13
‘Pressure was always the problem with Jan, even when no one was putting him under any’
—Walter Godefroot
Rudy Pevenage, Jan Ullrich’s long-time directeur sportif and friend, agrees to speak to me because Johan Bruyneel, Lance Armstrong’s long-time directeur sportif and friend, has asked him on my behalf. At the time, it will be the first interview that Pevenage has given for years. It is also years since he has been seen at a bike race.
In the first years of the twenty-first century the Tour de France was essentially a duopoly presided over by Pevenage and Bruyneel, who also happened to live in the same village. As Lance Armstrong will put it to me: ‘I mean, the whole incestuousness of it. Rudy, Johan, all the soigneurs and mechanics, all living within a kilometre or two of each other. That’s like saying, I mean, for many of those Tours, the whole power structure in cycling was concentrated in this one fucking neighbourhood in Belgium. It’s just weird.’
It is also a coincidence that the aforementioned neighbourhood was world famous among cycling fans for reasons that had little to do with Bruyneel or Pevenage. In 1950, for the first time, the organizers of the Tour of Flanders sent their race through and out of the town of Geraardsbergen via a cobbled track so severely inclined that locals referred to it not as a street but a wall, or ‘muur’. Before long it had become so notorious that further appellation was unnecessary. It was just – and remains today – the Muur.
Pevenage was born in Geraardsbergen and never really left. After years of lucrative success as Telekom and Ullrich’s directeur sportif, he established his fief on a leafy residential street five minutes’ walk from the top of the Muur, in a mock-Tuscan villa with swimming pool in the back garden and giant terracotta urns on the front step. Bruyneel grew up in the far west of Flanders in Izegem, a few kilometres from the French border and another of cycling’s lieux sacrés, the velodrome in which the annual Paris–Roubaix classic race finishes its journey. In the early 2000s, he masterminded the US Postal team and the Lance Armstrong empire from a key point on the route of another classic; if Pevenage could open his front door in Geraardsbergen and stroll to the brow of the Tour of Flanders’ second-to-last climb, the Muur, Bruyneel’s home looked out over the last hill of the Flanders route, the Bosberg.
Many of the fans, the amateur pilgrims on wheels, who come to the Muur pause beside the Chapel of Our Lady of the Oudenberg at the top or stumble into Hemelrijk restaurant across the road. And it is here that Rudy Pevenage instructs me to meet him at noon on the eve of the 2015 Tour of Flanders.
The first thing one notices about Pevenage these days is that he has lost weight since the era when he would typically be seen in a white Deutsche Telekom polo shirt, with an arm around Ullrich’s shoulder. Following his retirement as a racer in the late 1980s, Pevenage’s meagre, visible concessions to middle-age had been the slow fade of his surviving wreath of fine blonde hair to a white moquette, and his heavily freckled cheeks and midriff curving gently outwards. Today, though, he suddenly looks a frail sixty-one-year-old. In the spring of 2014, he’ll tell me, he was battling with throat cancer – and losing. Twelve months on, his voice is still halting and hoarse. The old glint has left his eyes and his walk and gestures seem slow and deliberate. At least, happily, the tumour has gone and his health, he says, is improving.
We take our place in a quiet corner of the restaurant, away from the clatter of cutlery and cyclists’ cleats. After a few minutes of niceties and Pevenage establishing some ground rules, a waiter arrives to take our order. Pevenage asks for a steak tartare listed on the menu as ‘The American’.
How apt.
Fifteen years ago, Jan Ullrich’s double ‘victory’ over Lance Armstrong in the Sydney Olympics had renewed his faith and that of his entourage, including Pevenage. As Pevenage saw it, only two things stood in Ullrich’s path to world domination: Ullrich himself and . . . the American.
‘I tried everything to get Jan to beat Armstrong,’ Pevenage sighs. ‘I’d be talking to him in winter like Micky to Rocky Balboa. But Jan would just say, “I’m Jan Ullrich and that’s it.” He had a problem in his head when he saw Armstrong spin his legs, that’s for sure. I did too. Because I knew Armstrong before his illness. He was a classics rider. He was the kind of guy who would win a medium mountain stage after a big mountain stage. Then he got ill, came back and it was a different Armstrong. I didn’t really understand . . . I still say that if you’d put Jan and Lance in quarantine for a month before a Tour de France, it’s Jan who’ll win the Tour.’
Pevenage wasn’t the only one at Telekom who wished that Ullrich was a little bit more like his arch-rival. Walter Godefroot had tried in vain to tease out Ullrich’s killer instinct only to finally decide he was wasting his time. ‘I remember Jan saying to Rudy after Pantani had beaten him in the 1998 Tour and he’d lost all those minutes in the cold, “Ach, well, Marco’s had a lot of bad luck in his life.” He said this in the team meeting. I couldn’t believe it. It was almost as though he was happy to have that pressure off him. He wasn’t a warrior. He wasn’t a Hinault, a Merckx. Jan was everyone’s friend.’
Bobby Julich – a preppy, bespectacled American whom Armstrong privately dismissed as a ‘choad’ – was, besides Pantani, Ullrich’s toughest opponent in that 1998 Tour.* Julich and Ullrich barely knew each other, but, over the course of the three weeks, Julich would be struck by Ullrich’s friendliness whenever they found themselves side-by-side in the peloton. During one stage, Julich complimented Ullrich on his Tag Heuer watch, to which Ullrich replied that he had a spare one that Julich could have.
The gift never materialized, but when they reached Paris, Ullrich lay second and Julich third – for the American an astonishing and life-changing result. There was, though, one more surprise, as Julich told Richard Moore in an interview for the book Étape. ‘I was in the hotel that everyone goes to in Paris, the Concorde Lafayette, all dressed up. I was with my mom and dad and my dad is, like, “Oh my god, there’s Jan Ullrich.” And there was Ullrich with his girlfriend, Gaby, and a million people around him [ . . . ] He spots me, races up and says, “Wait right there.” He races through the people, all trying to get a piece of him, and back up to his room. In a few minutes he’s back with this beautiful Tag Heuer watch. I still have it to this day.’
Another former rider, Jan Schaffrath, also volunteers a story about a watch as an Ullrich character reference. In 1997, Schaffrath was a bashful stagiaire, a mere triallist for the final weeks of Telekom’s season, when one day he got the call to make up the numbers on the set of the telecommunications giant’s latest TV commercial. The stars of the show were Jan Ullrich, Udo Bölts and Jens Heppner, the creative brief a goofy set-piece whereby the quartet would ride side-by-side and pass a ringing mobile phone down the line to Ullrich. It would be hours before they nailed a take, as Schaffrath could tell by glancing over at the hands on Ullrich’s wristwatch, a special edition Adidas had made to commemorate his Tour win. ‘It wasn’t the fanciest or most expensive watch in the world,’ Schaffrath says, ‘but my eyes must have been as big as plates, because Jan saw me and said, “You like this watch? You can have it.” He took it off and gave it to me on the spot. I went home that night proud as punch.’
By most accounts, Armstrong could also be generous with teammates – but rivals were a different matter. If Ullrich was ‘the bar, the standard, what I had to beat’, it stood to reason that he would also become an obsession. Tyler Hamilton describes in his autobiography how Armstrong would trawl the internet or mine his contacts for information, any information, about his opponents – especially Ullrich. ‘For a while Lance had so much information I thought he had someone working for him – I pictured a young intern in a cubicle somewhere, compiling reports. But after a while I realized it was all Lance. He needed to gather the information so he could turn it into motivational fuel.’19
Hamilton’s seemingly apocryphal line about Armstrong employing ‘spies’ in fact carries more than a grain of truth. As Armstrong tells me in Austin: ‘I mostly did the Dauphiné and Jan did Switzerland . . . so Ferrari would drive to Switzerland and wear a little disguise. I don’t know what kind of disguise exactly, but he’d stand on the side of the road, just on top of a climb, and watch Jan go past. He could look at Ullrich, just see his face and know exactly where Jan was. Then he’d give me the report.’
Johan Bruyneel laughs at the image of the world’s most mythologized, vilified sports doctor peering over the brow of a Swiss mountain pass – and over a pair of thick-rimmed fake glasses – as Jan Ullrich obliviously turtled past. Bruyneel and I meet in a wine bar in London’s Sloane Square in March 2015, a few days before my appointment with Pevenage. At the time of our conversation, Bruyneel has been living between London and Madrid for several years, having left Belgium and Geraardsbergen. Soon, in addition to the legal issues arising from USADA’s reasoned decision, he’ll be dealing with a painful divorce and separation from his children. He looks weary, but comes alive at the mention of a Cold War whose competing nerve centres were not Washington and Moscow but two inconspicuous houses ‘a few hundred metres apart’ in a town in east Flanders.
‘Rudy and I were colleagues, but more rivals than colleagues,’ he says. ‘There was just a cordial communication when we saw each other, but you had to measure your words very carefully. We would never have shared anything.’
Everything that Bruyneel was able to glean – at races, training camps, or from behind the net curtain at home – he fed straight back to Armstrong. Extra gasoline on his already smouldering fire of curiosity, ambition and fuck you.
‘I remember Ferrari going to spy on Ullrich,’ Bruyneel says. ‘That did happen. It became just such a habit between Lance and I to get information about him. Just anything. I knew a lot of guys in Belgium who were connected to Telekom . . . The German press, lots of people who talk.’
I say that Armstrong has also mentioned other riders. Jaksche, for example.
‘Yes! He wasn’t at Telekom long but guys who have been on the team keep connections . . . Anyway, knowing Lance, he needed a certain bad vibe between him and somebody else, to outperform them. He took every little thing to create that bad situation. And I would do that too. I didn’t exactly invent things, but I knew how he worked, how his system worked, so wherever I was, I would try to exaggerate it a little bit. If Ullrich said something in the press, I would exaggerate it.’
Jan Ullrich had at least left one scuff mark on Armstrong’s suit of armour ahead of the 2001 racing season. Having asked Bruyneel and US Postal for a pay rise and been dissatisfied with their offer, Armstrong’s long-serving domestique and one of his closest friends, Kevin Livingston, had quit the team. Livingston wanted more cash and more freedom, and decided he would get both at the British Linda McCartney team. That logic proved to be sounder than the Linda McCartney team’s foundations: by late January, the team was broke and broken, forcing its contracted riders to find employment elsewhere. Livingston got snapped up by Telekom.
Armstrong was, to say the least, unimpressed. It was, he said in the press, akin to the Gulf War general Norman Schwarzkopf defecting to Communist China.
I ask Rudy Pevenage whether one motivation for signing Livingston was to plunder intelligence on Armstrong and Postal. Pevenage shakes his head and says that, in fact, Livingston – a quiet, private character – never volunteered any. When I later put the same question to Walter Godefroot, he smiles and offers a more layered response: ‘We don’t only sign him so that he can tell us what’s going on in Armstrong’s team . . . but he’s also useful in that regard.’
Armstrong now concedes that he dealt with the split rashly. Years earlier, the Missourian had moved to Austin to be close to Armstrong, but in the months before he left Postal, Livingston said at the time they had ‘grown apart’. Armstrong disputes this, telling me that it was only towards the end of 2000, when Livingston demanded more money than Postal were willing to pay, that their friendship fractured. It was also a sense of betrayal, the feeling that his old pal had ‘flicked’ him, rather than any anxiety about what Livingston might reveal, that enraged Armstrong. ‘I was pissed with Kevin for a while. It wasn’t about him sharing secrets. I mean, secrets? There were no secrets. You mean medical secrets? Telekom knew everything anyway. That wasn’t my concern. It was just, we had been very close friends. He’d been on Motorola [Armstrong’s team from 1992–96], been like a big brother, and it felt just like a slap in the face to have him leave. But looking back, I could have dealt with it better. Looking back, I did that with a lot of relationships – kind of cut it all off. Anyway, he was better on the road for me in 1999 and 2000 than he was in 2001.’
It would be interesting to hear Livingston’s own thoughts, but he doesn’t respond to my emails requesting an interview. Over the years and particularly after his shock early retirement from racing in 2002, he and Armstrong patched things up to the extent that, when I visit Texas in spring 2015, Livingston is offering a bike-fitting service out of the basement of Armstrong’s Austin shop, Mellow Johnny’s. I go there unannounced in the hope that Livingston will at least hear me out. I spot a shop clerk, tell him why I’m here, to which the colleague responds that he’ll go and fetch Kevin. A minute or two later, the same gentleman returns to uneasily tell me that, no luck, it turns out Kevin’s not around.
When I relate all of this to Armstrong the next day, he shakes his head. ‘I don’t get it,’ he mutters. His efforts to solicit Livingston on my behalf come to nothing.
At the time, Livingston’s defection was perceived as the latest sign that maybe Ullrich and Telekom were finally getting serious. After three catastrophic winters, it was decided that, in 2001, Ullrich would finally commit to the credo prescribed by Walter Godefroot at the Tour the previous summer: total professionalism in all four seasons, and not only a few weeks in June, July and August. It would all start with a training camp in South Africa before Christmas, followed by another in Mallorca in the New Year, then a second trip to the Cape. Between the beginning of December and the second week of January, Ullrich racked up 3,000 kilometres. In Mallorca, he sounded determined, feisty. ‘Lance Armstrong doesn’t know anything about how I train,’ he sniffed in one interview, apparently piqued by Armstrong’s comments the previous summer.
The volume of Ullrich’s training had been the subject of scrutiny for several years, but now attention also turned to the methodology. In particular, Armstrong’s high-cadence blitzkrieg at Hautacam in the 2000 Tour had prompted some to question whether Ullrich wasn’t stuck in the dark ages, old dogmas that he had presumably learned in the East. Armstrong appeared to personify a new way – twenty-first century high-tech, the spirit of Silicon Valley that both infused and partially funded the US Postal team, given that it was where the team’s main backer, Thom Weisel, had made his fortune.
Ullrich, meanwhile, embodied the antediluvian methods of a political and sporting system so backward-looking that it had fallen into ruin and scorn. The pedal strokes of the two riders were the animated mirror images not only of their respective approaches but the worlds from which they came: Armstrong fast, efficient, ruthless; Ullrich slow, ponderous, intransigent.
Ullrich’s coach, Peter Becker, rolls his eyes at what he still sees as reductionism bordering on xenophobia. Rudy Pevenage has told me that Ullrich’s low cadence ‘was Peter Becker’s way, the East German way’. Pevenage also claims ‘everyone wanted Jan to change, except Becker’. But Becker says this is nonsense, and that he even encouraged Ullrich to mimic Armstrong – but was repeatedly ignored. In his 2004 autobiography, Ullrich himself writes about whole training sessions on his favourite Black Forest roads dedicated to learning ‘spin’ like Armstrong.20 On some of them he even had his nemesis’s old sidekick, Livingston, giving him tips. He also talks about Becker wanting him to alternate between climbing in and out of the saddle, to vary the muscle groups he was using and lessen fatigue. It was Ullrich who had quickly decided that neither technique was for him – the 90 rpm cadence because ‘it made my heart rate shoot up and I was exhausted far too quickly’, and the short bursts en danseuse, out of the saddle, because he thought that he could more easily maintain a steady, fast tempo sitting down. Ullrich believed he could kill Armstrong with consistent power. ‘I didn’t even want to attempt a compromise,’ he wrote. ‘A tennis player wouldn’t switch from right- to left-handed midway through Wimbledon,’ he said on another occasion.
Peter Becker’s features crumple painfully at the mere mention of a subject that, to his mind, became a dog whistle used to turn critics against him. He points out that in 1996 and 1997 commentators had drooled over Ullrich’s graceful, fluid pedalling motion – and they were the seasons at Telekom when Becker and Ullrich had collaborated most closely. Becker was an easy East German to stereotype – a sometimes gruff, steel-haired Berliner. But he was also his own man, not some brainwashed Socialist Party functionary. This is what Becker wants me to grasp.
There is something else Becker says we shouldn’t overlook: that Ullrich rode the way he did partly not only out of stubbornness but also ego and sheer machismo. In his memoir of the years he spent coaching Tiger Woods, The Big Miss, Hank Haney argues compellingly that Woods’s obsession with distance off the tee – another supposed badge of masculinity to go with the golfer’s sudden fixation with retraining as a Navy SEAL – both hampered his game and caused the multiple injuries that have derailed his bid to surpass Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major championships.
Peter Becker tells me that similarly vain and virile impulses were driving and hampering Ullrich.
‘I spoke with Ulli about the issue of his gears and his cadence. He simply wanted – this is what I firmly believe – to prove to himself and to others what gears he was capable of pushing. That was what motivated it, deep down. But, yes, he’s got unbelievable power. He’d always been able to turn a gear over, but he didn’t always do that before. Normally it’s absolute poison for a rider. Then there was the issue of the delays in his preparation, and the fact that in the early season he would suddenly find himself riding with guys doing 100 or 110 revs per minute. There, you soon notice that it’s a lot easier to stick with the group at 80 revs per minute. Sooner or later, though, a moment comes when you have to spin your legs, only you haven’t trained that, so you go to an even bigger gear. That’s one cause. The other is that stubbornness. One year I was with him at the Luk Cup in Bühl in southern Germany. It was all captured on camera: you see me turn around and walk away in disgust. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. How the hell can you go uphill in a gear like that? Not even a beginner does that. You can’t ride a bike like that. But by that point he’d long since stopped listening to me.’
Upon hearing this, others would argue that turning inwards had simply become Ullrich’s default martial art when he felt bombarded with often conflicting opinions. For the 2001 season, Godefroot, Pevenage, Ullrich’s manager Wolfgang Strohband and the Telekom doctors at the University of Freiburg had doubled down on the ‘babysitter system’, which they had now even publicly given that name. A resolution was made: Ullrich must never be left to his own devices – or vices. By the time he competed for the first time in 2001 at the Vuelta a Murcia, he had clocked up 15,000 kilometres since his first training camp of the winter in December. He even looked relatively svelte, his trips to South Africa around Christmas having kept him at a safe distance from seasonal creature comforts like Gaby’s mum’s cakes and sausage soup.
Poor results in a fitness test at the University of Freiburg in March indicated, though, that appearances were deceiving. In interviews, he lapsed back into familiar old excuses and blandishments, exemplified by what he told journalist Hartmut Scherzer in April: ‘I can lose five or six kilos in the blink of an eye. It’s just like firing up an engine.’ Meanwhile, Armstrong was trying to persuade the same reporters that he didn’t have the opposite problem – that he hadn’t found form too early, having roared into the spring with a second place at the Amstel Gold Race.
By the summer, Armstrong’s agent would be bragging to Texas Monthly that his client could now charge double Bill Clinton’s fee for keynote speeches – a further revenue stream to go with the $5 million a year Armstrong was now pocketing from endorsements and a ‘basic’ wage from US Postal creeping towards eight figures. Here, too, Ullrich was struggling to keep pace, for all that, at a press conference on 1 May in Frankfurt, he and Telekom announced that he would wear their colours at least until the end of 2003. His salary would also rise to around two million euros, placing him behind only Armstrong in cycling’s league table of top earners. Earlier the same day, 1.5 million German fans had lined the route of the Rund Um den Henninger Turm, most of them to see Ullrich. In Ullrich’s eyes, his 1997 Tour may have created unfair expectations, but business in German cycling was booming. The new president of the German Cycling Federation (BDR), Sylvia Schenk, said upon her election that a process had ‘begun with Jan Ullrich . . . and [Germany] can now proudly call itself a cycling nation.’ There was evidence of that wherever one looked: at the national tour, which had died in the mid-1980s amid court battles over who would pay for traffic policing, but was now bringing around seven million Germans to the roadside after its rebirth in 1999; the fact that Germany would suddenly have three elite professional teams in 2002, with Team Coast and Team Gerolsteiner both upscaling budget and ambitions; or at how the hours annually dedicated to bike racing by German television had spiked from 535 in 1994 to 1,060 in 1997 – and remained on the same high plateau.
The Pied Piper was Ullrich, yet he seemed barely able to look after himself, let alone the future of his sport in a country which had never allowed sporadic flirtations to mature into an enduring affinity for pro cycling. He had committed his future to Telekom while at the same time acknowledging that the ‘babysitter system’ had become suffocating – and counterproductive. ‘There was always a doctor being sent to weigh me, or a training partner to check up on me,’ he said later. As had already been the case in 1999, he felt both over-scrutinized and affronted by how little Telekom appeared to trust him. Walter Godefroot remembers, ‘I used to go to the soigneurs’ room and one of them, Dieter Ruthenberg, “Eule” as we called him, would be there massaging Jan. I’d have something to say to Jan but, when I spoke, he’d just turn to face the other way on the massage table and not say a word. Eule would whisper to me that I should just leave him in peace. Pressure was always the problem with Jan, even when no one was putting him under any.’
Fumbling for their annual quick fix, Ullrich and Telekom decided for the first time in his career that he should race in the Giro d’Italia in May. He would have no designs on overall victory. Instead, he would treat the three weeks as an extended training camp.
Things went serenely enough before the race paused for its one and only rest day in the Ligurian port of Sanremo. A few days earlier, the Italian drugs squad, the NAS, had already visited a number of hotel rooms just vacated by Giro riders in Montevarchi, finding numerous empty syringes and blister packs. Now they descended upon Sanremo to conduct a raid of extraordinary scale and shock value at the Hotel des Anglais, where Ullrich and Telekom were among the guests. Marco Pantani’s Mercatone Uno team were in the same hotel – and soon agents would be foraging in the bushes and flowerbeds outside for a bag allegedly hidden there by Pantani’s personal soigneur.
One member of the NAS didn’t even need to look for evidence – a syringe hit him as it flew out of a bedroom window. A rider on the Tacconi Sport team, Giuseppe Di Grande, allegedly decided the safest way to dispose of incriminating material was not to throw the drugs into the garden but himself; Di Grande was intercepted just as he was getting airborne.
In 2004, Ullrich recalled what La Gazzetta dello Sport the next day described as ‘The Giro’s Darkest Night’: ‘Two officers began searching my room. In one cardboard box they made a discovery that clearly made quite an impression on them: an inhaler, a huge syringe and a yellow liquid. They immediately called two of their colleagues into the room to proudly show them what they’d found. Rudy Pevenage, who speaks Italian, explained to them that it was apparatus and medication for completely harmless inhalations that I needed every night because I was ill . . . The whole room was ransacked. Every bit of medication they found was noted down and confiscated. That included vitamin pills, antibiotics and two doses of cortisone. I wanted to tell them that I had a bad cold and needed these medicines but they weren’t interested. I wanted to show them the certificate I’ve had since 1996, which allows me to take cortisone to treat symptoms of exercise-induced asthma. But they didn’t want to see anything.’
In an interview a few days before the raid, Ullrich had advocated life bans for convicted dopers. Now, reports in Italian newspapers claimed that the NAS had needed four pages to itemize what they had found in his room, including salbutamol, theophylline, corticoids and various other drops, pills and pomades.
All told, the NAS had seized medicines from eighty-one riders and numerous team doctors, including Telekom’s Lothar Heinrich. In Heinrich’s room they found Pulmicort, a corticosteroid authorized with a medical certificate. There were also high-dose caffeine pills that Heinrich said had helped keep him awake on a flight to Europe from Florida.
Stage eighteen would finally be cancelled amid threats by the peloton that they would stop racing altogether. The following day, when the Giro did resume, the rider lying second on general classification, Dario Frigo, was sent home and fired by his team for attempting to dope with what he believed was synthetic haemoglobin but turned out to be distilled water.
Frigo’s ejection infuriated Ullrich, he told Der Spiegel. He was also incensed that the NAS had confiscated the cortisone he was allowed to use to treat his asthma, per a therapeutic use exemption approved by the UCI.
The Der Spiegel interview was followed by another one, on television, with Germany’s most popular sports programme, Sportschau. Hartmut Scherzer, a journalist who had covered cycling for German newspapers and agencies since the 1970s, watched it and cringed.
‘Jan sort of corresponded to the Rostock stereotype,’ Scherzer says. ‘He didn’t talk much, and he was insecure. He hated press conferences. Hated interviews. Anyway, there, Frigo was suspended and on the Saturday night, Sportschau had a live link-up to the hotel where Ullrich was and they interviewed him from Mainz. What did he think about Frigo, and the police, etcetera? I can remember his exact words: “All of those black sheep like Frigo should be suspended for life.” I was in the hotel, sitting with Rudy Pevenage, and when Rudy heard this he put his head in his hands. Unfortunately, Jan doesn’t think about what he’s doing or saying. That’s always been his problem. Plus, besides Rudy, no one was really looking after him.’
Ultimately, when in August the investigating magistrate in Florence opened proceedings against fifty-two individuals, Ullrich was not among them. Questions remained, like the legitimacy of Telekom spokesman Olaf Ludwig’s claim Ullrich suffered from a pine-pollen allergy that had been well documented for years. Or who was right – the former Festina soigneur Willy Voet, who ridiculed the pollen-allergy alibi in an interview on German national TV, or Ullrich, who claimed that he was going to sue Voet. And, finally, why Heinrich had mentioned Kevin Livingston’s asthma in interviews but not Ullrich’s.
Months later, Ullrich’s file would be reopened and passed to the German National Cycling Federation, who finally decided that neither he nor Heinrich had any case to answer. The UCI’s medical commission agreed, thus officially quashing the idea that Ullrich had been using cortisone not to treat asthma but enhance his performance – and specifically to trim fat, which is among the drug’s side effects. Anyway, as Telekom’s Head of Communications, Jürgen Kindervater, had said after Sanremo, ‘organized doping would be impossible at Telekom.’
Ullrich finished the Giro in a lowly fifty-second place but at least confident that the race had put him firmly on the right track for the Tour. He hoped now that ‘The Tour passes off without doping’ – something that, given what had occurred in Sanremo, seemed improbable. The start of the 2001 season had seen the long-awaited introduction of a test for EPO – and it had taken just four months to claim its first victim, the Dane Bo Hamburger. There would surely have been more, but the shadowy gurus who for years had been leveraging cycling’s moral bankruptcy already had their clients well briefed.
Lance Armstrong, of course, knew the whole playbook. He spoke openly to teammates about the intricacies of the test and how to avoid getting caught. To that end, he had concocted a bulletproof plan of micro-dosing, time at altitude to boost the body’s natural EPO production and muddle the test, and intravenous injections with a small detection window. Or so Armstrong believed. Tyler Hamilton first made the claim that Armstrong tested positive for EPO in the 2001 Tour of Switzerland in his book, The Secret Race, then repeated it to the United States Anti-Doping Agency years later. According to Hamilton, Armstrong matter-of-factly informed him of his positive test on the morning of the final stage in Switzerland. Hamilton also claims Armstrong told him there would be no repercussions because his ‘people had been in touch with the UCI’. Another of Armstrong’s US Postal teammates at the time, Floyd Landis, has also alleged Armstrong spoke to him about ‘paying off’ the UCI to cover up the positive test. The UCI strongly denied this, although USADA did conclude, based on several sources, that Armstrong had indeed given a sample in Switzerland which, if not sanctionable, was certainly suspicious. And he was definitely doping.
Armstrong doesn’t disagree with that bottom line, though he does tell me in 2015 that some reporting of the episode has left him confused. ‘I don’t remember the Tour of Switzerland thing as it’s been described. It was the first year they were supposedly using this test, and you had guys going, “Are they? Are they not? I don’t think they are . . .” And basically carrying on. Meanwhile, the UCI was looking at the samples, going, “Oh fuck . . .” If you see a test result there’s a band going through the middle, like a music graph, and it’s where you put the band among the dots. They were still trying to figure out where that band should go; I think they knew where they thought it should go, but if they put it there, they have like fifty positives on their hands. So they’re going, “Fuck, what are we going to do?” So they’re either adjusting the band or they’re calling these guys and telling them, “Hey, you’ve got to be careful.” That call never came to me, though. It might have gone to Johan . . .
‘In any case,’ he says finally, ‘it didn’t affect what we did.’
The final standings after ten stages in Switzerland said that Armstrong had stayed ahead of his competition and also the law. Or above it. He looked in ominous form going into the Tour de France but so, for once, did Ullrich. At the German national championships in Bad Dürrheim, he powered away from Erik Zabel in the final two kilometres to ensure that he would ride the Tour with the black, red and gold colours of the German national flag across his chest, as he had in 1997. After collecting his jersey on the podium, Ullrich had jumped on his bike and ridden home to Merdingen – a 75-kilometre encore . . . after a 210-kilometre race.
At the Tour’s team presentation in Dunkirk a few days later, his sveltesse didn’t pass unnoticed. One of Armstrong’s US Postal imperial guard, Christian Vande Velde, gulped. ‘It was my first Tour, and I just was standing there, looking at his body, his legs, and I turned to George Hincapie and said, “Holy fuck, we’re in trouble.” I mean, his veins were like garden hoses. I said to George, “That guy is a fucking mutant. He’s going to fucking kill us.” I was speechless. And he was wearing leg warmers. You could see these veins through his leg warmers.’
Premiered in the 1952 edition, the first Tour to enjoy daily TV coverage, Alpe d’Huez is nowadays referred to as cycling’s ‘Hollywood’ climb – and Ullrich and Armstrong were to star in the first blockbuster of the 2001 race on stage ten. Both men found themselves in unfamiliar positions, over thirteen minutes down on surprise maillot jaune François Simon. Two days earlier, in torrential rain and polar temperatures, Telekom and US Postal had engaged in a blinking contest on the road through the Jura mountains to Pontarlier, allowing a fourteen-man group including Simon to gain thirty-five minutes.
What occurred next has become a fabled chapter in the Tour’s mythology. The widely accepted, oft-corroborated version goes that, after feigning weakness for much of the stage, Armstrong tore off his pain mask and committed an act of rare savagery on the lower slopes of Alpe d’Huez to win the stage and bury Ullrich. Worse, he looked over his shoulder and into Ullrich’s eyes as he launched the attack. As though wanting a visual keepsake of the distress being inflicted – a souvenir of Ullrich’s humiliation, a polaroid to allegorize their ‘rivalry’, a painting that would hang in his mental gallery like his own private, sanguinary Caravaggio.
‘The Look’, the image, the moment, was instantly christened.
Back in the smaller of the Hemelrijk restaurant’s two dining rooms in Geraardsbergen, Rudy Pevenage is chewing on the first mouthfuls of his ‘Américain’ when I broach 2001 and Alpe d’Huez. The topic itself causes Pevenage a curious kind of indigestion, for to the ignominy of defeat, on this occasion, was added the embarrassment of being fooled – or at least of Armstrong having given that impression.
For this act of deception, Armstrong and US Postal didn’t use drugs or blood – only the airwaves. Intercom radios. These devices had quickly become popular in professional cycling since their introduction by the team for which Armstrong rode in the early and mid-1990s, Motorola. Via matchbox-sized receivers tucked into jersey pockets and connected to two-way mics, riders and their directeurs sportifs could relay real-time information back and forth between the peloton and team cars, which were also equipped with TV monitors. Purists complained they had changed cycling for the worse, breeding a generation of ‘radio-controlled’ riders who showed no initiative. Less well known or hotly debated by the general public was the fact that some directeurs had become adept at ‘hacking’ the frequencies of rival teams’ radios and eavesdropping on their tactics. As they were in most things, Bruyneel, Armstrong and US Postal had been in the vanguard of this form of espionage.
Telekom, a team sponsored by a telecommunications company with 50 billion euros turnover a year and with two stars, Erik Zabel and Jan Ullrich, raised under a regime that used to allocate $1 billion a year to spying on its own citizens, had been comparatively slow to cotton on.
Pevenage assures me that by 2001 and certainly at Alpe d’Huez, he was doing to Bruyneel, his nosy Geraardsbergen neighbour, what Bruyneel was doing to him. It had, though, taken the input of another wily operator, Vicente Belda of the Kelme team, to bring him up to speed.
‘Maybe we were a bit naive,’ he concedes. ‘I found out what was happening at the 2000 Vuelta. Oscar Sevilla was one of the Kelme leaders, and I used to be quite friendly with Vicente Belda, their directeur sportif. In the stage to Albacete, there was a lot of wind, and Sevilla was competing for the overall. Belda was scared that the wind was going to split the race, so he came and asked whether we could help Sevilla. He said that, in return, he’d tell me a secret that I’d be able to use the following year at the Tour . . . So, at the start of the Tour in 2001, Belda gave me US Postal’s frequency. I had no idea before that. But it worked, because after that I could hear Bruyneel.’
The satisfaction was short-lived, for Pevenage had sensed for a while that Bruyneel was onto Pevenage being onto him. Just as Telekom had recruited their man from behind enemy lines in Kevin Livingston, US Postal had also mined the Telekom brain trust by signing up Ullrich’s former mechanic, Jean-Marc Vandenberghe. Vandenberghe had kept a lot of his old contacts at Telekom, and Pevenage suspected news travelled quickly down that particular grapevine. Not that Bruyneel would have been surprised. ‘You know that everyone’s listening to everybody, and there’s just no way around that,’ he says. Which Armstrong echoes: ‘Pevenage was listening, but we were listening to him. Every day. Every year . . . I assumed everyone was listening to everyone.’
In Bruyneel’s pre-race briefing in Aix-les-Bains that morning, he at least hinted that it may be a good day to lay a trap that he and Armstrong had been plotting for some time. Armstrong would puff and pant, fake a ‘pain face’, Telekom would see and start making the pace – thus sparing US Postal some spade work. Then, Armstrong would strike.
‘That day, there was one big climb, Madeleine, then another one, Glandon, and then Alpe d’Huez,’ Armstrong remembers. ‘So we get to the Madeleine – and this is me just being typical me, an egomaniac, because I’d won two Tours and I was feeling good – we get there, and I’m like, If anyone’s going to set the tempo on the climbs, it’s us. But we hit that climb and they go to the front . . .’
Armstrong frowns and cocks his head to one side, mimicking his reaction at the time.
‘I’m like, What? This is our Tour. Look at these motherfuckers. What are they thinking? This is my road. I say who sets the tempo . . . And it was Kevin. Kevin, Klöden, just driving it for Telekom. So I’m thinking, OK, what am I going to do? I’ve got an idea: I’m just going to fool them. So I just stayed by the TV motorbike. I never stayed at the back; usually I’d be right on the front, right on the wheel. But this time I stayed at the back and, when I heard the motos coming, I’d give a little more of a grimace. And I knew they were listening, so I got on the radio and said, “Johan, something’s wrong. I don’t feel good. We’ve got two more climbs and I’m suffering.” At this point, Johan doesn’t know yet that I’ve gone with the bluff. Next thing, Johan hears Rudy on the radio. “Lance told Johan he’s suffering. Give it more gas!” ’
Here, Bruyneel’s recollection of events and Armstrong’s diverge. Bruyneel downplays the influence of whatever messages were being relayed on the radio waves, believing instead that Pevenage was fooled by Armstrong’s repertoire of gulps, of grimaces on his dashboard TV screen. Regardless, it seemed to be working – as US Postal’s Spanish climber, José Luis ‘Chechu’ Rubiera, confirmed to Bruyneel.
‘Chechu was coming back a few times for bottles, and he was winking at me and telling me that Lance was super. Rudy didn’t know. He thought Lance was bad. Otherwise why would Telekom have kept on riding?’
In his kitchen in Texas, Armstrong is fully re-immersing himself in the moment.
‘So, yeah, then Johan comes on again, like, “What’s happening?? Are you OK??!” I tell him I’m definitely not, that something’s not right, so Rudy will hear. But then I drifted back and called the car, and [team owner Tom] Weisel was in there. He comes up and I wink at them. They’re like, “What?” And I wink again. Then they knew that I was just fucking with them. Then it continued on the next climb. We had good guys – Rubiera, [Roberto] Heras – but those Spanish dudes didn’t really speak much English, and my Spanish isn’t great, but I made up this thing: “Esperamos, miramos, decidimos, atacamos.” – “We wait, we look, we decide and then we attack.” I told them that and they loved that shit. Chechu was like, “What’s this guy talking about?” And Heras just spoke no English. But they loved that shit.’
As Armstrong’s bravado was reaching its zenith, so the perception of Ullrich and Telekom as his half-witted whipping boys was about to receive further corroboration. For what it is worth, Pevenage is still adamant that they didn’t get fooled, telling me he was immediately suspicious of Armstrong’s huffing and puffing, contrary to what some of his Telekom riders were telling him. ‘We should have attacked before the Alpe,’ he says. ‘We knew that Lance was always going to be stronger than Jan on the Alpe. I knew that he was bluffing. What could we have done anyway? We rode to toughen up the race . . . Armstrong was just stronger. It’s not true to say that we fell into his trap.’
Ullrich later also claimed the idea they’d been tricked was ‘nonsense’, while conceding that Livingston and Klöden had got carried away. At one point, another Telekom rider, Alexander Vinokourov, had gone back to the team car to get drinks and been forced into a breathless chase to deliver them, so hard were his teammates riding on the front. Vinokourov had hurled one of the bottles against a rock face in a fit of rage.
Then, within moments of Livingston leading the peloton onto the first ramps of the Alpe, it was time for the big reveal. Rubiera surged to the front and unleashed Armstrong from out of his slipstream, like a magician swishing back his silk. It was in this instant, before his murderous flourish, that Armstrong gave Ullrich ‘The Look’.
His margin of victory was staggering – one minute and fifty-nine seconds over Ullrich, the result of having set the fifth fastest time ever for the 13.8-kilometre ascent of the Alpe. Ullrich was one of those who had gone quicker – by twenty-three seconds in 1997. But that was then, when Ullrich was two or three kilograms lighter and Armstrong was still recovering from cancer.
One Telekom rider who hadn’t been impressed was the Italian domestique Giuseppe Guerini. ‘What Armstrong did was a clown show,’ Guerini says now. ‘He took the piss out of us, out of the spectators and the whole of cycling.’
With the hubris long since faded and another mask having fallen, Armstrong sounds almost remorseful about the episode today. The idea that he set out not just to beat Ullrich but to crush and embarrass him is one that causes him to squirm.
‘The whole “Look” thing wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. It was a hot day, and I was good but not great, and Jan was good – or I thought he was good – and I was looking back thinking that, when this failed, I needed to get bailed out. I was looking to see who was going to bail me out.
‘Anyway,’ Armstrong continues, ‘I would never have trash-talked Jan. Never. He was too kind and I liked him too much. I didn’t really know him too much but I just liked him.’
I ask Armstrong whether his frequent praise of Ullrich wasn’t also a mind game, a tactic to put him under pressure.
‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I didn’t do that for anybody. If I praised someone, it was because I cared about them and respected them. I didn’t praise anybody if I didn’t mean it.’
That may be true, but, when he wasn’t flattering his rival, Armstrong could sound as frustrated with Ullrich as everyone else. As his former teammate Frankie Andreu says, ‘Lance thrived on, lived off confrontation’ – and there were times in the 2001 Tour when Armstrong seemed to lust for a stiffer, fiercer test. Ullrich had prepared better than in 1998 and 2000, but was still falling short. Armstrong would go on to beat him by a minute at Chamrousse and drop him again in each of the next two stages in the Pyrenees. They then rode in side by side on the final mountain stage to Luz Ardiden, with Ullrich stretching out his hand as they crossed the line – he said to congratulate Armstrong and ‘and thank him for the fair contest’. Armstrong obliged but truly it had been a mismatch. He thrashed Ullrich again in the final time trial in Saint-Amand-Montrond, on a course that Ullrich hadn’t even bothered to recce in full. That night, to a gathering of journalists in the garden of his manor house hotel, Armstrong argued that it wasn’t talent that had given him the edge over Ullrich – and it sure as hell wasn’t doping. No, he said, the reporters and Ullrich should all ask themselves, ‘Where was Jan Ullrich when I was here in April in the pissing rain, riding the time-trial course?’
For Armstrong, whose dangerous liaisons with Michele Ferrari had been revealed by David Walsh of the Sunday Times at the start of the Tour, Ullrich’s laziness thus became an effective shield. Another one, like the cancer which had, he said at least, given him perspective and a community of sufferers and survivors he would never think of betraying.
Nowadays, he is less scathing of Ullrich’s professionalism, perhaps because there are no more torch lights to deflect. Or maybe out of loyalty and affection.
‘We didn’t view [Telekom] as haphazard or amateurish,’ he says. ‘They may not have been as successful as us, but they didn’t have a Johan and they didn’t have a Ferrari. And, true, Jan wasn’t me when it came to the details. We had Jan and Riis’s old mechanic, Jean-Marc Vandenberghe, and he would say that the difference between me and Jan was that you could move my saddle a millimetre and I’d know instantly, whereas you could move Jan’s a centimetre and he wouldn’t know. Which is kind of cool. People like that. I even like that . . . but I just wasn’t wired that way. So, yeah, we were a tighter outfit in that sense.
‘Rudy was probably good on the road, I guess, but that’s the last little piece,’ Armstrong continues. ‘You’ve got to get that crew, plan out their year, motivate them . . . Bruyneel was a thousand times better. Just so I’m on the record about this, Johan Bruyneel was the greatest coach in the history of sports. Yes. Fact. Based on how he could motivate and inspire. He was smart, tactically very astute, and he didn’t just do it with me: he did it with Contador, with a bunch of other guys later. He’s just special. I know that’s not going to be popular but I don’t care.
‘So, no, going back to Jan, I would never say he didn’t do anything with his talent, or that he wasted it. I would speak of him in terms of how much I respected him, and how much potential he had . . . Because it’s purely potential. But that narrative as you described it just became the narrative. That’s what you guys took out of it, that’s what the public took out of it, and, you know, in those situations, the guy who gets chunky in the winter, the guy who doesn’t live up to his potential and makes these mistakes that human beings make, those ultimately endeared him to the people. He was much more popular on the road than I was. But Poulidor was always popular too – and he always finished second. And Merckx wasn’t. So there you go . . .’
Armstrong coasted into Paris with an advantage of nearly seven minutes over Ullrich on the overall standings and an even bigger margin in a different competition. The Tour’s photographers had awarded him their annual Prix Citron, or Lemon Trophy, for the bitterest, most obnoxious rider in the field. The presentation of a basket of lemons was made on the final morning. Armstrong’s reaction was acidic and expletive-laden.
Jan Ullrich pondered his third runners-up finish in four Tours over a glass or three of red wine on a boat on the River Seine. The memorable, water-bound venue for their post-race party seemed befitting of Telekom’s fine Tour overall. The team’s dedication to Ullrich had not stopped Erik Zabel from claiming three stage wins and his sixth green jersey. Ullrich had never truly threatened Armstrong but seemed reconciled, like Rudy Pevenage and Walter Godefroot, to the American’s invincibility, at least in this edition. The Telekom bigwigs in Bonn were also satisfied. At a homecoming reception at corporate HQ in Bonn a couple of days later, Telekom board member Heinz Klinkhammer introduced Ullrich as ‘not the first loser of the Tour but the second winner’. All present responded with rapturous applause.
Klinkhammer’s plaudits echoed Ullrich’s own feelings about how he had performed. For the first time in years he had finished a Tour free of regret. He had overcome the travails of his early spring and Armstrong’s comments in Saint-Amand-Montrond seemed not to have shaken his own belief that his way was the right way – at least for him. Besides, Armstrong might well ask where he was in April, but Ullrich could equally turn the question around and ask where Armstrong had disappeared to in August. The answer was a schmooze-cruise of American talk shows, receptions and festivities, followed by a long holiday. Meanwhile, Ullrich took his post-Tour form into a series of lesser races and demonstrated what cycling would look like without Armstrong. Which is to say, with Ullrich ruling the world.
After his world championship time trial victory in Treviso in 1999, two years on, he targeted a historic double in Lisbon – victory in both the time trial and the road race. Ullrich had been the first German to complete the first half of the ‘rainbow slam’, and now he hoped to end a thirty-five-year road-race drought since Rudi Altig’s victory on the Nürburgring.
He would justify his pre-race favourite’s billing by winning the time trial, but the margin of victory over Britain’s David Millar was gossamer thin – a mere six seconds. Many in the German camp already had visions of Ullrich uncorking champagne on Sunday night. But fears that he needed a tougher test than the Lisbon course proved well-founded. Terrorized by his performances in hilly one-day races like the Championship of Zürich and Giro dell’Emilia in August and September, rival teams now built their entire game plan around thwarting Ullrich – and ultimately succeeded despite his three thunderous attacks. This left Erik Zabel to forage for crumbs of consolation for the German team, but Zabel could only manage fifth in the bunch sprint won by Oscar Freire. Walter Godefroot, for one, was unimpressed. ‘Jan goes on the climb but doesn’t get enough of a gap, then he doesn’t bother leading Erik out in the sprint. If he had, Erik would be world champion.’
Regardless, Ullrich was signing off for 2001 and doing so with a telling closing remark: ‘I have no desire to keep finishing second in the Tour de France.’ For all that the season had ended with another Indian summer, apparently being labelled as a perennial nearly man or, worse, loser had begun to grind Ullrich down.
Too few sympathized, but among those who did was Ullrich’s first cycling hero, Greg LeMond. The two hadn’t met, and indeed the three-time American Tour champion had got to know Ullrich the same way that Ullrich had got to know him – by admiring him through a TV screen. LeMond had drifted away from professional cycling after his retirement in 1994, disillusioned by what he believed was the sport’s escalating EPO problem. He had been back in the news in the summer of 2001 – but that, too, was to do with drugs or his suspicions about who was using them. LeMond’s response to the revelation by Sunday Times journalist David Walsh that Armstrong was being coached by Michele Ferrari had read – and perhaps been intended – as the pre-emptive epitaph for Armstrong’s career: ‘If Lance’s story is true, it’s the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If it’s not, it’s the greatest fraud.’
These sentiments had started a war with Armstrong. Parallel to that, LeMond also found himself feeling for Ullrich. LeMond had heard many of the same judgements now levelled at Ullrich when, in the dying embers of his own career, he was struggling to keep up with a turbo-charged peloton. ‘I can only imagine his frustration at not being able to win again after 1997,’ LeMond told me some years later. ‘There’s always a human side to this, as well; he was a kid from East Germany, with a different background. People were calling him a fat pig, lazy, criticizing him, and I can only imagine how it felt to him. He was finishing second in the biggest bike race in the world yet it still wasn’t good enough for anyone.’
Jens Heppner, Ullrich’s friend and mentor at Telekom, had witnessed Ullrich’s first, lopsided duels with Armstrong at much closer quarters. Heppner now thinks that 2001 marked a watershed – or at least the beginnings of hope’s decay into resignation, of Ullrich’s already fragile passion paling into apathy. Heppner thinks it might even have been the beginning of the end.
‘I think at a certain point, maybe around that time, he lost his love for cycling. Everyone had said here’s this massive talent who’s going to win the Tour seven or eight times, then Armstrong appears out of nowhere – and we knew Armstrong before; he was good going uphill for five kilometres and no more. But now suddenly he’s so superior. Jan’s problem then was that the idea that he should be winning somehow persisted, and yet he knew implicitly that he had absolutely no chance. Zero. There was that contradiction. Yet the journalists wanted to know why, how come he was only finishing second again. He would say that Armstrong was just better, but at the same time something didn’t quite add up. That was where I think he stopped enjoying it.
‘The problem wasn’t so much that Armstrong had come back or how he’d done it. It was the air from Armstrong that “I’m the best and you’re nothing.” That was the aura he gave off to everyone. And Jan felt it.’