12
‘That’s great. We got the cancer guy to win the Tour, but now the real guys are back’
—Lance Armstrong
‘Jan, can you not just lay off the chocolate a bit?’
These words, delivered by Jens Heppner to his friend and teammate Jan Ullrich one day in the spring of 2000, sounded less like Heppner’s usual brotherly counsel and more like an admonishment. All of the promises of the 1999 autumn, Ullrich’s vow that ‘Fat Jan’ would never return, the good intentions and New Year’s resolutions, had petered out into a much more familiar loop of illness, infections, antibiotics and lethargy. Once again, the first four months of the year had come and gone with Ullrich’s withdrawals and enforced schedule changes having outnumbered his days of competition. He had ‘successfully’ completed one race, the Tour of Murcia (in ninety-third position overall). For the first time, Ullrich was training with an SRM power meter – but as ever it was gravity and oxygen, not watts through the pedals, that were his undoing. One day at the January Mallorca camp, Udo Bölts had walked in on Ullrich thrashing away on an indoor trainer, noticed the overhang of his belly, seen the sweat rolling down his brow and over the edge of his chin – and thought what he could see was a hopelessly unfit teammate straining to hit respectable numbers. Bölts then sneaked a glance at Ullrich’s power meter. The display read 450 watts.
No, power was definitely not Jan’s problem.
The SRM device hadn’t been Ullrich’s only change for the new millennium. Mario Kummer, a teammate in Ullrich’s debut Tour in 1996, had been a member of Telekom’s coaching staff since the end of his racing career in 1998. Now, Kummer was to be Ullrich’s chief minder for the 2000 season, or to use a term that Telekom had employed the previous season, his ‘babysitter’. Kummer recalls the weeks spent in Merdingen, where Ullrich and Gaby had moved into their new ‘dream home’ the preceding winter, with fond nostalgia. Not that Ullrich didn’t also occasionally test his patience.
‘We’d agree a time of nine o’clock to go training, and I’d be there at nine on the dot, on his front step, just hoping he’d open the door. He always did, but he’d be in his pyjamas, and then, as casual as you like, he’d say, “Kummi, let’s just have a coffee first.” Finally we’d get out the door and go training at ten thirty, eleven . . .
‘I’d known him in 1996 and 1997 and he was a different person [in 2000],’ Kummer continues. ‘It was harder to motivate him. I know that the team tried everything. But motivation has to come from within.’
The fresh memory of Ullrich’s rip-roaring end to 1999 – and of how expediently it had been achieved – brought him at least a limited period of grace. Walter Godefroot was also happily distracted by Telekom’s best start to a season for years. Central to it were the rider some pundits had hurried to anoint as the new Ullrich, Andreas Klöden, and Telekom’s other star and in many ways its anti-Ullrich, Erik Zabel. While Klöden won both Paris–Nice and the Tour of the Basque Country, Zabel rattled off a succession of minor victories and two major ones, in Milan–Sanremo and the Amstel Gold Race. As ever with Zabel, it was minimum fuss, maximum grunt – the diametric opposite of what Godefroot was used to seeing from Ullrich. ‘Walter was a huge fan of Zabel. That was his son. Zabel was everything Ullrich wasn’t,’ Brian Holm observes.
Another long-time teammate of both riders at Telekom, Giovanni Lombardi, says that if Godefroot or anyone else could have ‘screwed Erik’s head onto Jan’s body, they would have had Eddy Merckx’.
Merckx himself was one of the pundits who now weighed in on Ullrich’s perennial early season struggles. The most decorated rider of all time reckoned Ullrich had ‘a mental weakness’ that was perhaps the result of ‘being under pressure to perform too early when he was growing up in East Germany’. Ullrich dismissed such beermat psychoanalysis, but a further inquest followed his return to competition in late May at the Midi Libre. There, wearing the rainbow skinsuit of world champion, he was caught by his ‘minute man’ in a 26-kilometre time trial on the fourth day. On the fifth, he finished in the last group on the road, thirty minutes off the pace. On day six, he crossed the finish line in a Telekom team car.
At the start of the Deutschland Tour the following week, Godefroot seemed finally to be losing his rag. Whether Ullrich would ever become a model pro, Godefroot said gloomily while tapping the side of his head, would depend only on his ‘grey matter’.
Ullrich himself told the press he had no more than three or four kilos to lose in the five weeks before the Tour. The Vuelta in 1999 had proved how quickly he could get into form. Besides, what did they want? ‘For me to be a sportsman who only thinks about his job for 365 days a year and eats strictly fat-free foods?’ The very notion seemed far-fetched. After all, he said, ‘It doesn’t matter how you achieve the success.’
The rider who most thought would be his biggest rival come the Tour would have agreed with that sentiment, and certainly exemplified it. Lance Armstrong had suffered his own setbacks in the spring of 2000, crashing on a training ride in the Pyrenees in May. But by comparison with Ullrich’s, the first half of Armstrong’s season had still been ominously smooth. Their paths were due to cross for the first and last time in their respective Tour build-ups on the first Saturday of June at the Classique des Alpes – a now defunct one-day race mimicking a Tour de France mountain stage. They duly took their place on the start line in Aix-les-Bains and rolled through the neutralized zone only for Ullrich to climb off his bike before he even reached the start line proper. The back spasms that had begun at the Deutschland Tour had made a sudden reappearance, making it impossible for him to even do up the Velcro straps on his shoes.
With still no direct confrontation in a meaningful setting, it was hard to know how Armstrong and Ullrich would measure up even if the latter could shape up in time for the Tour. The aesthetic contrast between their two styles certainly offered few clues. In his second autobiography, Every Second Counts, Armstrong himself described Ullrich as a ‘big, pantherish rider, while I looked, someone said, like a cat climbing a tree’.14 In May, Armstrong’s coach, or at least the man he presented as such, Chris Carmichael, also reached for a zoological metaphor as he described how he had reinvented Armstrong post-cancer to Outside magazine. ‘Lance is a small rider, compared with Miguel Induráin. Induráin has larger muscle mass, meaning he can use bigger gears. Lance needed to break this work into smaller segments. It’s like lifting 300 pounds. If you’re a gorilla, you can lift it all at once, but if you’re a little guy, you’d be better off lifting 100 pounds three times. In Lance’s case, it meant he had to pedal faster.’
It sounded simple, perhaps simply ingenious, but there was another story, an alternative and untold version of this already dubious narrative. On a Tuesday in June, while Ullrich was competing in – and helping Telekom to win – a team time trial at the Tour of Switzerland, Armstrong, his US Postal directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel and teammates Kevin Livingston and Tyler Hamilton were boarding a private plane in Nice and flying across the Mediterranean to Valencia. Near there, Hamilton reported later, Armstrong’s real guru – not Carmichael but the Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari – was waiting for the travelling party in a large, conference centre-style hotel overlooking the beach of Les Gavines. The US Postal team doctor, Luis del Moral – or ‘El Gato Negro’, ‘the black cat’, as he was only semi-affectionately known by his patients – and the team’s coach, José ‘Pepe’ Martí, were also in attendance. According to Hamilton, between them, Martí, Ferrari and Del Moral proceeded to draw blood from the three riders with the intention of re-infusing it at the Tour de France in a just a couple of weeks’ time.15 In the USADA reasoned decision that twelve years later summarized the evidence leading to Armstrong’s conviction as a drugs cheat, the account of this episode is pithily footnoted with a quote from Bruyneel’s autobiography: ‘The Tour has always brought out the best and the worst in humankind.’16
The ‘worst’ in this case was a doping technique that most assumed to be obsolete. It is widely documented that the practice of transfusing blood to boost the supply of oxygen to muscles was adopted, if not pioneered, by Finnish distance runners in the 1970s. A secret weapon at first, the method quickly gained traction and had become relatively common by the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where the US track cycling team were among its users. In 1986, finally, belatedly, the International Olympic Committee banned blood transfusions despite not being able to detect them. But their best deterrent was neither the testing nor the Olympic ideal; rather, it was the difficulty, the danger and the sheer grisliness of the process, which involved either cold-storing one’s own blood and then injecting it or, even more chillingly, ‘filling up’ with someone else’s. The first reports outing the American track cyclists in LA had spoken of ‘vampirism’.
Luckily for the cheats and unluckily for their sports, there would soon be a much better and less gory alternative. In 1983, an American pharmaceutical company, Amgen, cloned the gene for human erythropoietin – a hormone secreted by the kidneys to stimulate the production of those precious oxygen-carrying, performance-enhancing red blood cells. Five years later, in 1988, a synthetic or recombinant form of erythropoietin was approved in Europe for the treatment of anaemia. In June 1989, Amgen launched its EPO drug in the USA. The IOC added EPO to its banned list the following year. The UCI followed suit in 1991.
The question of when, precisely, EPO was first given to athletes has fascinated sports historians for decades. A flurry of deaths among Belgian and Dutch cyclists beginning in December 1987 and stretching to 1993 has been commonly described as the ugly tidemark of the drug’s first wave, but evidence remains patchy. The same could be said about rumours centring on the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics and Francesco Conconi, the University of Ferrara professor and mentor to Michele Ferrari. The Italian anti-doping expert who first exposed Conconi’s use of EPO to dope cyclists, Alessandro Donati, tells me he thinks Conconi started to give athletes EPO ‘at some point in 1988, between the late spring and the summer, largely abandoning blood transfusions’.17
Certainly, athletes were a lot quicker to embrace EPO than sports lawmakers to combat it – and this was partly due to Conconi. For years in the early 1990s, including while serving as the president of the UCI’s medical commission, the professor told the International Olympic Committee he was developing a method to detect the drug when, in fact, he was using it for a different kind of experiment – doping some of the world’s top cyclists and, bizarrely, himself.18 This was judge Franca Oliva’s conclusion at the end of a trial that finished in 2003 with Conconi’s acquittal because the statute of limitations had lapsed ‘[although] the crime took place’. Other, genuine attempts to come up with a test either made painfully slow progress or failed, and by the mid-1990s endurance sports were in the grip of an EPO pandemic. The danger to an athlete’s health could be managed, the risk of getting caught was zero. Years later, Lance Armstrong put it in a nutshell: ‘We had a drug that was totally undetectable, unbelievably beneficial, and most would say, if monitored by a doctor, totally safe. What were we all gonna do? Trust me. We’re all in.’
Armstrong had regularly used EPO, among other substances, even before his diagnosis with testicular cancer in 1996. When he returned to racing in 1998, his body had changed shape but his morals and illegal medical regimen remained much the same. Jörg Jaksche says Telekom stopped bringing EPO to races in 1999 – and US Postal had been sufficiently perturbed by the previous year’s Festina scandal to do the same. But while Rudy Pevenage makes the dubious claim that Telekom riders gave up the drug altogether, no one would try to argue today that, in July 1999, EPO was not part of Armstrong and US Postal’s chemical arsenal during their first Tour win.
The following spring, the cycling world was abuzz with anticipation of Armstrong and Ullrich’s first mano a mano at the Tour – and about a development that could have more far-reaching consequences: finally, a French research team had reportedly cracked the EPO code, come up with a way to find its fingerprint in urine. Their paper was published in the journal Nature on 8 June 2000. Coincidentally, Armstrong lost his leader’s jersey on Mont Ventoux in the Dauphiné Libéré that afternoon.
A few days later, Armstrong and his two most vaunted teammates were flying to Valencia to get their blood banked. Ultimately, the UCI would decide at the last minute not to give the new EPO test its world premiere at the Tour, but Armstrong and Dr Ferrari had not wanted to take the risk. They would go old-school, medieval – back to the guts and gore of doping’s Middle Ages.
‘Frankenstein-ish’, as Tyler Hamilton described it.
Miraculously, not only did Jan Ullrich make it to the start of the Tour, but he fairly swaggered into France at the end of June. In the Tour of Switzerland he had worn the leader’s jersey for three days and eventually finished fifth. A few days later, he starred in a Telekom procession at the German National Road Race championship, giving teammate Rolf Aldag a limousine ride to the title. He suddenly looked lean, motivated and capable of challenging Armstrong.
According to the Telekom doctor, Lothar Heinrich, Ullrich’s fitness test at the University of Freiburg on the Tuesday before the Tour yielded his best results since 1997. Ullrich had also reached his target weight. But what exactly was that? In pre-race interviews, Heinrich and Ullrich put the magic number at 74 kilograms – and journalists nodded. Never mind that Ullrich had told some of the same writers just a few weeks earlier that his Tour weight was between 70 and 73 kilograms. Or that, according to Peter Becker, by the end of the 1996 and 1997 races, he had been a skeletal 68 kilograms.
Rolf Aldag was left scratching his head. ‘His “perfect” Tour weight changed by about five kilos over time,’ Aldag says. ‘I know that he weighed around 69 kilos at the end of the Tour when he won it. He was super lean. And he’d started that Tour at seventy-one. So that was his perfect weight. But the next year, suddenly, they were saying seventy-three was a really good weight for Jan. They even put that out publicly. I always wondered why no one ever looked this up. It went to seventy-four, then eventually seventy-five and seventy-six, and he was “good”. You’re like, Hang on, he’s five kilos heavier than when he won the Tour. OK, he could gain some muscle, but he has to get oxygen to it, so how can that ever be good?’
The venue for the traditional pre-race team presentation and for the stage one time trial the following day was the Futuroscope theme park just outside Poitiers. Ullrich walked onto a stage overlooked by a 3D cinema and 45-metre space needle – and, in the process, gave Lance Armstrong a heartening glimpse into the futures of the two respective riders.
‘In 2000 I was the defending champion, but it also had this stigma that Ullrich wasn’t there and Pantani wasn’t there,’ Armstrong says. ‘People said ’99 was an easy Tour, or that I would have been third if they’d raced. So the impression among the fans, in the press room probably, and also in the peloton was, “That’s great. We got the cancer guy to win the Tour, but now the real guys are back.” There were two big stories: not just Jan but also Pantani. And Jan was not fit. He was looking pretty bad. I knew that I would have to take time out of him early because he’d come in – and he’d do this often, like in the Vuelta – and by the end he’d be skinny. But I could just look at him and see he wasn’t fit. For sure. Just his face, then at the team presentation, absolutely . . .’
The possibility that Ullrich and Telekom had found a different way of dealing with the looming threat of an EPO test didn’t faze Armstrong then and doesn’t seem to strike him as particularly relevant now. ‘We also knew what was going on with Jan because Jörg Jaksche always told everybody . . .’ he says dismissively, half in jest.
‘Anyway, whatever,’ Armstrong picks up brusquely, ‘I knew I had to strike early while Jan was still trying to lose a few kilos.’
Not much could be gleaned from the 16-kilometre first-day time trial and Armstrong’s second place behind the British debutant, David Millar, twelve seconds ahead of Ullrich. Even a 70-kilometre team time trial to Saint Nazaire three days later was far from conclusive, as US Postal’s ‘blue train’ gained forty seconds over Ullrich and Telekom. Meanwhile, Pantani leaked over five minutes on general classification over the first seven days but would still be declared ‘the winner of the first week’ by Walter Godefroot. The Italian had overhauled a bigger deficit in the Pyrenees and Alps in 1998.
The first mountain stage of this Tour took the peloton to Hautacam, a dark, brooding moloch of a Pyrenean climb overlooking Lourdes. A dense mist had enveloped the lower slopes, and through it, Armstrong responded to an attack from Pantani by dancing into the Italian’s slipstream and away from Ullrich in a phosphorescent blur of flesh and metal. So long revered for his twinkle-toed pedalling style, Pantani seemed stuck to the mountainside as Armstrong shimmied clear alone. Behind them both, Ullrich lumbered. The stylistic gulf translated into a numerical abyss by the end of the day, with Armstrong suddenly over four minutes ahead of Ullrich and the Tour – pundits agreed – as good as over after ten stages.
Trying hard to keep his euphoria in check, Armstrong half lied that a bad day could result in losses of fifteen minutes or more on Mont Ventoux, where he and Ullrich would have their rematch in three days. He then found a quiet moment to call the individual whose opinion he valued most: his doctor, Michele Ferrari.
Expecting confetti, what he got was a cold shower.
‘People talked a lot about me always making a big statement in the first mountain stage of the Tour . . . but it just ended up working out that way,’ Armstrong says. ‘It wasn’t like it was a team mandate or plan. I guess those opportunities just presented themselves in Sestriere in 1999 and Hautacam in 2000, because of weather. I was always better in the colder weather. I ran hot, so on a scorching day it was always hard for me to do an effort. Also, just to set the tone for the race, get a cushion . . . you know, those efforts are impressive to watch on TV, and they get people talking, but they’re really not that smart – and this is where we get to Ferrari. I get onto our little camper after the stage, I call Ferrari and I’m thinking this guy’s gonna be like, “That was amazing! Way to go, Lance!” But I ask him what he thinks and he replies in this low voice, “You made a big mistake.”
‘I say to him, “What are you talking about? I won by fucking four minutes.” But he just went on, “Big mistake. That was too good. Guys are going to be on you now.” He had to balance the tactics and the politics in the peloton, but also what the authorities probably thought. He just thought that was a mistake, to come out with such an obvious show of strength. Also, forget the politics and all of that, he also always had the view – because I did it every year, and he’d tell me every time – that you paid for those efforts. He’d straight up say it to your face: “You will pay for that effort. Don’t think you won’t because you will. This is a three-week race and this is the first day in the mountains . . .” Sure enough, I did later.’
Ferrari was right on at least one score. The previous year, Armstrong’s performance in the first mountain stage to Sestriere had inspired innuendo-laden headlines like L’Équipe’s ‘On Another Planet’. It had also given impetus to sleuthing journalists who, just a few days later, would uncover his use of a banned corticosteroid. Officially, he had emerged victorious and unsullied from the 1999 Tour, but, now, twelve months later, he had put a large down payment on a second win after just one mountain stage and had rivals comparing him to a jumbo jet. In a few days, a pair of French journalists would be following their intuition and, from a safe distance, an unmarked car driven by US Postal staff members. They tailed the vehicle to a lay-by in the Alps and filmed its occupants dumping rubbish bags. Among the trash were syringe wrappers, 160 of them, plus packaging for a substance with a strange name, Actovegin, and even stranger derivation – the blood of foetal cows. The discovery would eventually lead to a French government investigation that lasted over a year. US Postal were finally cleared because the product wasn’t banned. But the scent of suspicion around Armstrong had become a little more pungent.
Ferrari had seen it coming. Not that it altered US Postal’s plans for the rest of the 2000 Tour. Their rest day was partly spent injecting the blood removed a month earlier in Valencia. Replenished and refreshed, Armstrong took a further half-minute out of Ullrich the following afternoon on Mont Ventoux. So much for him losing a quarter of an hour.
Perversely, though, Ullrich’s sole moment of glory in the 2000 Tour was also to come partly as a result of what had occurred on the ‘Giant of Provence’. Armstrong had said previously of the Ventoux: ‘It doesn’t like me and I don’t like it.’ Now, having coasted in half a wheel behind Pantani, gifting the Italian the stage win, Armstrong made a new enemy; instead of thanking the American, Pantani claimed that he had simply been the stronger man. And this sent Armstrong into a rage.
First, he mocked Pantani’s big ears by calling him ‘Elefantino’ and comparing him unfavourably to ‘the gentleman’ Ullrich. He then downgraded the Italian to ‘a little shit-starter’ after Pantani’s second stage win at Courchevel. Finally, two days later, on the final mountain stage of the Tour at Morzine, Pantani launched not just an attack on the first of five passes on the route but something he hoped could turn into a revolution – setting out to overturn his nine-minute deficit on general classification and overthrow Armstrong.
One of Armstrong’s then teammates, Frankie Andreu, will never forget Armstrong’s reaction.
‘I’d never seen Lance so excited, so riled up. We were chasing like crazy, right on our limit, but Lance was like, “Let him go, let him go! Fuck, yes. We’re gonna kill him! This is fucking great!” He figured Pantani was going to be away all day, then blow up, just explode, and we were going to blow by and kill him. I can remember going up to him, and Kevin Livingston going up to him, telling him he had to remember to eat but it was like he didn’t want to hear us. Total tunnel vision. “Man, this is gonna be great. It’s gonna be great! We’re gonna kill him!” Just so . . . gung-ho. Eventually, of course, we did catch him – but we’d ridden ourselves into the ground. Then we get to the final climb, the Joux Plane, and look what came next . . .’
It became a footnote, an inconsequential tangent in the story of the 2000 Tour, but in the career of Jan Ullrich the moment was significant: four kilometres from the summit of the Col de Joux Plane, as the gradient stiffened, Armstrong’s legs seemed to lock and Jan Ullrich pulled away. A minute or two later, a couple of hairpins higher, the gap was yawning and Armstrong floundering, in the grip of the dreaded hunger knock. It was a crisis like this that he had meant when he had talked about ‘maybe losing fifteen minutes’ after Hautacam. It was also this, as well as prying eyes, that Ferrari had feared.
Years later, it would emerge that Ferrari, whose partnership with Armstrong was still not public knowledge in 2000, had counselled Johan Bruyneel, Armstrong and US Postal on how to respond to Pantani’s attack via a phone call to Bruyneel’s team car.
Armstrong finally lost over a minute and a half to Ullrich – and ended the day apologizing to his teammates for his own act of self-sabotage. ‘He barely finished the stage . . .’ says Andreu. ‘He said he knew he could have lost the Tour.’ The rest of us were like, ‘No shit!’
‘I definitely got wrapped in the Pantani thing that day,’ Armstrong confirms. ‘I was distracted, paying attention to Pantani and not eating. And the whole thing just totally backfired. Not only that, but we got to the bottom of the Joux Plane and I told Kevin Livingston just to blow it apart. I remember that I was alone then all of a sudden Jan comes back and I’m like, Huh. That’s strange. That’s not supposed to happen. Then I’m on Jan’s wheel and I’m thinking, Man, this don’t feel so good. Then you’re dropped. Oh, it was terrible. Then the next minute you’re in full-on crisis mode. Then it’s cut to Johan seeing it on the TV in the car, and he says, “Lance, you have a seven-minute lead. You do not need to panic.” But of course, you’re thinking, Fucking seven minutes is going to be gone like that.’
Salvation came from an unlikely source – an old friend and teammate of Pantani, Roberto Conti, who handed Armstrong two energy gels as they crested the Joux Plane together.
‘He gave me them for free! For free!’ Armstrong splutters. ‘I’m not saying you’d usually have to pay him, but, you know, I mean the guy’s just saved your Tour . . .’
It would have been even better for Ullrich had he not lost precious seconds and his chance of a stage win due to his brake pads wearing out and forcing him into a bike change as he began the descent into Morzine. He had, though, restored some pride and some credibility, even in his own mind, to the trope of Ullrich versus Armstrong as the rivalry of a generation. He could one day beat Armstrong, he was sure, given that he was finishing second having drawn on ‘only 80 per cent’ of his potential, as he told the press. ‘My weight problems in winter really have to stop now,’ he added – a rare public self-reproach. But Walter Godefroot had heard it all before, and made his feelings known on the rest day in Provence: contrary to what the 1999 Vuelta had led them to believe, ten weeks of sacrifice every season was not enough, not even for Ullrich.
His third second place in four appearances at the Tour was therefore filed away as semi-failure. The collective memory of Arcalís in 1997 remained powerfully intact, like the reductive, prejudicial myth of a profligate whizz-kid who was more gifted than Armstrong. ‘Purely body-wise, he was the biggest talent,’ says Rolf Aldag, ‘but then we come into this complete opposite thing with Lance. I think that’s what made it so interesting: people really believe, rightly or wrongly, that Jan was the biggest physical talent and Lance was by far the biggest mental talent. In Germany it turned out to be a little unfair. It was all “He’s lazy, he doesn’t do this or that . . .” But if you really break it down, it’s like, can you really blame him for that? We all have certain talents and we all have certain weaknesses. Definitely that was one of his weaknesses: he definitely wasn’t as uncompromising as Lance. But what if he just can’t be like that? It’s against his nature. His genes. What if Lance and Jan had equal talents, just different ones?’
Despite the many warnings and Godefroot’s insistence that things had to change, the late summer and autumn of 2000 would send the same mixed messages as the previous year’s Vuelta, in much the same way: reinforcing the notion that Ullrich was the best cyclist on the planet – but also a lazy one. Before the Olympic Games in Sydney, Ullrich went to the Vuelta as the defending champion but with his focus very much on topping-up his post-Tour fitness in time for Australia. He completed eleven stages in Spain, his most important result being the one displayed on his bathroom scales; according to Peter Becker, Ullrich was leaving the Vuelta ‘underweight’.
For Becker, Ullrich and anyone else who had grown up in the East, the Olympics were more than just a joyous quadrennial congress of sport and cultures. Ever since the advent of the DDR, sport had been used as a delivery drug for the ‘socialist personality’ that the regime sought to instil in its people – and as a megaphone to broadcast its message. The role of the DDR’s ‘diplomats in tracksuits’ in international competition was less about cultivating relationships beyond the Iron Curtain than proving the inherent superiority of the socialist corpus and animus.
It was clearly another world and another Germany after reunification, but to Ossis the Olympics retained a different cachet and bestirred sharper patriotic emotions than those experienced by Wessis or their opponents on the track, pitch or in the pool. Ullrich would admit it years later: ‘For us who grew up in the East, the Games are extra special.’
Walter Godefroot went with Ullrich to Sydney and noticed something he found curious: Ullrich seemed different, more relaxed than in his usual environment at Telekom. Godefroot would finally put it down as an unconscious craving for Ullrich’s former, simpler existence in a breeze-block dormitory in Berlin’s Sportforum. ‘I can remember standing with him at the Olympics in Sydney, and him pointing to the Olympic Village. “That’s real sport,” he said. I’ll never forget that. It reminded him of the DDR. Jan’s a super athlete but everything that comes with that is too much for him. He needed to be shut away like that.’
Peter Becker had reconnoitred the Sydney route a year earlier and returned to Germany with vital insight, notably into the importance of the wind direction on the only significant climb on the road race circuit. The German team was to consist of four Telekom riders – Ullrich, Klöden, Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel – plus the larger-than-life Berliner, Jens Voigt. On the eve of the race, Zabel and Ullrich sat down to discuss how to distribute roles and resources, given that both were potential winners. They finally, amicably, decided that until the last lap of the 17-kilometre circuit Ullrich would have a licence to attack but that he would lead out Zabel should his attempts fail. Riders who had seen Ullrich in the Olympic Village remarked on his gauntness, which was accentuated by an aggressively short hairstyle. ‘My English isn’t that great, and I just kept saying “shorter, shorter!” Then the guy took the whole lot off,’ Ullrich said of his visit to a local hairdresser.
He was grinning again when, on the day of the 240-kilometre road race, as they made their way to the start, rain hammered against the windows of the German team’s minibus – and he joked with Andreas Klöden that they might as well head straight for the airport. Fortunately, Lothar Heinrich, the Telekom and German team doctor, was soon calling to say the sun had just come out over the race route – and wind was also whistling down the climb in Centennial Park. Just as Peter Becker had predicted.
Two laps from the end none of the favourites – not Armstrong, not Ullrich, not Zabel nor one of the fancied classics specialists – had yet made their move. With his freedom ticket about to expire, Ullrich finally bolted out of the peloton and onto the Centennial Park climb, as per Becker’s advice. Halfway up the hill, Ullrich turned to see Klöden and the Kazakh, Alexander Vinokourov, pursuing him, and more daylight between them and the field. A Telekom employee and teammate for the rest of the year, Vinokourov had trained with the German team at their holding camp in Brisbane – and had given the frequency of the Kazakh team’s intercom radio to Rudy Pevenage. Hence, Pevenage, a Belgian, was standing in a gazebo close to the finish line directing both Germany and Kazakhstan’s Olympic cyclists over his walkie-talkie. Meanwhile, Lance Armstrong was, for once, oddly out of the loop. He hadn’t seen Ullrich’s attack and was livid when he found out.
At the front of the race, Ullrich, Klöden and Vinokourov turned the remaining lap into a Telekom team time trial. Soon, their advantage was unassailable and they were discussing who would take which medal, finally deciding Ullrich would get the gold, Vinokourov silver and Klöden bronze. Not everyone appreciated the cosy German–Kazakh alliance. ‘If Hitler and Stalin had co-operated in the same way, there would have been no Eastern Front,’ sniffed the Sydney Morning Herald.
Peter Becker had undoubtedly been one of the architects not only of Ullrich’s success but also Germany’s, having spent a key week with Klöden and Ullrich in Merdingen after their withdrawals from the Vuelta. Becker hadn’t made it to Australia but watched on TV and, initially, rejoiced. A decade and a half later in his home in Berlin, though, at the mere mention of Sydney, Becker’s brow creases.
‘There, for the first time in my career as a coach, I shed tears. But not tears of joy. No, tears because he gave an interview and there wasn’t a mention, not a word of thanks to his coach in Germany. Just “I, I, I . . .” ’
A similar fallout after the German time trial championship in 1995 had apparently neither changed Ullrich nor lowered Becker’s expectations. When Becker and I meet in late 2015, they are years into another impasse in their relationship. It pains Becker to criticize, he says, but he also wants to press home the point that, when people said Ullrich was ‘badly advised’, they didn’t understand that Ullrich’s worst advisor has often been himself.
‘At the end of the day, given all that he’s experienced and the way he is, he’s not a bad person. I don’t want people to take that message. But the mistakes that he makes, this immaturity of his, the way he mishandles situations, all that damaged him so much and cost him and his career so dearly.’
Jan Ullrich might have gone home from Australia with two gold medals, but the wind that been key to his success in the road race conspired against him three days later in the time trial. As the TT world champion and in-form rider, Ullrich seemed destined to avenge Armstrong’s Tour de France win on the 46-kilometre course – and yet, to everyone’s surprise, it was neither of the demiurges who finally prevailed. Armstrong’s US Postal teammate, Viatcheslav Ekimov, had taken advantage of an early start time and gentler breeze to relegate Ullrich to the silver medal and Armstrong to the bronze.
Germany ended the Sydney Games behind only the USA, Russia, China and the host nation in the medal table, but overall it had been a strange and sobering year for German sport. In January, twenty-one months after beginning in Berlin, the trials of the doctors, coaches and officials who had masterminded the East German state doping system produced one of its most shocking moments when the lawyer, Michael Lerner, told Lothar Kipke that he was ‘the Joseph Mengele of the DDR doping system’. The comparison with a Nazi doctor nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’, the perpetrator of unspeakable crimes at Auschwitz, seemed questionable in its taste and proportion, and Lerner later regretted it. Nonetheless, the twelve former athletes whom he represented, and whose children bore the legacy of Kipke’s treatments in their assorted disabilities, appreciated the power of his emotion.
Earlier in the hearings, it had been the turn of former SV Dynamo Berlin swimming coach Rolf Gläser. At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Gläser infamously responded to a question about his female swimmers’ unusually deep voices with the quip: ‘They came to swim, not sing.’ Twenty-odd years later, from the witness box in an oak-panelled courtroom in Berlin, one of his former lab animals, Christiane Knacke-Sommer, pulled out the bronze medal that she had won at the 1980 Moscow Games and slung it to the floor. The echo was as chilling as the words Knacke-Sommer said next: ‘They destroyed my body and my mind. They even poisoned my medal . . . It is worthless and a terrible embarrassment to all Germans.’
On the afternoon of 18 July 2000, Jan Ullrich was dropping Lance Armstrong on the Col de Joux Plane when judge Dirk Dickhaus handed the two main brains behind ‘State Planning Theme 14.25’, Manfred Höppner and Manfred Ewald, eighteen- and twenty-two-month suspended jail terms. ‘I have nothing to add. I stand by what I did and I am grateful,’ mumbled Ewald when the judge asked him for a closing remark.
The final months of the trials had been charged with a harrying urgency owing to the fact that the statute of limitations on crimes committed in the former DDR was to run out in October. In total, seventeen coaches or doctors ended up receiving suspended jail sentences. Thirty were made to pay financial penalties. In all, it seemed a meagre tariff for a system estimated to have dispensed two million doses of anabolic steroids a year and to have employed 600 doctors and technicians solely to coordinate State Planning Theme 14.25. They had reportedly doped around 10,000 athletes without their knowledge over two and a half decades.
Jan Ullrich has always maintained that he was one of the lucky ones, that he escaped the DDR’s moral and pharmaceutical depravities. Peter Becker, likewise, forcefully tells me that he kept his charges well away from ‘diesen Dreck’ – ‘this muck’.
Shortly after visiting and spending almost two days with Becker, I continue my journey into the historical hinterland – and now disbanded Vaterland – that gave birth to Jan Ullrich via a tiny upstairs office in an apartment building in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. Here, encircled by floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with the paper files that tell an alternative version of East Germany’s sporting miracle, Katrin Kanitz is explaining to me how she became a part of the medal factory’s human toll. Once, before the Wall fell, Kanitz was among East Germany’s and indeed the world’s leading figure skaters – a statuesque, brown-haired Katarina Witt-doppelgänger with similar pedigree. Lately she’s been spending her days in this room working for the Doping Opfer Hilfe – the organization set up in 1999 to morally and financially support the victims of State Planning Theme 14.25.
Kanitz retired at age eighteen after missing out on the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics with a knee injury likely to have been precipitated by her unwitting use of the steroid Turinabol. She tells me she was ‘dropped like a hot potato’ by her coach and shunned by her parents. She suddenly had the feeling of being catapulted into adulthood before tasting adolescence, this while Germany was undergoing its own seismic, developmental shift. Years later, in 1997, Kanitz was studying, reinventing herself, just about muddling through when a letter from the police bureau in Thüringen dropped through her letterbox. One line in the text would change her life forever. ‘They said they’d found a disk and on it I was recorded as having received Turinabol.’
Kanitz doesn’t know to what extent this bombshell was to blame, whether it was the drugs themselves, or how much was to do with her parents, her private life or the process of Sozialisation – socialization – in the East. She can only say that, in 2001, she began suffering psychotic episodes and still needs anti-psychotic medicine ‘to live a normal life’ today. Professor Werner Franke, the archduke of anti-doping in Germany, is among those who believe that anabolic steroids could trigger conditions like Kanitz’s years later. Kanitz would rather not speculate, but sees and hears on a daily basis from others like her just how deleterious the drug’s effects could be. ‘Damage to the heart, liver, kidney, pancreas. Busted joints. A hundred per cent of the people affected have knee, shoulder and back issues. I don’t know the percentage, but a very large number of the women have breast cancer, which is scientifically proven to be a side effect of Turinabol . . .’ she explains.
Kanitz and I speak for over an hour, about her story, about the shame that stops others like her coming forward, and about how a symbolic, belated but still heartfelt recognition of their suffering often means more to victims than financial compensation. At best, they can expect to receive 10,500 euros from the German state and roughly the same amount from Jenapharm, the company which created Oral Turinabol and is still in business today. For some, the cash barely covers a few months of prescriptions.
Cycling has been curiously neglected in the process of piecing together exactly which DDR sorcerers gave which drugs to which athletes. Nevertheless, like all Ossis, Katrin Kanitz knows Jan Ullrich and what he represents. She has also, she says, learned that there are universal truths which apply to everyone who grew up in the East, in a society both built on and torn apart by secrecy.
‘When you tell your own story, you also learn about other people. That’s also why I’m open about my own journey. I can understand that he, for example, might not want to open up in the same way. But that’s really not smart. It’s a chance to grow. That’s my experience. You don’t have to explain everything but if you start being open, talking about your feelings and how certain decisions were taken – you start to grow through that.’