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‘Cycling’s like cocaine: once you’ve tried it you want it again and again’
—Luigi Cecchini
It was the undignified end, if not of a beautiful relationship, then at least of a mutually convenient one. Not Telekom and Jan Ullrich but Walter Godefroot and Rudy Pevenage, the front office and the foreman of ‘Germany’s team’. Pevenage’s promise in Cologne to stick with Telekom, the spiel about the Ullrich chapter being closed – it all turned to sugar dust on the yule log one day between Christmas and New Year. ‘Walter was going on holiday to Tenerife and coming back just before Christmas. I didn’t want to tell him before his holiday, and I didn’t want to ruin his Christmas either . . .’
Pevenage says he was trying to be considerate. Only that’s not how Godefroot saw it.
‘I was really angry and upset,’ Godefroot tells me. ‘He parks up in front of my house in Drongen, comes inside and tells me the kind of things you only tell a friend. Friend is a big word . . . but, anyway, he starts talking to me about private issues, things you only tell a friend. And the punchline is that he wants to quit. I said, “OK, but you know how much you earn with me. Do you want to go with Jan? Is that it?” “No, no, it’s family stuff . . .” And so on and so on. That sort of thing. He says he’s not going to stay in cycling, that’s for sure. This is when he’s been going around in a car that I’ve paid for, making calls on a phone that I’m also paying for, trying to arrange his new job. I call Kindervater and his reaction is, “What a way to pay you back!” I said that, no, it wasn’t like that, it was for family reasons . . . but then I speak to Bjarne Riis. “Do you not know, Walter?” Bjarne had found out [Rudy was leaving] when he was talking to potential sponsors, because they were telling Bjarne that they were talking to Rudy too.’
Godefroot looks sternly at me over his spectacles.
‘There are lines you don’t cross.’
Pevenage says he understands why Godefroot never really got over it. He also looks remorseful when trying to explain why he went back on his word. He finally took the decision when he travelled to Scherzingen to retrieve Ullrich’s T-Mobile team bikes and, over dinner, Ullrich made an offer Pevenage was never likely to refuse. Pevenage hemmed, hawed, phoned his wife and finally told her he would follow his heart. ‘Ultimately, winning the Tour with Jan was a big personal ambition for me. We were going it alone – it was me and Jan, not the big Telekom machine. Somehow I couldn’t imagine being a directeur sportif without Jan.’
Brian Holm had seen enough in his five years riding for Telekom to know what was coming Godefroot’s way. ‘When I left the team in 1998, I’d said to Walter, “Thanks for everything, but your good friend Rudy is gonna fuck you eventually. Don’t trust him. Always look over your shoulder.” So then Walter calls me at the end of 2002: “What you said about Rudy . . . you were right.” I said, “I fucking told you, Walter.” ’
‘You didn’t have to be Einstein to see it coming. It was obvious Rudy would do that one day,’ Rolf Aldag concurs.
Godefroot finally agreed – the warning signs had always been there. ‘Rudy was a good directeur, but too crafty,’ he says. ‘Always wheeling and dealing . . . And being known as a schemer is not a good thing. I’ll give you an example: we’re at Milan–Sanremo and the Mapei team car drives up. I’m in the car next to Rudy. Mapei had already put a couple of riders on the front to bring back a break, and now they wanted to know whether we would too. But Rudy wasn’t even winding down his window. He just stepped on the accelerator and drove away. He thought he was being clever but that’ll come back to bite you. I always used to assume that others were at least as clever as me, whereas Rudy always wanted to prove that he was the smartest.’
The bad news for Godefroot was, of course, a positive development for Jan Ullrich. He had locked down the services of his most trusted directeur sportif despite the fact that neither of them yet had a team for the 2003 season. That, though, was about to change. It wasn’t US Postal, although, remarkably, they did try. ‘I was at Johan Bruyneel’s house three times, there were calls with Lance, but Jan and I agreed that wasn’t the way to go,’ Wolfgang Strohband confirms.
No, Ullrich would find his saviour much closer to home. He had been the fuse and fireworks for an explosion of interest in professional cycling in Germany that had produced two new teams, Gerolsteiner and Coast. It was therefore logical and somehow fitting that he would end up at one of them. In Ullrich’s current spirit of self-revolution, Coast would also represent the sharpest pivot: from a national behemoth counting 250,000 employees and a net revenue of 50 billion euros to an upstart, mid-range high-street fashion retailer with 50 million euros in annual sales and sixteen stores, all of them in the industrial Rhine-Ruhr region unaffectionately known in Germany as the Kohlenpott – ‘the Coal Scuttle’.
The road less travelled had been sold to Ullrich and Wolfgang Strohband by Coast’s owner, Günther Dahms. Unremarkable in appearance, with his centrally parted brown hair finishing just above his rimless glasses and the physique of a forty-something more used to watching sport than doing it, Dahms was anything but ordinary in ambition. He had stood among the million Germans pressed against the barriers when the Tour de France crossed the Rhine for two days in 2000, and had an epiphany. Years earlier he had paid millions to get his name on a tiny panel of Michael Schumacher’s racing overalls; now, he realized, he could spend the same money on a cycling team that would win the Tour de France. Within months he had his team and, in it, the riders who in the 1999 Tour had finished second and third behind Lance Armstrong, Alex Zülle and Fernando Escartín. The team presentation took place in the rooftop restaurant of the Reichstag in Berlin.
‘A strange bird’, according to Wolfgang Strohband, Dahms himself delighted in telling journalists he was ‘a little bit of a chaos monster’. As Der Spiegel would observe later, ‘With Dahms the line between passion and calculation becomes blurry, and he’s more enthusiastic about how to shave a couple of grams off the spokes of a wheel than he is about accurate bookkeeping.’ This much had been clear at the end of the 2002 season – a wildly successful one on the road, with Coast finishing fifth in the world rankings, and a precarious one off it. The Swiss rider, Mauro Gianetti, was in dispute with Dahms over unpaid bonuses, while the team’s sizeable Spanish contingent had all lost a large slice of their salary due to Dahms’s misunderstanding of German tax laws. When the Société du Tour de France confirmed in autumn 2002 that Coast were on their 2003 guest list, and Dahms also revealed that he was negotiating with Ullrich, his dream suddenly inched closer – and yet so did oblivion. The UCI announced they were withholding the team’s racing licence for 2003 until Dahms got the team’s finances in order.
Marcel Wüst had long since ceased to find the chaos endearing. One of the best German sprinters of the late 1990s, Wüst had retired in 2001 after a horrifying crash cost him his right eye. He was Coast’s manager in 2002, but had eventually become weary of Günther Dahms’s freewheeling management style. In 2003, he told Dahms, he would stay at the team but in a different role, as their communications chief. Still, Dahms wanted Wüst’s input on what could be a game-changing decision. ‘I was cycling down the Rhine one day in the autumn and Günther called to say he was considering signing Jan Ullrich. What did I think? I said, “Günther, if you have the money in the bank to pay Jan Ullrich and you can get everything organized, there’s no better deal than signing Jan Ullrich. But if you don’t have the money and think that by signing Jan Ullrich you’re going to get a co-sponsor, do not do it.” ’
Dahms reassured Wüst that all was in hand. Which meant that, no, he didn’t have the money, and, yes, he was doing exactly what Wüst had cautioned against – leveraging Ullrich’s name to entice new commercial partners. Negotiations were soon underway with Coca-Cola, Vodafone and RWE, Germany’s second biggest electricity supplier. ‘There were contracts waiting to be signed – I think three million euros with RWE,’ Wolfgang Strohband recalls. Dahms, though, had already said in interviews that he was ‘a glutton for risk’. As Marcel Wüst puts it: ‘Dahms wasn’t a criminal. He was just buying shoes that were a size too big for him.’
In December, Jan Ullrich still had three months to wait until his ban would expire and he could race again, but he was growing impatient. Ullrich wanted the deal done when he, Strohband and Pevenage met Dahms at Strohband’s Hamburg office on 20 December. There was still no co-sponsor, but Dahms promised them one would be in place by 15 January. They discussed clauses and contingencies deep into the early hours, until, at around 3.30 a.m., pens were passed around and signatures added to dotted lines. Ullrich stood to earn around 2.56 million euros a season. He had also secured jobs for Pevenage, his friend Tobias Steinhauser, the physiotherapist Birgit Krohme and his younger brother, Thomas, who had previously worked as a mechanic at Telekom.
There would be no official announcement before Coast’s team presentation in Essen on 15 January, but word soon got out. While Bjarne Riis accused Ullrich of following the money, Lance Armstrong damned his supposed arch-rival with faux-fatherly career advice: ‘It’s his affair, but I don’t think that’s the best way. Was it the money? That’s not the attitude of a champ. I’m disappointed. I would have accepted Bjarne Riis’s offer. At CSC he would have been forced to take responsibility.’
Touché.
If Telekom to Team Coast was one journey to the other end of the pro cycling universe, Jan Ullrich was about to embark on another as he set out to make 2003 the year of his reinvention.
Point of departure this time: Peter Becker’s back porch in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. At least, this is where Becker is explaining to me how, without warning, he and Ullrich reached the end of the line, this time for good.
‘So, sixth of January 2003. The training plan was done and dusted and I say to Ulli: “This year we’re really going for it. I want to see more from you. You haven’t won the Tour of Flanders, Paris–Roubaix, the Giro and you also want to join the really greats and become the world road race champion. These four things, that’s what we’re going for. Obviously, to achieve all of this, you’re really going to have to focus.” To that, he says, “Ach, Trainer, I can’t suffer from January to December. I’m not like Armstrong.” And I reply, “You know what – you’ve suffered a lot more over the years because of the way you go about things. You could have it so easy. There’s really no need to stuff your face like you’re training to become a sumo wrestler. You only have to stay at a decent weight and continually keep on top of that, keep watching what you eat.” He says maybe I should just help him to put the finishing touches to things and, that way, I wouldn’t have to travel so much. I say, “Ulli, I’m your coach. That’s my role from dawn till dusk and now I want us to get after it . . .” But what he was getting at was that it was all over. It wasn’t the last time we spoke but, as far as training was concerned, that was the end.’
Sixteen years they had worked together. Becker didn’t know, certainly couldn’t understand, but Ullrich had been seduced under the Tuscan sun. The training paradise that Tobias Steinhauser had raved to Ullrich about the previous summer had proven to be just that. They had gone there in the autumn and Ullrich had fallen under the spell of the region and of a man known to some in cycling as a genius and to others as an enigma.
The Via del Cimitero in Vicopelago is a procession of towering Renaissance villas nestled between olive groves and topaz swimming pools a few kilometres to the south west of Lucca, the ‘City of One Hundred Churches’ and birthplace of Puccini. House numbers seem to follow no logical sequence, as though picked on a whim, to confound visitors. After 395, a hundred metres or so later, the next plaque is 275. And here, behind ancient stone walls, a wrought-iron gate and thick pine-tree canopy, is the Villa Talenti Cecchini, Luigi Cecchini’s palatial hideaway.
‘Cecco’ has told me to call him when I reach the tiny piazzetta opposite his gate, outside the eighteenth-century baroque chapel which also belongs to him. I duly park in its courtyard and dial Cecchini’s number.
The seventy-year-old gentleman who a few moments later shuffles into view must be one of the least-photographed famous people on the planet. An internet search produces around half a dozen images taken at irregular intervals over twenty-five years. In most of them, the recession of Cecchini’s wisps of grey hair is the only marker of time, while, in others, we see him in an office cum improvised lab with the rider he helped to turn from a journeyman into a Tour de France winner, Bjarne Riis. Cecchini will confirm to me later that he hasn’t sat down for a ‘proper’ interview in seventeen years. He has accepted my request, albeit hesitantly, ‘because I’m old now and thought, Why not?’ But also, mainly, because I, he and Riis have a common friend, the former Orica-GreenEDGE team’s communications chief Brian Nygaard, who lived for years in nearby Pisa.
I follow him around the side of an old stable block and up a stone staircase. In a thick, melodic Tuscan accent, with its barely audible ‘C’s and ‘G’s, and intonation that suggests a sneeze could come at any second, he apologizes for the slow progress: for a few days now an old back problem has kept him not only housebound but mostly horizontal.
Finally, he hobbles through a doorway and into a corridor, at the end of which I glimpse the office where he was once photographed with Riis. The room looks almost unchanged from those pictures – same or similar bike perched upon an ergometer in front of his glass desk, magazines and books stacked on top as they were then, same signed jerseys on the wall. We turn right into a different room, this one a disorderly man cave littered with antique furniture, sports equipment and, most curiously, a decrepit pinball machine. Cecchini apologizes that he’ll have to lie down, for his back, and he duly lowers himself onto a blue chaise longue. A copy of today’s La Gazzetta dello Sport lies between us on the floor, under a coffee table scattered with cycling magazines and beside a Swiss ball almost obscuring the doctor from view.
Finally, Cecchini holds his phone up in front of his glasses, stabs the off button with his index finger, and places it face down next to him.
‘Allora,’ he begins, ‘a book about Jan? Gentilissimo, Jan. So let me tell you a few things . . .’
Luigi Cecchini always thought he was destined to be a surveyor. He had done the training and was ready to look for his first job when he succumbed to an old Italian curse and fell into the family business. In the Cecchinis’ case it was textiles, shirts to be precise, and from the age of seventeen until he was thirty-two, Luigi more or less ran the show. ‘I thought that was me,’ he says, ‘but then, one day, I picked up a book on medicine and I couldn’t put it down.’ At age thirty-two, he would enrol in medical school partly because two of his five-a-side football teammates were already undergraduates. Six years later, Cecchini got his degree summa cum laude.
At thirty-eight, Cecchini says, he was too old to work in hospitals or even set up practice as a GP. Instead, he turned to his old love of sports.
‘I’d been a decent footballer and tennis player, then an Italian champion in car racing, and had also won things in skiing, so I decided to become a sports doctor. The first cycling team that I worked with was Ivano Fanini’s here in Lucca, then I gradually moved through different teams. I’d started cycling myself mainly because I’d put on some weight when I was studying and I had high blood pressure. The director of the cardiology department said that I shouldn’t be taking pills for it and should start cycling instead. So I did and, you know, cycling’s like cocaine: once you’ve tried it you want it again and again.’
Cecchini’s ‘addiction’ took him into the cycling big leagues when he accepted a job as Ariostea’s team doctor. It was there, in 1990, that he also met and briefly worked alongside Michele Ferrari, a few years before Ferrari linked up with Lance Armstrong. By the mid-1990s, they would both be mainly ‘freelancing’, Cecchini after Ariostea’s disappearance and Ferrari after Gewiss-Ballan had fired him in the spring of 1994, following an infamous comment reported by L’Équipe: ‘EPO is not dangerous, it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink ten litres of orange juice.’
Soon, between them, Cecchini and Ferrari were carving up cycling’s most prestigious races. In 1996, the last season before the UCI tried to stem the EPO plague by introducing blood tests, Cecchini coached the winner of the Tour de France and the gold, silver and bronze medallists in the Olympic road race. Meanwhile, Ferrari’s clients took the Giro, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and the Tour of Lombardy. The Italian media hyped up a rivalry that acquired further mystique thanks to both coaches’ reticence about giving interviews. Besides their similarities, the two preparatori also offered a succulent dichotomy: Ferrari scheming out of his hideout in Ferrara on one side of the Apennine mountains, Cecchini serenading champions in Lucca on the other; Ferrari who, according to one former charge, Filippo Simeoni, ‘treated you like a number’, Cecchini for whom you were ‘one of the family, like a son’, as former client Dario Pieri tells me; Ferrari, known as ‘il Mito’ – ‘The Myth’ – to many of his clients, Cecchini, who to everyone, regardless of status, would forever remain simply ‘Cecco’.
When I remind Cecchini of how it was all spun at the time, he tuts and shakes his head. ‘The Cold War between me and Ferrari . . . that was another cazzata clamorosa. Complete balls,’ he says. ‘Ferrari’s a friend. He’s someone I was with at Ariostea. I still consider him the number one coach in the world. I learned a lot from him in terms of training . . . But I must have spoken to Michele three times in ten years.’
Listening to him, one could be forgiven for thinking that Cecchini’s Achilles heel over the years was that he kept mixing with – or getting mixed up with – the wrong crowd. In 1998, for example, a magistrate wire-tapped his phone and that of a pharmacist in Bologna and caught them discussing the banned hormone DHEA. In conversations with a supplier, the pharmacist was also heard describing Cecchini as ‘a bloke who prescribes a lot, if he gets into it’ and saying that Ferrari had ‘cleaned out the chemist!’
Both doctors’ houses were subsequently raided in the summer of 1998. It was the last such experience for Cecchini, but not for Ferrari. The former has never been charged with any doping-related offences, either by sporting authorities or the judiciary, unlike the latter.
‘They took away all of the paperwork they could find – all my old notes and my computers,’ Cecchini remembers. ‘I hired a lawyer but no one ever questioned me. My lawyer wanted to go and see the magistrate, but, then, after two years, the case was closed.’
Then there is Francesco Conconi, Ferrari’s mentor and his forerunner as cycling’s most infamous ‘EPO doctor’.23 A multitude of online sources describe Cecchini as one of Conconi’s pupils at the University of Ferrara, like Ferrari.
This has Cecchini risking another slipped disc by swivelling to face me.
‘I’ll tell you the truth . . . I don’t even know Conconi. I’ve seen him at a couple of conferences . . . and he was great: he can explain difficult concepts in a way that everyone understands. But I’ve never studied at Ferrara! I studied in Pisa. If you go onto Wikipedia, it calls me a pupil of Conconi. Don’t even know the guy.’
All of which leaves Cecchini with one final name in his address book to account for. In 2001, the Kelme team doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, was a familiar figure within the sanctum of pro cycling’s travelling circus but largely unknown to the sport’s wider audience. That began to change when, after the Vuelta a España won by the Spanish rider Ángel Casero, a Spanish magazine obtained telephone messages sent to Casero by Fuentes on the morning of the final mountain stage of the race, telling Casero that he would be in Madrid ‘with you know what’.
This was bizarre: Casero didn’t even ride for Fuentes’s team, unlike his rival for overall victory Oscar Sevilla. Fuentes’s explanation also sounded unconvincing: he claimed the ‘you know what’ were pedal cranks that Cecchini, an old friend, wanted him to pass on to Casero.
Casero later sued the magazine for violating his privacy and implying that the Fuentes–Cecchini axis was his doping supply line. Casero says now, ‘The damage that leak caused me was inestimable.’ He insists that Cecchini was his coach in 2001 but that he never worked with Fuentes, contrary to what Fuentes later told the press. ‘Fuentes said he worked with me . . . and with Bush and with Bin Laden,’ Casero says. ‘It was bravado. Bullshit.’
Lying on his flea-bitten old couch in the stables of his villa in Vicopelago, eyes now fixed back on the ceiling, Luigi Cecchini doesn’t so much as twitch when pressed for the truth about his connection to Eufemiano Fuentes. ‘Fuente [sic], I’ll tell you straight away . . .’
‘Fuentes.’
‘Yes, him. Fuentes. It’s true that I was a friend of Fuentes. Because Fuentes is the nicest bloke in the world. I don’t know if you know him, but he’s exceptional. And there was this problem – he’d had an issue with his little girl. She had a cancerous eye. And because there’s a group in Siena who specialized in those tumours, we were in contact a lot for a while. I’d met him in 1991 or 1992, when he was doctor for Javier Mínguez’s team and I was at Ariostea. Mínguez introduced us. Then I used to see him at the Tour, the Giro, and we’d talk, as you do at races. But we never worked with the same rider. Besides, Fuentes wasn’t a coach. There was only one rider – the guy who once won the Vuelta . . .’
‘Casero.’
‘Casero, that’s him. Fuentes treated him in Spain, and Casero used to come here four or five times a year to do tests.’
Which should settle things, but of course does not. Lance Armstrong can’t recall exactly when he found out that Jan Ullrich was being coached by Luigi Cecchini, but he thinks Michele Ferrari probably told him. Armstrong can also remember or at least imagine his reaction. ‘Cecchini is Fuentes, right? I made that association straight away. Cecchini didn’t want to run the medical side of things, so he just handled the training side. Right?’
Right, halfway right, or completely wrong. Having let him have his say on Fuentes, I cut to the chase and ask Cecchini what service exactly he was offering Ullrich.
‘I’d already stopped working for teams at that point, by the time the police raided the house,’ he says. ‘In 1995, I was still the team doctor at MG-Technogym, but I had other riders coming to see me and creating a right old mess, with a conflict of interests. The Mapei team’s owner, Giorgio Squinzi, didn’t like it and neither did my team’s boss, Giancarlo Ferretti. I was also sick of breaking my balls, travelling a hundred days a year. I preferred just training guys. Then, after the raids in 1998, I even completely stopped looking at all blood values. A rider who wanted to be trained by me just had to bring his medical certificate to say he was fit to ride a bike – because, if a guy has a heart attack when he’s doing a test, it’s a mess. I have a defibrillator but you never know; something like that goes wrong in Italy and you’ll be under investigation for twenty years. The second point is that the teams always knew when I was training their guys. I’d say, “Look, you get your directeur sportif to contact me and tell me you’ve got his consent.” I didn’t want guys coming in secret, with a fake moustache or beard. You laugh but it would have happened . . .
‘In any case,’ he continues, ‘half of the riders came for a month then I never saw them again. They would come at the end of November, do a test, then I’d draw up a programme for three weeks in December on the basis of that test. I would tell them to do that programme then decide if they wanted to carry on. I would do December free of charge. But then so many guys would say, “Cecco, this is great, but your training’s too hard for me.” Or “I don’t want to have to send you files every day.” If that was the case, there’d be no hard feelings. The guys who liked it, though, would carry on. And Ullrich was one of those who stuck around.’
A few kilometres to the east of Lucca, on a road rising steeply towards the village of Montecarlo, lies the Fattoria Borgo La Torre. Its cluster of primrose-coloured farmhouses and converted barns don’t particularly command the traveller’s attention – the Tuscan hills are scattered with rural hotels, agriturismi, like this one, many of them more handsomely situated, opulently decorated and expensive to visit. For Jan Ullrich, though, for several weeks in 2003 and three seasons thereafter, La Torre became home from home.
On an electric-blue May day in 2015, middle-aged tourists amble between pottery shops or wrestle with their fold-out maps on Montecarlo’s cafe terraces. Back down the hill, silence reigns at Fattoria Borgo La Torre but for the chatter of the cleaning staff. In reception, the owner smiles in vague recognition when I mention Jan Ullrich. ‘Ah, yes, I remember him. Them,’ she says. ‘They used to come here for a few weeks in the spring. The boys in the kitchen, the chef, I think he had more contact with them . . .’
The chef. Of course. Unfortunately his shift won’t begin for a few hours.
Even without sampling the bistecca fiorentina or speculating about what was on Luigi Cecchini’s menu of training programmes, it’s easy to see why Ullrich felt that he’d located his promised land in La Bella Toscana. Thomas Dekker, Tyler Hamilton and Jörg Jaksche have all spoken or written openly about their doping, about Eufemiano Fuentes supplying the drugs and also about being coached by Cecchini – and all of them tell more or less the same story: the Fuentes–Cecchini link is a red herring, a disservice to Cecchini, his genius and the soul-nourishing, strength-giving magic of training in this region of Italy.
Dario Pieri, an Italian classics rider with weight problems worse than Ullrich’s, tells me he called Cecchini ‘l’omino dei sogni’ – ‘the little man of dreams’. ‘He would make you dream, not by forcing you, but by saying, “If you do this, this and this, you’ll achieve this.” But he was against doping . . .’
Likewise, it was Jörg Jaksche’s impression that Cecchini had been traumatized by the police search of his home in 1998 and ‘didn’t want anything to do with doping’. ‘When Cecchini trained me, he charged me barely a token fee, 800 euros a month,’ says Jaksche. ‘He did it for passion. He just loved riding his bike and coaching bike riders. He said that coaching young guys kept him feeling young, that he always wanted to feel thirty.’
Thomas Dekker has a similar memory. Dekker says that doping was never taboo with Cecchini, but he ‘never supported it, never got involved with it’. Echoing what Tyler Hamilton wrote in his 2012 book The Secret Race, Dekker explains, ‘Cecco would tell you: the only thing that really works is increasing red cells with blood transfusions or EPO. He said that with all the other stuff that people did – cortisone, testosterone, insulin, growth hormone – you were just poisoning your body and not getting much of an advantage.’
Dekker has his own theory about why Ullrich, in particular, found Cecchini’s charisma irresistible.
‘I think everyone knows when they go to Cecco that this guy has coached the best riders in the world. I mean, growing up, I was more an Ullrich guy than an Armstrong guy, so the thought of being coached by the same trainer as Jan was pretty attractive. And then Tuscany is just beautiful for riding your bike. It doesn’t matter if you were Jörg Jaksche or Juan Antonio Flecha or Kim Kirchen – everyone was coming from less beautiful places, and the training went easily over there. You’re always with really nice people with the same goals, who have also travelled to be there to work with the same guy, so you get a bit of a community. And Cecco is like the Pope to everyone. Then in the evening, it’s like a whole family: his wife has a beautiful clothes shop in the centre of Lucca, they invite you to their beautiful villa, the food is amazing . . . It’s la dolce vita.’
Dekker goes on: ‘You also need to think, a guy like Ulle, not the best childhood, and a guy like Cecco – laidback, warm, wealthy Italian – and he puts his arm around you, knows what he’s talking about. He’s one of the first guys in the world to work with SRM power meters, he’s won the Tour with Riis . . . There’s this whole mythology around him. And Ullrich was not a happy cyclist. Didn’t seem to love the sport. He was just a product of East Germany, finding this guy who treated him like a human . . . But also, probably no one else could get through to Jan. Maybe he would tell Pevenage and Steinhauser that he wanted to go home after four hours behind a motorbike, but he probably didn’t have the balls to tell Cecco that if Cecco wanted him to do six. He was probably so indoctrinated when he was young, and he was probably so good when he came to Telekom, that he never had a guy who was pressing the right buttons. If he’d spent his whole career in Italy, just training with Cecco, Jan would probably have won the Tour more times than Lance Armstrong. Because I think everyone knows that Jan had the bigger engine.’
Cecchini only vaguely remembers his first encounter with Ullrich, but is fairly sure that it followed his usual formula. ‘I would always get the rider to do a test on the stationary bike there,’ he says, waving a hand towards the adjacent room. ‘That was a Conconi test, or what people now call a lactate threshold test. Generally, I preferred the tests outdoors.’
One stretch of road, in particular, had become synonymous with Cecchini and how he assessed his riders: a 6.1-kilometre drag from the village of Buti up to a small dimple on the eastern flank of the Monte Serra, the mountain overlooking Lucca. The climb almost never featured in Italy’s national tour, the Giro d’Italia, or indeed any other professional race. And yet, thanks to Cecchini, performances there were the subject of feverish speculation among the world’s top professionals. Ullrich’s first ascents, together with what Cecchini had observed in his lab, left the doctor in no doubt. As he says now, ‘Jan had a huge engine. One of the two or three biggest I’ve seen. Maybe only he and Fabian Cancellara would ever get to 510 watts in my lactate tests.’
But no one had questioned Ullrich’s physiological capabilities. The difficulty was getting him to channel them on a consistent basis. Could Cecchini succeed where Peter Becker, Rudy Pevenage and an assortment of Telekom ‘babysitters’ had failed?
‘I don’t really consider myself a psychologist,’ Cecchini sets out straight away. ‘To be honest, if I’d sent Jan to a psychologist it would have been the shrink needing help after a fortnight, with the character that Jan had . . .’
Meaning he was stubborn?
‘Yes. I don’t think a psychologist could have influenced him. There are also riders, though, who need someone, if not a psychologist, then at least someone who could take away all of the fears they have. There are some riders who are finished in a race the moment they attack, turn around and see that there are still guys on their wheel. But this wasn’t Jan’s problem. He wasn’t one of those riders who are afraid of their own shadow . . .’
Ullrich’s much bigger issue, most believed, was his weight.
‘Well, obviously Jan knew better than anyone that he had a big problem with that,’ Cecchini says. ‘But in two months he could get down maybe not to his ideal weight – I think he only got to his ideal weight in the year that he won the Tour – but he always came down a lot. Even with me, he’d get very skinny, in my opinion, but still be three or four kilos heavier than when he won the Tour. He was a rider who, when he decided to train and came here, really trained: he’d do his six hours, then an hour on the rollers when he finished. He was also quite careful about his food when he wanted to be, but he was also the kind of guy who, if you put a bottle of wine in front of him . . . well, you understand? That was the issue. I think he always gave away two or three kilos to Armstrong, and that was just fat.
‘I’m not a dietician, so I’d say to him, “Look, this is your form weight, and dieticians recommend that you eat a little and often, avoid alcohol . . .” Just general rules like that. He was also an adult, and it’s really something that has to click in the rider’s head, that makes him want to make those sacrifices. If you break a rider’s balls, stress him, you also tend to have the opposite effect, and he ends up eating a lot. You can’t hold a pistol to his head. If you’d done that with Jan, his head would have exploded first. He was unlucky as well, in that where he stayed in Montecarlo they had an excellent restaurant. If he was doing seven hours on the bike, then getting back there for his evening meal . . . Sometimes he would be able to resist, other times he cracked.’
Cecchini laughs, but the point, the reason why I’ve come to Tuscany looking for answers, is that something, in the weeks before his return to racing in March 2003, did finally seem to flick the dopamine switch, open the motivation tap in Jan Ullrich’s brain. There were other ingredients, no doubt, but Cecchini’s influence was undeniable.
‘I think there were two main reasons for 2003 being so good,’ Cecchini says. ‘One was that he was really motivated because he’d changed teams. The other point was that he’s a very respectful and polite boy and he saw this old man getting on the Vespa every day to spend six hours motor-pacing with him, tying his back in knots, ruining his spine, and I think he somehow wanted to show that he was grateful for that. He didn’t want to let me down.’
At home in Berlin, even had he known how and with whom Jan Ullrich had replaced him, Peter Becker is adamant he would not have cared. ‘I’d heard of Cecchini, the name, but that’s all,’ he says. ‘Cecchini this, Ferrari that . . . From 2003 on, I wasn’t interested any more.’
Which, of course, does not mean that Becker looks back without regret – or recrimination.
‘Pevenage engineered that whole thing. He wasn’t a coach, but Ulli’s biggest fan. He only wanted to keep me at arm’s length while he made Ullrich great. Fine. I just wanted the kid to be where he belonged, achieve everything he could achieve. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent. I just wanted him to achieve those four things – Flanders, Roubaix, the Giro and then, on the day when he becomes the world champion, to say, “Dear friends, that’s me done.” Everyone would have celebrated him. He would have gone with a status, an image that would have guaranteed him everyone’s lifelong admiration.’