considering retirement. Ullrich had also inched towards that conclusion and finally informed Walter Godefroot that he intended to ride on at a meeting in Brussels in August. Having hesitated at first, he responded favourably to Godefroot’s offer to ride the Vuelta a España. It would help, they both agreed, to lay the groundwork for a fruitful 2000 season.
The Vuelta rolled out of Murcia in the south-east corner of Spain on 4 September, and a callow Telekom line-up reflected the team and Ullrich’s limited ambitions. He remained out of sight, out of mind for the first few stages, until the peloton began climbing into the sierras that are western Spain’s last lines of natural fortification before the land ripples into Portugal. Ullrich scaled the first two bona fide mountain passes of the Vuelta among the leaders and then stunned everyone by leading home a twenty-three-man group in Ciudad Rodrigo to take stage five. It was his first victory of any description since the 1998 Tour, the first in a bunch sprint since his amateur days. His insistence that he was treating the Vuelta as an extended training camp suddenly rang hollow, all the more so after his second place behind Abraham Olano in the long time trial to Salamanca the following day took Ullrich to second on the overall standings, a minute behind Olano.
Ullrich slipped back slightly on stage eight, the premiere of a climb whose obnoxious steepness brought it overnight, worldwide notoriety – the Alto de l’Angliru. But the next big test came on an ascent that had elevated Ullrich to global superstardom – the mountain road to the Arcalís ski resort in Andorra where, in the 1997 Tour de France, Ullrich had announced himself as cycling’s next dominant figure. Now the recital was less emphatic and the plaudits more measured, but in one respect history had repeated itself: Olano capitulated, and Ullrich took over the race leader’s jersey.
Years later, in his autobiography, Ullrich wrote about the 1999 Vuelta in terms that suggested his passion for professional cycling had been reignited in Spain. He felt unburdened, liberated of the stresses of the previous few months. Meanwhile, to the Spanish journalists covering the race, Ullrich looked, on the contrary, joyless and poker-faced. The ABC newspaper’s correspondent, José Carlos Carabias, interviewed him in Murcia on the eve of Vuelta and wrote of an ‘odyssey . . . a kind of persecution’ which, between the wait and delaying tactics of his entourage, had ‘lasted four hours – all for fourteen questions’. Carabias found Ullrich to be ‘passionless, shy, a touch melancholic . . . like a frightened mouse.’
Ullrich’s countryman, the sprinter Marcel Wüst, had won four stages and led the race for two days in the first week – and yet would soon be reminded that, as he says, ‘in Germany, cycling was three things – Jan Ullrich, the Tour de France and Telekom’. ‘I do all that in the first week and nobody gives a fuck. There are two German journalists at the Vuelta. Then Jan takes the jersey and suddenly there are twenty. I was like, “Hey, guys, thanks for showing up last week and writing three lines about me in your paper.” I was grown up enough by then to make it sound funny, but I also sort of meant it.’
Even Wüst had to concede, though, that a glimpse of Ullrich in full flight was worth anyone’s airfare. A rider whose career straddled the dynasties of Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx, the Italian Vittorio Adorni, once said that the key difference between those two riders lay in how they affected the senses rather than the course of the sport’s history; Adorni was in equal measure haunted and mesmerized by Anquetil’s stealth, the way he could silently cut through a peloton like a dagger through human flesh; Merckx, meanwhile, came and went with a commotion, a turbulence which years later moved another Italian contemporary, Giancarlo Ferretti, to recall the angry rustle of a ‘one-man forest fire’.
Ullrich possessed neither Anquetil’s finesse nor Merckx’s ballast, but a hybrid not dissimilar to his most recent predecessor on the cathedra of the major tours, Miguel Induráin. What most impressed about Ullrich, the Italian journalist Gianni Mura had written during the 1997 Tour, was the ‘power and effortlessness’ of his pedal stroke. ‘He looked like a postman . . . a motorized postman,’ Mura observed. Reminiscent, Mura thought, of Merckx during his first Tour win in 1969. Certainly ‘more than just a rider on his bike’.
At the 1999 Vuelta, for the first time since that scramble for new superlatives in July 1997, Ullrich was purring on the roads. ‘He had that smoothness back. Just so super relaxed and super determined, like the result was never in doubt,’ says Marcel Wüst. Three mountain stages remained – and in none of them would he appear unduly flustered. Telekom’s porous, teetering flotilla could offer little resistance against the Spanish armadas of Banesto, Kelme and Vitalicio Seguros, and yet its captain, Ullrich, emerged from every battle windswept, weary but defiantly afloat. After the final mountaintop finish of the race to the Alto de Abantos, Ullrich’s closest challenger, the Spaniard Igor González de Galdeano, had narrowed his deficit to under a minute. But Galdeano’s last remaining ‘chance’ came in the penultimate-day time trial in Ávila – and, there, Ullrich dominated. His margin of victory on the stage ran to nearly three minutes, his cushion over Galdeano in the general classification as the race rolled into Madrid stood at over four.
Thus Jan Ullrich became the third German to triumph in the Vuelta a España, after Rudi Altig and Rolf Wolfshohl, the 1962 and 1965 champions. To Ullrich’s teammates in Spain, the three weeks had served as a dazzling reminder of his crystalline talent. The hours spent carrying water bottles, counselling and sheltering Ullrich from the wind had given Rolf Aldag the time and further cause to ponder how much of Ullrich’s brilliance was inborn and how much had been moulded, refined, polished. ‘It was the combination of power and style that was so impressive,’ Aldag says. ‘Never out of the saddle, just killing people with his rhythm. Obviously the time trial skills were just really impressive. You could have chased him with a whole team and not really caught him. And looking so stylish. It’s maybe a little bit the legacy of the athletic training they did in the DDR. You could hang Jens Heppner on a tree and he would do fifty pull-ups, whereas in the West we only knew how to ride our bikes. We could barely even hang from the tree.
‘That was also what you saw on the bike. If you saw Jens Heppner, or Olaf Ludwig, or Uwe Ampler or Jan, the way they sat on the bike, they were like robots. They looked identical at 20 kph, 30 kph or 60 kph. That’s really impressive, and I think that was the real benefit of what they did at school. Whereas, in the West, I left school at fifteen, went to the factory at sixteen, was going to work at six a.m. then back at three p.m. What do you do then? Core stability or ride your bike? You ride your bike and do nothing else. The trade-off is that your body can only do this one thing, while they had their first athletic lesson before they went to school for three hours, then had a break, went riding for four hours, then went for another two hours to school. So Jan was just a really good overall athlete, otherwise he couldn’t have been able to look that good on the bike.’
Ullrich’s physical gifts had of course never been in question. It was how he used them that occasionally vexed less gifted colleagues like Aldag.
‘It was always really funny, how he defended himself and how he argued once in a while. He would say, “You know, I really don’t understand you guys. I see it like this: it’s like a glass of water that’s full in the winter, really full. You guys are tipping a little bit, a little bit, then when you get to the Tour it’s already half empty. What I do is keep it completely full until the Tour, then empty it all at once. I’m not better than you are. I’m just smarter.” And he was really convinced that was the truth, to defend his laziness in the winter. If you’re not talented and you hear Jan say this, you actually get quite angry. “You really think that you have the same talent as us and are just more dedicated to the Tour de France? OK, Jan. Thank you very much . . . but what I think is your motor is just four times bigger than ours.” But, he’d be sitting there, really convinced his theory was the truth.’
Jörg Jaksche had often been the last of Ullrich’s lieutenants to buckle in one of the most mountainous Vueltas for years. All these years later, Jaksche’s affection for Ullrich is tempered with the frustration that often came with serving him as a teammate.
‘Jan was a very nice guy, very humble,’ Jaksche says. ‘The only negative thing I could say about him is that he sometimes didn’t stand up and take a position. That was often missing with Jan – just standing up and showing personality. This was also the reason, I think, why the team wasn’t super successful, because Jan couldn’t give the team direction and momentum.’
Jaksche recounts one episode from the Vuelta to underline his point.
‘There was one summit finish where Olano got dropped. I was having a good day, so ten kilometres before the last climb I asked Jan whether he also felt good. He nodded, so I say, “Why don’t I go as fast as I can to the bottom of the last climb, and you just hold on?” Because I could see that Olano was struggling slightly. Jan hears this, thinks about it for a second, then says, “Yeah, but why?” I’m like, “Er, so you can drop Olano?” “Ah, OK,” he replies. It was like his mind was somewhere else.
‘You really had to spell it out to him. It was sometimes funny but sometimes you were also thinking, Come on, man. At the same time, what Jan could do with his body was just phenomenal.’
That would again be evident two weeks after the Vuelta, at the world championships in north-east Italy, where the time trial was to be Ullrich’s main objective. A gently undulating 50.8-kilometre route into the Prosecco vineyards to the north of Treviso, then back towards the city, suited him perfectly. As widely predicted, he proved too strong for the competition – although a journeyman Swede, Michael Andersson, caused a shock by finishing second, just fourteen seconds behind Ullrich’s time. Telekom’s bike sponsor, Pinarello, is based just a few kilometres outside Treviso’s city walls, and they honoured Ullrich’s victory by inviting him to a celebration dinner with other illustrious former Pinarello ‘ambassadors’. One of them, Miguel Induráin, said that Ullrich’s recent results proved that he had turned a corner: he was ‘no longer just strong in the legs, but also in the head as well’.
Rudy Pevenage also spoke of a transformation, a sudden jolt forward into adulthood. Ullrich had apparently learned an important lesson – in future, he needed to do more racing and less training to stay in shape. To one reporter enquiring about how these changes would affect how he approached the coming winter, Ullrich responded with a laugh and the vow that ‘Fat Jan’, as he called himself, wouldn’t be making a reappearance this year or indeed ever again.
The new, purportedly unrecognizable Ullrich more or less single-handedly dragged the road race peloton up the last ascent of the Torricelle hill three days later, only for a rank outsider, the twenty-three-year-old Oscar Freire, to pull off an unfathomable heist as the front group of eleven swept into the last 600 metres. Freire had missed even more of the season than Ullrich due to his own knee problems. Many of the commentators who broke the news of his victory from the television gantry overlooking the finish line had never even heard of him. ‘I had no idea who he was,’ Ullrich also conceded after finishing eighth.
Overall, Ullrich’s late summer and autumn had exceeded expectations, and the recurring, overriding theme of his interviews in Italy had been the rekindling of his love for cycling. In the same articles, it was frequently pointed out that Ullrich was still a couple of months short of his twenty-fifth birthday; while the talk of a ten-year reign after the 1997 Tour had proven premature, he was still a young man in cycling terms, still primed, with his new mindset, to shape an époque in professional cycling.
Equally, the previous three months had been a mixed blessing. Ullrich would admit the following spring that he had rediscovered his best form so quickly over the summer that it had reinforced bad habits – most notably the conviction that he could ride himself into form in a matter of weeks.
In other words, Peter Becker’s this time, the giddy glory of his Vuelta success and TT gold in Italy had exacerbated what Becker calls Ullrich’s ‘certain self-overestimation’. ‘You get kids who climb trees without having a clue how to do it, yet they somehow succeed. And that puts them in danger. They develop this conviction: I can do this. But really, actually, they haven’t mastered it. That’s how it works with Ulli.’
To use Becker’s metaphor, never was Ullrich at greater risk than when gaily swinging from the highest branches, as at the end of the 1999 season, the torments of the spring long forgotten.
Other worries were also fading from memory. Telekom’s main accusers, Der Spiegel, had been gagged and other naysayers deterred. A positive test for one of Ullrich’s Telekom teammates, Christian Henn, at the Bayern Rundfahrt was dismissed as the folly of a lone wolf.* Even the microbiologist Werner Franke, who had helped Der Spiegel with their investigation in June and made it his mission to expose Telekom, was now publicly avowing his trust in the team’s Freiburg medical staff.
So would end a season that had seen a series of near epiphanies turn into missed opportunities: for Jan Ullrich, who had extracted the wrong lessons from a disastrous winter and spring; for the Telekom bigwigs in Bonn who, rather than take Der Spiegel’s allegations seriously, opened fire on the messengers. And for cycling at large, which rather than believing in myths like the ‘Tour of Renewal’, ought to have realized the daunting proportions of the plague uncovered the previous year.
Back in the present day, flanked on all sides by denizens of Munich’s cocktail-sipping Schickeria – the name given here to the city’s fashionistas and scenesters since the late 1970s – Jörg Jaksche and I are reliving cycling’s age of drugs and decadence.
Andreas Burkert, a long-serving journalist for Süddeutsche Zeitung, has joined us. To anyone familiar with Burkert’s work and with Jaksche’s career path, this may seem incongruous. Burkert was for many years the German media’s most dogged and prolific reporter on doping in cycling, and Jaksche would one day wind up among his ‘victims’. As they’ve explained to me, though, hunter and hunted finally discovered they had much in common – most notably their interest in how cycling had sucked in, chewed up and spat out a generation of promising young athletes. Yesterday, Andreas attended Jaksche’s graduation from finance school. They are a little like big and little brother – Burkert a decade or so older, a few inches taller, one or two wider, and bald. Andreas chides Jörg over his love life; Jörg pokes fun at Andreas for going ‘over to the dark side’, to a job as communications chief for Bayern Munich’s basketball team.
They’ll riff off each other seamlessly, fascinatingly, for as long as the bar is still serving negronis – but the conversation keeps coming back to the same subjects. Jan Ullrich, doping and the Germans.
‘I think the difference, Jörg, is that in France or Belgium they’ve had scandals too in the past but they’re cycling countries . . .’
‘They’re also mainly Catholic. And if you’re a Catholic you can go to church and say these are my sins, and they forgive you.’
‘Jörg’s right, but partly because of what happened with the Nazis, there’s always this desperation to pick away at why things happened here, to find who was guilty. Which can also be a very good thing . . .’
‘Ja, and if you put up a German flag in your garden, up until a few years ago, everyone would call you a Nazi, or at least a nationalist . . .’
‘The turning point was the World Cup in 2006. Then suddenly you were allowed to be proud of being German.’
They both fall silent for a second. In few places is nationhood as frequently or intensely debated as in Germany, and yet connecting certain dots, or threads in this narrative, still gives Andreas and Jörg pause.
‘The Germans want to have that image of [being] technologically advanced, hard-working, clean, transparent,’ Jörg picks up. ‘We want people to think a German car is advanced because of German engineering, hard work, no cheating – not like a Ferrari that will fall apart after 100,000 kilometres or whatever. This is the German way. Hey, Andreas?’
‘Ja, Germans are very moral . . .’
‘. . . and this is because of the war.’
‘For sure.’