14
‘One of the most famous people in Germany was walking alongside me, a millionaire, and yet he was helpless’
—Sylvia Schenk
Telekom had finished the 2001 season as the ‘best team in the world’ according to Walter Godefroot (the official rankings placed them behind Fassa Bortolo) and the venue for their annual post-Christmas training camp was also one for social climbers. The one star who owned a villa over the road from the Dorint golf resort on Mallorca’s south-west coast, Claudia Schiffer, arguably said even more about the prestige of where Telekom had made their base than the five on the wrought-iron gate.
Godefroot, though, had other things on his mind besides the valet service and fluffy towels. The Telekom boss was giving himself a guided tour of the spa one day when he wandered into the gym and saw something alarming. ‘I come into the gym and Jan’s not gone training but there he is lifting heavy weights,’ he remembers. ‘I say to myself, Well, I’m not a coach, but that can’t be good for him. No one on the team could push the weights that Jan did. I called everyone together – Doctor Heinrich, [Ullrich’s masseur] Eule, Becker and Rudy – and asked them whether they approved. I’m paying a doctor, a coach and a soigneur yet there’s Jan doing whatever the hell he wants. It’s not normal . . . I tell Rudy we have to talk to Jan but Rudy says that we mustn’t say anything because Jan’s already threatening to retire. It was the same with his food: people would be watching him stuffing his face and they’d say nothing. Not Kindervater, not Becker, not Strohband, not Rudy. No one. I’m the only one – and even I don’t say much.’
In South Africa before Christmas, Peter Becker had surprised Ullrich by reading him a letter he had penned a few weeks earlier, less a message than an oath, a manifesto for how, together, he and Ullrich would finally defeat Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. Ullrich’s main takeaway from South Africa, though, had been a stubborn pain in his right knee. Rumours later circulated that Ullrich had forgotten to pack his shoes, and that a new or borrowed pair had caused a painful misalignment further up his leg. Later, in his autobiography, Ullrich said only that he had felt good on the first day on the Cape and had ended up extending what was supposed to be a gentle limb-loosener ride to a full 120 kilometres. The following day he began to feel discomfort after a couple of hours. Then, on ride number three, the pain was so acute that Ullrich couldn’t go more than half an hour without pausing on the side of the road. Finally, he was able to clock up around 2,000 kilometres for the whole trip, but only thanks to painkilling injections that he would later regret.
Those treatments allowed him to soft-tap through training rides at Telekom’s Mallorca training camp and even to compete at the Tour of Qatar at the end of January. But the pain returned on a second trip to South Africa in early February, with scans showing inflammation in the tendons of the right knee. He returned early to Germany and underwent further tests in Freiburg. They confirmed that the knee had been damaged, overstressed. The only remedy would be rest and recovery.
Yet again, for the fifth year in a row, Ullrich’s first race of the season was against the calendar. Each attempt to resume training was followed shortly afterwards by another enforced break, a further summons to Freiburg, more tests and another delay. Finally it was decided that the only way to break the pattern was for Ullrich to commit to three weeks of in-patient rehab at a clinic in Badenweiler, the Black Forest spa town where Anton Chekhov died in 1904, famously toasting the moment with a glass of champagne.
While present days consisted of aqua-jogging and physiotherapy, Ullrich’s past excesses were again on the agenda as the court of Ullrich met for crisis talks. And, by excesses, Ullrich’s coaches and doctors meant on the bike as well as off it – specifically his penchant for turning huge gears. Team doctors Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid put it to Ullrich that pushing huge loads while he was overweight created a double jeopardy for which he was now paying the price. Peter Becker nodded in agreement. ‘It was the usual business of, “I’m going to do it and I’ll show everyone.” And he ruined his knee with that bullshit,’ Becker says now.
Nevertheless, when the inflammation visible on the earlier scans had disappeared, Becker would be driving from Berlin to Merdingen as he had done countless times before to take up temporary residence in the guest house belonging to Ullrich’s friend, Erich Keller. This one, though, would be different from the training binges that Becker had overseen before; an old acquaintance from Becker’s SV Dynamo days, the track sprinter, Eyk Pokorny, helped him to turn Ullrich’s garage into an altitude chamber, where Ullrich would be able to train at high aerobic intensities while spinning small gears.
Ullrich now spent mornings on the indoor trainer, wheezing on oxygen-starved air, and afternoons on the Black Forest roads, with Becker observing from his car. So it went until 29 April, when Becker had to leave Merdingen and return to Berlin for his wife’s birthday. And left Ullrich with the warning: ‘Nothing stupid while I’m gone.’
The next morning, Ullrich woke as usual, trained for three hours on his indoor trainer, as usual, then met with Andreas Klöden for what was supposed to be a leisurely ride through the vineyards encircling Merdingen. Rainclouds had huddled in the valley but Ullrich announced that they would simply ride through them, past them, over them – whatever it took to clock up kilometres. They started slowly but as the second hour became the third and the third the fourth, Klöden noticed that Ullrich was picking up the pace – until Klöden was corkscrewing out of his slipstream. They were around 20 kilometres from home, now flying down the Rhine Valley, when suddenly Ullrich felt the familiar stabbing pain in his right knee. A couple of hours later, Lothar Heinrich arrived at Ullrich’s house for a routine progress check – and Ullrich said nothing, even when Heinrich began to download the data off Ullrich’s power meter onto his laptop and the doctor’s posture stiffened. At first Heinrich thought one or the other device must be broken. Ullrich told him that, no, he had ‘felt just great’ and his knee was ‘absolutely fine’. Which were lies.
The following day, Becker was back behind the wheel, back behind Ullrich and Klöden as they rode towards the Glottertal, the valley north-west of Freiburg which acts as a gateway to the best cycling routes in the Black Forest. ‘Look out, Klödi. I’ve had enough,’ Ullrich announced at one point. ‘I’m going to ride to the Glottertal, up this mountain, as hard and fast as I can. Either the knee holds together or it smashes to pieces.’
It was, Ullrich admitted later, ‘total madness’.
They hadn’t got far before Klöden was again struggling to hold the wheel and Becker was pulling alongside Ullrich with his window down, screaming at him to slow down. Soon Becker was barking at Ullrich to get off his bike and into Becker’s car, which headed straight for the university clinic in Freiburg.
Ullrich could generally count on a more sympathetic audience from Andreas Schmid, but the doctor did the necessary scans and now also reviewed the data from Ullrich’s power meter that had troubled Lothar Heinrich. Schmid told Ullrich that the previous day’s session had been equivalent to a Tour de France stage.
Schmid promptly made an appointment for Ullrich to see one of Germany’s leading knee specialists, Albert Güßbacher, at his clinic in Bavaria the following morning. Meanwhile, Ullrich decided to console himself with a night out in Freiburg with Eyk Pokorny, the track sprinter who had installed Ullrich’s altitude chamber a few weeks earlier.
By the end of their meal, Ullrich and Pokorny had dispatched three bottles of wine, after which they headed to one of Ullrich’s frequent haunts, Kagan, and drank more. It was gone three in the morning and they were finally about to head home when, on the way to their cars, the pair got chatting to two girls. Minutes later one of the new acquaintances found herself in the passenger seat of Ullrich’s Porsche as he pulled out, wheelspun into a U-turn, misjudged speed and angles and smashed into a bike rack. The scene was witnessed by too many people for Ullrich to count and also too many for him not to be recognized. No sooner had he turned down a side street and got out to inspect the damage than police were approaching.
Having for a moment considered using Pokorny’s name, Ullrich finally gave his own – and even had to hitch up his trousers to show the police his legs and prove he really was the Jan Ullrich, the cyclist. He then blew into a breathalyser. The reading was 1.4 milligrams of alcohol per millilitre of blood – almost three times the legal limit.
Ullrich would end up losing his driving licence for nine months. It had been coming: a few months earlier he had burst a tyre on the autobahn while doing over 250 kph. Now he was in danger of losing something more valuable than a car – his relationship with his partner of seven years, Gaby. The fact that another woman had at least a walk-on part in his nocturnal escapade made it even harder to explain away. Whatever soul-searching Ullrich did privately would be followed by another mea culpa in his autobiography a couple of years later: ‘In the first part of the year I’d been far too wrapped up in myself to realize how much I was hurting Gaby. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d been a bit more attentive. Gaby realized much more quickly and clearly than me that something was going very wrong in my life.’21
Peter Becker had got a call from Gaby at around about the time he and Ullrich should have been leaving for their appointment with Albert Güßbacher. He was angry with Ullrich but furious at Pokorny, telling him he was a ‘hobo’. Becker still becomes animated when the incident is mentioned now. ‘Ulli betrayed himself, he betrayed me and everyone else. I told him, “Right, now there are going to be some consequences. First, you call your manager and he can sort this whole thing out.” And he said: “What do you mean? Nothing’s happened. No one knows about it.” The naivety. He thought it was no big deal!
‘How far is he really aware of his responsibilities, and where’s his social conscience? I can see one cause for it and I’m partly to blame – for him winning the DDR road race championships at such a young age, fourteen going on fifteen, and, later, also winning the Tour de France so young. His development, morally and socially, is out of proportion with his success. That’s one cause. He hasn’t understood who he is in the world and he wasn’t ready to step forward and really give something of himself. In interviews it was always: “OK, mate, bye.” He has to work on his image.’
Becker’s choice of words alone – the talk of ‘social conscience’, ‘giving something of oneself’ and ‘social development’ – carries faint echoes of one of the seminal documents of the DDR, ‘The Ten Commandments for the New Socialist Personality’. These edicts came from Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht himself, and were diffused not only through the media but also on concertina-shaped cards with which DDR citizens were called to adorn their mantelpieces. The Ullrichs may not have even had or displayed one of the leaflets in their living room – but, at least for a while, they were beholden to a patriarchal figure, Werner Ullrich, whose violent tendencies and alcoholism may have had a significant influence on the personalities of a fledgling family. Becker may, then, be underestimating how many of Ullrich’s problems had their root in his DNA, or in the neural rewiring caused by early traumas. Ullrich’s mother confided at the time of the drink-driving charge that her son’s most recent antics reminded her of his father. Ullrich admitted that this also crossed his mind when he went to Rostock to ‘surprise’ Marianne two weeks after the Freiburg incident. Perhaps jolted by Gaby’s admonishments, he decided that his impromptu visit should be followed by a second, bigger gift: the promise to buy – or build – his mother a house in Papendorf, the village outside Rostock where they had spent the happiest years of Jan’s youth.
As some serenity returned to his private life, professionally the outlook remained somewhat bleaker. At his manager Wolfgang Strohband’s urging, Ullrich turned to the knee specialist Bernd Kabelka, whose client list included tennis stars Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl and world-famous boxers Vladimir and Vitali Klitschko. Kabelka told Ullrich he needed an operation to remove an inflamed fold, or ‘plica’, in the tissue lining his right knee – and a few days later carried out the surgery. Doctor Lothar Heinrich was present at the operation but sceptical as to whether it was the best course of action, not least because none of the other experts who had seen scans of Ullrich’s knee – ‘all manner of doctors, therapists and even dubious alternative healers,’ as Ullrich put it later – had mentioned the plica. Ullrich had also initially consulted Kabelka without Heinrich’s and Andreas Schmid’s permission.
Kabelka declared the operation a success, but there would be no miracle. Ullrich promptly announced that he would now miss the Tour de France at a press conference in Umkirch bei Freiburg, a few minutes’ drive from his house and even closer to the spot where his Porsche had obliterated a bike rack. Soon he’d be checking into a lakeside Bavarian clinic owned by a multi-millionaire friend for residential rehab. Bad Wiessee is infamous in German history as the scene of key events in ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ – Hitler’s 1934 purge on the Nazi’s own SA and the execution of their leader, Ernst Röhm. The resort is also known and prized for its idyllic setting on the Tegernsee lake, in the heart of the Bavarian Alps – and for its proximity to central Munich.
Which, for Jan Ullrich, would quickly become synonymous with temptation.
Possibly because Telekom had also begun sponsoring Bayern Munich’s football club, word of Ullrich’s newly flourishing social life and frequent visits to some of Bayern’s players habitual nightspots would quickly get back to Telekom HQ in Bonn. Jürgen Kindervater travelled to Bad Wiessee to issue a gentle call to order. It did not have the desired effect, for a few days later, Ullrich was spotted in the early hours in the company of an unidentified blonde and a vodka and Red Bull at Munich’s Milch Bar nightclub.
Tabloid reporters speculated later that this could even have been when and where it had happened. Or it could equally have been the following night. It was Ullrich swallowing two white pills given to him by a friend he has never publicly named, to ‘make him feel better’. And it would have disastrous consequences.
At the time, Ullrich felt nothing. No euphoria, no hallucinations – just numb anti-climax. He wouldn’t even say where it had happened, either because he wasn’t sure or to protect one of the venues where he partied that night, Pasha, whose proud door policy had given rise to a slogan: ‘Music is the only drug’. Ultimately, the wheres also didn’t matter, not to him. Ullrich knew for a fact that he had returned to Bad Wiessee some time around dawn, fallen asleep, then been woken at around noon the following day by a knock and a voice: ‘National Anti-Doping Agency, Mr Ullrich.’ When he opened the door, he was greeted by an unfamiliar face – not the guy the agency ‘usually’ sent. When Wolfgang Strohband heard this later, he became suspicious. ‘We also always said someone must be with him when he got tested. But that day it was just him,’ Strohband says.
Woozily, Ullrich asked whether or why he still qualified for testing given that he probably wouldn’t race again before 2003. But the tester seemed nice enough and, having complied with protocol, Ullrich even sent him away with an autograph.
It would be seven days before consequence caught up with action. First there was a text message from Lothar Heinrich with the instruction to call him immediately. Then, when Ullrich did, Heinrich ordered him to get to Freiburg as soon as possible. Why, Heinrich wouldn’t say.
The next morning he told Ullrich, ‘Jan, we have bad news. You’ve got a positive test. There were traces of amphetamine in your urine.’
It had been one week since the fateful night in Munich and it would be one more before the news was made public. Ullrich assured Heinrich and Schmid that he had no idea what had happened, whether something he’d eaten or taken could have been contaminated. It finally dawned just as he and Gaby pulled into their drive in Merdingen: the two pills he had taken in Munich. He immediately called the friend who had supplied them, demanded to know what they were and wrote the name on a note. Four letters: MDMA. Ecstasy, amphetamine – it all added up to the same cataclysmic outcome. People would hear ‘drugs’ and think doping, he told Gaby. The only way out was to say that his knee had forced him to retire. She told him not to be ridiculous.
But nothing was off the table as long as only a handful of people knew. The new German Cycling Federation (BDR) president, Sylvia Schenk, was one of them. By chance, the German national championships were taking place that weekend in Bühl, not far from Merdingen, and Schenk was due to attend. She and Ullrich agreed to meet on the day of the race at a service station just off the Number 5 Autobahn.
In her first few months in the job, the cosiness of Telekom’s relationship with the BDR had alarmed Schenk. She had competed for West Germany in the 800 metres at the 1972 Olympics before building a successful career as a lawyer and politician and also a reputation for uncompromising integrity. In a world more accustomed to tracksuits than trouser suits and where the only academics were men wielding syringes, Schenk’s clipped tones and businesslike demeanour had immediately marked her out from the rank and file. When I meet her in Berlin in 2016, she describes her immersion in cycling’s arcane social norms and idiosyncrasies as ‘a culture shock’. She points to the fact that Olaf Ludwig managed a Telekom feeder squad and performed PR duties for the main team while simultaneously sitting on the BDR board and working as the German national team selector. She had finally reconciled herself to the fact that, whatever the conflicts of interest, Telekom’s success had elevated the entire German cycling movement – and their influence still dwarfed all others. To her regret, Schenk had realized ‘you cannot operate in the same way in sport and anti-corruption.’
She would demonstrate this new pragmatism by showing Ullrich her human touch. She suggested that Wolfgang Strohband wait at the service station while she and Ullrich went for a walk. She had decided that she would be sympathetic but not blur lines. Hence she made a point of calling Ullrich ‘Sie’, the polite German form of ‘you’, and not ‘du’, the more informal register that in cycling was also the common parlance.
‘There were meadows behind the service station so we just left Strohband and walked for about forty-five minutes in the fields,’ Schenk remembers. ‘I asked Jan what he was thinking about it and he said, “Well, I’d better retire.” At that time, of course, it wasn’t in the public domain yet. Only about five people knew. So he said this and my reply was, “OK, well, what will you do for the next three months, then the next three years? Because you know cycling and nothing else.” My view was that he had to go public with it, say he’d made a mistake. Then I talked to Strohband – we had a coffee in the service station, all of us together – and I said that he mustn’t stop cycling and not say anything. That would be crazy. They were suggesting that one way out was to say that it was his knee and he simply couldn’t ride any more. They finally agreed with me and the following day Olaf Ludwig, who was on our board, convinced Jürgen Kindervater. We were going to prepare for the announcement by making calls to all of our regional committees, some sponsors and journalists, just telling them what was going to happen and to be ready for it. This was the Monday, I think. Then, on the Wednesday, we found out that Bild Zeitung knew, so we had three or four hours to make all the calls and brief everyone.’
On her drive home from the Black Forest, Schenk had been able to reflect on Ullrich and his predicament. Lothar Heinrich had told her that he and Andreas Schmid were already worried before the positive test when they could barely get hold of him in Bad Wiessee. He had looked to her, too, like someone for whom it was all too much – especially now.
‘To me, him saying that he wanted to quit was just him running away and not wanting to take responsibility,’ Schenk says. ‘Generally, he was not someone who was really thinking about things in great detail, I would say. He was always surrounded by people telling him what to do. We had one situation where he won the time trial in Lisbon the year before. I had a meeting that day for the UCI management committee, and when I came into the hotel they were celebrating the title. Jan had a finger of red wine in his glass, then he ordered a second glass. Everyone was there: Kindervater, the German national under-23 coach Peter Weibel, everyone. And no one said anything, except me. I said, “Er, do you really think you should be having another glass?” But he didn’t think it was an issue and neither did anyone else. I think it was kind of the same thing with him putting on weight. In 2002, after the positive test, I had a phone conversation with Strohband. I told him I thought Jan had an eating disorder. Strohband asked me what an eating disorder was. I explained it to him, then said that, from my perspective, what was happening with Jan was more than just the usual weight gain that most athletes experienced in the winter. It sounded to me more like an addiction.
‘But on that day in Bühl, I was thinking to myself that one of the most famous people in Germany was walking alongside me, a millionaire, and yet he was helpless. Totally helpless. He didn’t know how to manage himself or the situation.’
Ullrich could at least count on the support of his employer. His problem was also Telekom’s and, in particular, Jürgen Kindervater’s. For over a decade, this fifty-seven-year-old from the Harz mountains in the centre of Germany had been the company’s fire fighter extraordinaire.
Kindervater now swung into action by instructing Ullrich to leave Merdingen and head towards Kufstein, just beyond the Austrian border, where he would be met by a representative of another sponsor, Adidas. Gaby, naturally, would have to drive, since Ullrich was banned.
The Adidas intermediary, Otto Wiedemann, met Ullrich and Gaby at a petrol station at the border and told them to follow him to their destination – an alpine guesthouse at the foot of the Hintertux glacier, 1,500 metres above sea level in the Tyrolean Alps. They would end up staying there for three days, with Ullrich only ever leaving their room well after the sun had dipped below the encircling peaks. Daylight hours were spent pacing around his room, on the phone to Wolfgang Strohband, his lawyers or Kindervater. Between them, they agreed that Ullrich would comment on what was already three-day-old news at a press conference in Frankfurt on Saturday 6 July.
So it was that, mere hours before Lance Armstrong began his defence of the Tour de France in Luxembourg, and less than three hours’ drive from the start line, Jan Ullrich finally came out of hiding. He sat flanked by Sylvia Schenk, Olaf Ludwig and the director of Bad Wiessee clinic, Hubert Hörterer. The underarms of Ullrich’s grey Telekom polo shirt were soaked in sweat from the moment he took off his leather jacket.
‘Eine Dummheit’ – ‘an act of stupidity’ – was what it had been. Ullrich explained that he had been in a kind of crisis due to his knee injury and looking for distractions, some relief, anything to lift his Weltschmerz, his melancholy. It wasn’t doping and neither did he have a drug or alcohol problem. Telekom had suspended him pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings, which he considered ‘perfectly justified’. Whatever happened, whatever he’d felt and said to his inner circle in the initial panic, Ullrich ‘didn’t want to finish his career like this’.
Jürgen Kindervater stood at the back of the room, tense and watchful. A few days earlier he had told journalists that Ullrich’s was a ‘human tragedy’, perhaps hoping to drum up sympathy or hinting that Ullrich’s issues were deeper than some imagined.
Meanwhile conspiracy theories flourished. One went that Telekom were fed up with Ullrich and wanted him off the books. Had they arranged for someone to slip Ullrich the pills and for the dope test the next day? It seemed unlikely, given Kindervater’s repeated pronouncements about helping him out of the mire. Sylvia Schenk is also sceptical. ‘In cycling at that time, I think everything was possible so I have no idea. But the doctors really took care of him, so I think it’s unlikely.’
If Ullrich felt betrayed by anyone, Schenk says, it was by her and the German Cycling Federation. On 23 July, the BDR’s disciplinary commission announced that he would receive a six-month ban, bumped to seven to account for the off-season, and be eligible to race again on 23 March 2003. Ullrich wrote in his autobiography that, although he hoped not to be banned, he found the punishment ‘fair’. But a mutual acquaintance later told Schenk otherwise. ‘Someone told me that Jan was angry with me because he expected not to be punished.’
By the time he learned of his sentence, Jan Ullrich was already living in therapeutic exile on the other side of the world. Officially, the contract between Telekom and Ullrich that ran to the end of 2003 had been voided by his positive test, but Telekom had made good on a verbal promise not to ‘drop him like a hot potato’. They wondered whether a period of mutual ‘cooling off’ might be followed by a resumption of the relationship with different results. To that end, they came up with a plan to take him out of the fire.
Bob Stapleton had become a member of the Telekom ‘family’ by selling them his VoiceStream Wireless company for nearly $50 billion in 2000. One day, the softly spoken, hard-bargaining Californian businessman would take over Telekom’s cycling team and oversee Jan Ullrich’s sacking on his first afternoon in charge.
In July 2002, though, Stapleton was given the unlikely brief of Samaritan and travel agent.
‘I’d first come across Jan in 2001, when our deal had just gone through and Telekom invited us to the Tour,’ Stapleton explains. ‘It was the day Armstrong bluffed at Alpe d’Huez. There were two Americans, the CEO Don Guthrie and me, and these forty German VIPs in hospitality, and they’re all cheering when Lance is dropping back. Then the tables turn and Don and I are cheering, but we look behind us and it’s like a funeral. We’re thinking, We’d better sit down here.
‘Later, we’re invited into the room where the team was having dinner. I was just so shocked at how beaten to shit Jan was, frankly. He was eating – I’ll never forget it – a bowl of simple pasta and, next to it, a long, tall glass, like a sundae glass, full of muesli, with warm water, not milk in it. I was thinking, man, this is one disciplined operation. Anyway, we met him briefly, and he’s a very likeable guy. Very sympathetic, very empathetic. He can really connect to people, even without the vocabulary. Such a contrast to Lance in that people really liked him. An everyman guy. Liked his beer, liked his food – he had normal guy problems . . . whereas Lance, from my impression, unlikeable from the start. Super aggressive, paranoid, and you couldn’t feel at ease around him. They couldn’t have been more different in their emotional presentation. My wife is a great barometer – and she took an instant dislike to Lance. I met him for the first time at an event in California years later. We’d just bought this tiny puppy and we took it down with us. My wife is in the hotel with this puppy, and Lance just glares at her, like, What the fuck are you doing with a dog in my hotel? I mean, it was kind of a strange reaction to a cute little puppy.’
Stapleton digresses. Back to 2002 . . .
‘Yes, so one of the guys in Germany just called me up and said, “We need to get Jan out of this environment, to somewhere where he can really focus on himself. He’d really like to go to the US. Have you got any ideas?” I just whipped up a spreadsheet of kind of nice places to go where no one would know him – places like Whistler. They got the list then said they wanted to discuss it on a call. So they set up this conference call, with, like, twenty people online, and I start to go through the options for them. I get to Whistler and they say, “Yes! Canada! Jan wants to go to Whistler!” So that’s what happened.’
Memories return to Stapleton in flickers – of him picking Ullrich and Gaby up at the airport, of Jan giddily interrogating Stapleton about the capabilities of his Audi sportscar, of Gaby being ‘very together, quite impressive’, and of their dinner that night at Snoqualmie Falls Lodge, a famous filming location for the cult US drama Twin Peaks.
‘I think they ended up staying in Whistler for over a month,’ Stapleton goes on. ‘People just kept arriving. It became this big posse, this whole entourage. I think they had a couple of motivational people come in to try and rebuild his psyche. But who knows what was going on up there. A big party. The guy from Adidas [Otto Wiedemann] was super intense. He was hammering away at all of Jan’s defects, like this tough love, sports psychology spiel . . . It was clear from the reports I got later that it wasn’t much of a therapeutic experience.’
The financial cost of the Dummheit would soon begin to bite, but initially in Canada all Ullrich had wanted to do was to drown his sorrows. His first night in exile was toasted with a bottle of 1982 Château Haut-Brion – a wine for ‘people with fuck-you money’, as the wine collection expert Maureen Downey puts it in the documentary Sour Grapes. Ullrich kept the label as a souvenir. He decorated it with a signature, the date and a battle cry: ‘Now we go again!’
Back in Germany, reporters scrambled to reveal his location, but Ullrich, Stapleton and Telekom had outfoxed them. Bild claimed he was in the Caribbean, even offering photo evidence, but the picture was from a previous holiday. Other newspapers reported that he was in Florida. Meanwhile, Telekom were enduring a wretched Tour de France. The conspicuous lack of success, even from the usually reliable Erik Zabel, increased both the frequency and pertinence of questions about Ullrich’s future. ‘I don’t even know if Jan is still bike rider,’ Walter Godefroot snapped one day.
The reality was that, in Canada, Ullrich was slowly rediscovering a lust for his old life. Or some of it. Never an early riser, he made a daily exception to tune in to live broadcasts from France and the Tour. Afternoons were spent walking through the forest with Gaby, mountain-biking or riding a tandem with Otto Wiedemann. Walter Möbius, a newly retired doctor who counted former German chancellor Helmut Kohl among his patients, had been hand-picked by Jürgen Kindervater to help restore not only Ullrich’s knee but also his spirit. On both fronts, things were looking up.
Gaby, too, was seeing the old Jan re-emerge. After months of unreturned calls and dubious new acquaintances, he was becoming attentive and sensible once more. On one of their walks, she confronted him about his drinking and he promised to change. She also asked him whether he would consider becoming a father. He responded without hesitation, in the affirmative.22
On reflection, in the late summer of 1997, there had been one better gauge of Jan Ullrich’s standing in the national sporting pantheon than Der Spiegel’s poll ordaining him as the greatest ever. It had come not in the form of a vote, a trophy or accolade, but a meeting that took place in the head office of a company whose name had been, since its creation in 1924, a byword for German sporting royalty: Adidas.
From Steffi Graf to Franz Beckenbauer and the German football team, nearly all of the true greats had been as synonymous with the famous ‘three stripes’ of their Bavarian apparel supplier as they were with the black, red and yellow bands of the Flagge Deutschlands.
Having single-handedly awoken Germany’s passion for cycling and the Tour de France, Jan Ullrich, naturally, had to be inducted into the kingdom.
‘After the Tour in 1997 we were invited to Munich,’ Wolfgang Strohband remembers. ‘I was there having my meeting with the head of sponsorship when Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the CEO of the company, suddenly came in. He said, “Hello, what are you talking about here then?” So I, half jokingly, told him, “A new contract . . . and I’d really like five years.” His reply was that I should go away for a while so that he could talk to the head of department. I came back a couple of hours later and Dreyfus said to me, “Listen, we don’t want five years. We’ll make it ten.” The bonuses were no issue, either. Dreyfus was very laidback. He lived in Switzerland in a house with a fabulous view, except that it was partly blocked by a tree. I remember him telling us that he couldn’t move the tree because of a conservation order, but he was thinking about moving the house a few metres. A few months later I read in the paper that that’s what he’s done – just moved the house!’
In the summer of 2002, after a positive test for amphetamines that represented a flagrant breach of his contract, Jan Ullrich’s 300,000 euros a year retainer proved a much more easily moveable object from Adidas’s payroll. A further, temporary casualty of this, his most expensive indiscretion, would come to light only years later: a highly controversial agreement between Ullrich and German state broadcaster ARD, worth up to 195,000 euros a year, which gave the TV channel special access and Ullrich performance-based bonuses, was now also canned.
Of course, his most lucrative and important commercial association had always been with Telekom – and, in the end, it would be Ullrich, not Telekom, who decided to take a chainsaw to that umbilical cord. His existing contract had officially been suspended with the confirmation of his doping ban, but within weeks Telekom were asking Wolfgang Strohband to put together a proposal for a new agreement. These weren’t the only mixed messages. One minute Jürgen Kindervater was taking Ullrich to meet the new consorts under Telekom’s sponsorship umbrella, Bayern Munich’s footballers. The next, he was agreeing with Walter Godefroot at a meeting in Cologne that Telekom really ought to start planning for a future without Ullrich.
Rudy Pevenage remembers Godefroot in particular feeling ‘betrayed’. ‘With Jan you needed a lot of patience. He was very stubborn. But Walter had been putting up with the same thing for years, Even I was a bit sick of it.’
Pevenage says the discussion in Cologne ended with everyone agreeing that, regardless of what Ullrich decided or proposed, they, Ullrich’s old minders, would all stay with Telekom. Godefroot had no idea that the next betrayal was just around the corner.
Godefroot tells me he ‘couldn’t wrap his head around’ Ullrich’s original sin, but ‘didn’t want to kick him out’. In the end, Ullrich simply didn’t give him or Telekom a choice.
Wolfgang Strohband had in fact begun sounding out potential suitors during the Tour de France. One team – and one team manager – particularly piqued the German press’s interest. Ullrich had flourished as Bjarne Riis’s apprentice at the 1996 Tour de France, and now Riis was keen to ‘relaunch’ him in the team he managed, CSC-Tiscali. Strohband had secretly met Riis during the Tour. Soon they were making plans to reboot not only Ullrich but also Riis’s team with another household German brand name on the jersey – Deutsche Post i.e. another hatchling from the privatization deal that had produced Telekom in 1995.
‘The idea with Deutsche Post was that DHL, their parcel service, would be the name on the jersey,’ Strohband remembers. ‘They told me DHL did more deliveries by bike than anyone else in the world. They had a motor-racing driver, Heinz-Harald Frentzen, on their books, but they wanted out, they wanted to put their money into cycling. They wanted to hang a 70-metre long banner on their new building, right opposite Telekom’s. The jersey was designed and everything was agreed in principal, but then they came along one day and said, “We’ll have to break the whole thing off. We have to close such and such a number of post offices and save money.” Bjarne was very disappointed. For me, the idea of Jan with him had been a real ray of hope.’
Throughout his courtship of Ullrich, Riis had given little away – and nothing of his three trips to Deutsche Post HQ in Bonn. In late September, Ullrich confirmed via his website that he would not be returning to Telekom in 2003, and Riis reacted with the tart remark that he had ‘perhaps taken a decision alone for the first time in his life’. For the umpteenth time, here was someone who knew and had ridden with Ullrich highlighting his lack of autonomy – apparently in contradiction to the widespread view that he could also be infuriatingly set in his ways. Brian Holm says that, in fact, Ullrich’s stubbornness sometimes manifested itself as a blind, deaf and if not dumb then minimally argumentative faith in – or loyalty towards – false prophets. ‘He had his guys and not ten horses could have changed Jan’s mind. Forget about it.’
Pevenage had been one such confidant for almost a decade, but even he now admitted, ‘the Ullrich chapter is closed’. As summer turned to autumn, the German press suggested Ullrich’s signature on a two-year contract with Riis was a fait accompli, just days away – only to report later, after Deutsche Post’s withdrawal, that Ullrich’s wage demands were the ultimate deal-breaker. The asking price was around two million euros – a princely sum for a rider who had undergone a second knee operation in August, this one carried out by Ernst-Otto Münch, who had previously rebuilt the knees of several top German skiers. While Ullrich called it a ‘resounding success’, Münch offered no guarantees that he would regain full movement and power.
When we speak in 2021, Riis doesn’t mention money when I ask him now why the reunion with Ullrich didn’t come to pass. ‘I said, “Jan, I’m going to take you if you want, but it’s going to be on my terms.” Because I knew that’s what he needed – to change his environment. That was my demand, but in the end he couldn’t agree to it. The weight was only part of the problem. If you put the whole focus on that, you make it a bigger problem than it is. I was going to change the whole foundation of what he was doing, how he was thinking. But he wasn’t able to do that. He knew I could help him, he knew he maybe needed me, but to do it a hundred per cent? He didn’t want to take that step.’
Ullrich attended the Tour de France route presentation in October still without a team. The 2003 edition of the Tour would mark the race’s centenary, and the Société du Tour de France had invited every living champion to its unveiling. Having previously said that, in his second coming, he wished to broaden his horizons and focus on other races besides the Tour, Ullrich looked and sounded spellbound by the race that had given him everything yet also sapped so much of his life force. In a group photo, he stood between Armstrong and the 1959 winner, Federico Bahamontes, and a few places down from Eddy Merckx and his first Tour heroes, Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon. Before leaving for Merdingen, he walked Gaby through the gathering of old greats, collecting autographs for the first time in his life.
On his return from Canada, he had spent a few days in Switzerland, at the home of an old friend from the German under-23 team, Tobias Steinhauser. They talked about training and teams for the following year, given that Steinhauser too was out of contract. Steinhauser subtly planted a seed, an idea, that continued to germinate over the autumn: maybe one of Jan’s problems was Merdingen. Perhaps he would feel freer, less harassed, less vulnerable to assorted temptations if he could relocate to somewhere like, well, the sanctuary that Steinhauser had created on the shores of Lake Constance.
Gaby had been reticent at first but eventually Ullrich talked her round. There would be less tax to pay in Switzerland, but, most importantly, this was Ullrich proving that he’d meant what he’d said about breaking with the past. They had been together for seven years and spent them mainly on or around the corner from her parents’ winery. She had her job in Freiburg, but surely she too would be happier knowing that her partner was well away from whomever or whatever had led him astray over the previous few months. Besides, just as they had planned in the summer, there would soon be a baby on the way. What better excuse for a fresh start?
In his book, Wieder im Rennen, Andreas Burkert quotes Ullrich’s mum, Marianne, as saying that he would have left Merdingen even if Gaby had stayed – ‘as harsh as it sounds’. Luckily, she didn’t make him choose. As Wolfgang Strohband observes, ‘Jan has always been very lucky with the women in his life.’
Ullrich told the press that moving to Switzerland would also help his cycling. More mountains, easier access to Tuscany, where he intended to train with Steinhauser over the winter. These advantages were marginal (a saving of fifteen minutes on a seven-hour car journey to Tuscany) but the remaining members of Ullrich’s diminishing inner circle still welcomed his uncharacteristic decisiveness. In no time at all he had set his heart on a five-bedroom, 430-square-metre villa with lake views – and insisted on signing a contract to buy, not rent. Soon, for the first time, he would also seem suddenly interested in what money was going into and leaving his accounts. The quarterly balance sheets prepared and given to Ullrich by Wolfgang Strohband had previously remained unread.
He had admitted to the media in September that cycling had felt like his true passion until about three years earlier. Since then he had ‘only ridden because [he] had to’. He had finally come to this realization and to one of those points in life’s journey where change doesn’t so much present as impose itself, not as unconscious transition but as a series of jolts – bracing, uncomfortable but necessary.
If Telekom had indeed been his ‘golden cage’, it was time, on the cusp of his thirtieth year, to find the door and tear it from its hinges.
Jan Ullrich had not been the only or indeed even the most important Telekom figurehead to be taken off the payroll in the summer of 2002. The weeks and months either side of Ullrich’s ill-fated visit to a Munich nightclub had been traumatic ones at corporate HQ in Bonn, as German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his finance minister began to lose patience with the downward trajectory of a company that was still 43 per cent state-owned. The share price was plummeting and the CEO of the last seven years, Ron Sommer, had been castigated for splurging $46.5 billion on the purchase of Bob Stapleton’s VoiceStream Wireless. Things were predicted to come to a head at a board meeting on 16 July – a rest day for the 2002 Tour de France and, as it turned out, time for Sommer to leave on an indefinite vacation, having duly been given the boot.
He had grown up in Israel and Austria, studied maths at university and known next to nothing about cycling when he arrived at Telekom from Sony in 1995. But from that point on, Sommer, Ullrich, the team and company had risen and fallen together, tracing the same parabola to giddy success followed by their swan-dive back to earth. In 1995, Ullrich took his first pro win at the German national time trial championship and Telekom monopolized the first seven positions in the road race, only for Sommer to ruin the party; literally interrupting the celebrations to tell them he would pull Telekom’s funding if they didn’t also succeed at the Tour de France. Erik Zabel’s two stages saved them – and then, in 1996 and 1997, had come Riis and Ullrich.
Sommer has invited me to his home in Meerbusch just outside Düsseldorf to share his Telekom story. Known locally and now even nationally as the ‘Stadt der Millionäre’ or ‘Millionaire’s Town’, at the last check Meerbusch counted one seven-figure earner for every 580 residents – the highest density of anywhere in Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Were it not hidden behind a high wall, even here Sommer’s lair would stand out for its futuristic cubic design in a town that wears its wealth unostentatiously. Those expecting a cat-stroking cliché, though, would be disappointed upon meeting the man of the house. Years after the event, the Süddeutsche Zeitung described his arrival at Deutsche Telekom in 1995 in the following terms: ‘Telekom and with it the whole of Germany wanted to be a bit like Ron Sommer: international, suntanned, sexy. Ron Sommer became Mr Germany.’
Sitting in his squash-court-sized home office, his straight-point collar unbuttoned and his black Oxfords glistening, Sommer appears greyer than in his cover-star years but in no way diminished. Now in his late sixties, he still treasures many of his memories from Telekom – and one important legacy the company left to his family: multiple summers as the cycling team’s schoolboy cheerleader infected Ken, his son, with a passion that became a career. He is now an agent to some of the world’s leading riders.
Even Ron eventually caught the bug, to the point where he is nodding in agreement when I relate what Rolf Aldag has told me about cycling and Deutsche Telekom in the mid-1990s: ‘Deutsche Telekom were just a company you called up when you’d been overcharged on your phone bill . . . then all of a sudden, thanks to the cycling team, it became this great source of national pride.’
‘Deutsche Telekom was originally part of the Bundespost, which was a government provider of postal services, banking and telecommunications,’ Sommer explains. ‘It was a public administration, so hugely bureaucratic. My team didn’t call a customer a customer – they called them an applicant. Remember, it was not only pre-internet but pre-anything. The network was analogue and completely useless.
‘Considering the total communications budget of the company, the cycling team cost us a tiny amount. Of course the main expense was general communication, to build the market for us in Germany and prepare the IPO. So it was never something that gave us financial concerns and we enjoyed it when they started to give us huge success and become a German national team . . . The key for us was: do they win the hearts of the people? And you don’t have to win the Tour to do that. The guy who wins is not always the guy everybody loves the most. From a corporate standpoint, it was more a case of, are they a real team?’
If the answer to these questions was yes, Sommer concedes that there was just one other key proviso: ‘Then, of course, the question was being clean. If I had thought they were not clean, that day we would have stopped. But we were totally convinced.’
Over the two hours that I spend with Sommer, there will be plenty of time to discuss how trust and confidence can be the siblings of naivety or, worse, gullibility. But that is all part of the postscript. In the then and there, Sommer says, seen from his watchtower in Bonn, his team, the united Germany’s team, and especially Jan Ullrich were the jolly bike-couriers of a corporate message and magenta-tinged dreams – a loose-change antidote to the higher-stakes stresses both company and customer faced every day.
‘From the point of view of a huge organization like Deutsche Telekom, it’s not a big issue: it’s the fun part,’ Sommer says. ‘You’re not making billion-dollar decisions and the risk of technology is not there.
‘When the team came home from a race, win or lose, it didn’t matter – we celebrated. We invited them to the HQ, there were thousands of employees with magenta flags. When they were winning we took them to the Marktplatz in Bonn to see the mayor, had a reception with 10,000 people outside, public and employees, a sea of magenta. I took them once to see the Chancellor in Berlin, for fun, because it was also fun for the Chancellor to meet the team and not some government head on serious business . . . So, anyway, at the end of the day, your concerns as a CEO are totally different.
‘But I did like Jan. I only met him a few times but I understood – it was not difficult to understand the issues. When I told him in the bus one day it didn’t matter if he won or not, that he only had to win hearts, I meant it. Did I dwell on it and wonder whether there was a danger anyway? No, because I felt that, if my guys felt comfortable, it was OK. In such a huge organization you’d better not spend your time thinking about sports sponsorship or advertising . . . If you have to cut 15,000 jobs in a year, that’s a big issue you spend a lot of time on. So, no, you don’t spend a lot of time on Jan . . .’
Sommer’s voice trails off. In the traumatic summer of 2002, he had too much on his mind to contemplate the poignancy of his and Ullrich’s parallel fairy tales with Telekom souring and then ending in perfect synchronicity, but since then he has often thought about Ullrich. A self-made mogul so committed he once slept with a fax machine on his bedside table and peppered interviews with mottos like ‘there’s no place for emotions in business’, Sommer would appear to have little in common with a faltering sporting prodigy from the DDR. But it is perhaps because of their differences that he can see what Ullrich lacked in such stark relief.
‘I had lunch once with my son, Ken, and Lance Armstrong, after the Telekom time, and I think Lance said something like, “If Jan had the character of Erik Zabel, I could never beat him.” So there was a clear weakness in Jan that wasn’t compensated by the team supporting him,’ Sommer says finally. ‘It’s like if you have a child and the child has a weakness; yes it’s the weakness of the child but you as a parent didn’t do your job properly: teaching, educating, supporting, whatever. And if you look at the life of Jan, you find a lot of signals like this . . . which is a shame.’