17
‘Ullrich and his story make him the kind of hero whose defeats we easily forgive because, with him, the difference between victory and defeat disappears’
—Burkhard Spinnen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
As births go, they were both scary, somewhat gruelling but ultimately joyous. At just gone a quarter past three on 1 July 1903, sixty trailblazers on bikes set out from the Réveil Matin cafe in southern Paris, bound for Lyon and the finish line of the first ever stage of the Tour de France, 467 kilometres away. One hundred years to the day and in fact almost to the minute later, in Freiburg, Gaby Weis gave birth to a 2.5-kilogram baby daughter who would take her father’s surname. Her dad’s were also some of the first words Sarah Maria Ullrich ever heard: ‘If you’re good, I’ll buy you a cabriolet on your eighteenth birthday.’ Hearing this, the little girl stopped wailing and fell silent.
For its centenary edition, the Tour would begin where it usually ended, in Paris, and Jan Ullrich felt as though his race was already won. Rudy Pevenage had never seen him so happy. Only a couple of days in, Ullrich said that fatherhood had already changed his perspective on life, more even than the tribulations of the previous summer. For the first time since 1996 he was also coming into the Tour with only modest ambitions: nominally, he would be Bianchi’s joint leader with the Spaniard Ángel Casero, but would be thrilled with ‘a nice stage win’, he said. Pevenage told the press a podium place was almost out of the question.
Ullrich did finish fourth in the prologue, only two seconds behind winner Bradley McGee. The result was significant; Ullrich had beaten Armstrong in a Tour prologue for the first time, and by a decent margin of five seconds.
The next major test was a time trial, this one ridden in teams between Joinville and Saint-Dizier. At Coast’s training camp in Gandia in Spain in the winter, Ullrich had organized a team dinner to smooth his integration into the group, and riders and staff had eaten, drunk and bonded until three in the morning. Since then, the money issues with Coast and ensuing suspensions, plus the difficulty of mixing Ullrich’s German clique with a large Spanish contingent, had stifled any sense of developing camaraderie. The switch from Coast to Bianchi had also created assorted logistical problems – including with the riders’ time-trial bikes. By the time they were assembled, checked and polished – and the mechanics could finally go to bed – daylight was already bleaching out the darkness over the Marne river.
When Bianchi rolled off the ramp a few hours later, Ullrich produced a performance that his teammates that day have never forgotten. ‘It’s very simple: Ullrich went like a bullet,’ says Ángel Casero, who had the invidious honour of following Ullrich in the Bianchi paceline. An effective team time trial is generally one in which everyone takes regular turns on the front to ensure a steady pace. ‘But that day it was almost impossible for me to come around him,’ says Casero. ‘There were riders in the team who didn’t take a single pull.’
Another of Bianchi’s Spaniards, Félix García Casas, says simply that it was ‘pure Ullrich . . . I think the last 20 kilometres were practically all him.’
The afternoon ended with Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel hailing US Postal’s best ever team time trial, and yet Ullrich had conceded only forty seconds. For Bianchi it had been a triumph – or would have been had Ullrich not started to feel unwell that evening, shortly after receiving a legal, intravenous infusion of amino-acids and vitamins, he said. When he woke the next day with diarrhoea and a temperature in the high thirties, the Bianchi team doctor deduced the previous night’s ‘treatment’ had somehow been contaminated.
Had the terrain been hillier, the racing more aggressive, he would never have made it through the next two stages, Ullrich said later. As it was, he endured a silent, private torture – some of the worst hours he had ever spent on a bike.
That he was able to hide his suffering owed in part to paranoia; their fear of US Postal listening in led Pevenage, Ullrich and Tobias Steinhauser to devise a method whereby Steinhauser would drop back to the race doctor’s car to ask for paracetamol or other remedies on Ullrich’s behalf. Pevenage also said nothing to the other Bianchi riders, lest they let on to friends in other teams. ‘There were two days when he didn’t even come down to dinner with us, which we thought was odd,’ says García Casas. ‘He’d always gone around the rooms to thank us for our help every evening – he was a fantastic guy, not cold as you’d expect a German to be – yet all of a sudden the guy was invisible. We found out later that he had acute diarrhoea and Rudy didn’t even want us to know. We were going back to the team car the whole time to get bottles . . . but it turned out they were to rinse his shorts, not to drink. After he’d made it through that, I said to myself that he was mentally and physically ready to win the Tour. You could also tell what condition he was in when he took his top off in the bus: I’ll never forget how you could see the vein running up his shoulder.’
Although recovering, Ullrich conceded just over a minute to Armstrong on the first mountain stage to Alpe d’Huez. He got through ‘on grit alone’, according to Pevenage. Armstrong ‘completely sucked’, he says now. But he was less preoccupied with Ullrich than with who had won: that punk Iban Mayo.
The 2003 summer was the hottest on record in France. Three months of temperatures edging 40 degrees Celsius killed 14,802 people by the French National Institute of Health’s estimates. On 14 July, Bastille Day, the Tour de France headed south, even deeper into the furnace. It was the very definition of Ulli Wetter, as the Germans called it – and exactly the conditions Armstrong despised. Soon the American would be glad to still be in the race, never mind the yellow jersey; when Joseba Beloki’s back wheel slid through a patch of melting tarmac on the descent of the Col de Manse, Armstrong swerved around the Spaniard and off the road. His ensuing detour across a ploughed field, over a ditch and back onto the race route was and would remain the most astonishing, perhaps the defining moment of his reign.
But in the 47-kilometre time trial between Gaillac and Cap Découverte four days later, Ullrich didn’t so much beat Armstrong as incinerate him. Armstrong would say later that at one point he’d thought about climbing off his bike and quitting. He was dehydrated, burned up, wrung dry by two torrid weeks. Meanwhile, in hellish heat, Ullrich had become the devil: his margin of victory, his first in a Tour stage since 1998, was one minute, thirty-six seconds. Of the other riders, only Alexander Vinokourov, Ullrich’s old teammate and his replacement as Telekom’s leader, came within two and a half minutes. Armstrong still led the Tour but his advantage had been cut to thirty-four seconds over Ullrich and fifty-one over Vinokourov.
At home, six million Germans had tuned in to watch what was described in L’Équipe the next day as ‘Le Retour du Wunderkind’.
Ullrich now had three Pyrenean stages to land his coup de grâce. He was the strongest rider in the race but the margins were too fine for that to suffice. He would also need to outmanoeuvre or outthink Armstrong, and herein lay his problem. As Ángel Casero reflects, ‘When he was strong, that was when he lacked the ability to read the race. He thought he could smash everyone to pieces – he lost his cool.’
During act one, the mountaintop finish at Ax 3 Domaines, Ullrich looked at times to playing it too safe. He finally launched a violent attack two kilometres from the line, moments after Vinokourov, reducing Armstrong’s usually effervescent cadence to a leaden clunk. ‘Everything felt so fragile,’ Johan Bruyneel admits now. ‘We were just hanging on, even in the car. We thought Lance could crack at any moment. There was no strategy: just hang on.’
Armstrong eventually conceded only seven seconds, to which was added Ullrich’s bonus for finishing second on the stage: twelve more. Pevenage hadn’t been certain bonus seconds were on offer, and – somewhat embarrassingly – had to check with the mechanic in the back of the Bianchi team car. Armstrong was still in yellow but now only fifteen seconds ahead. Vinokourov had burned bright and faded fast, coming in ten seconds behind Armstrong.
One opportunity down, two to go.
When I mention the second Pyrenean stage to Loudenvielle, even nearly a decade and a half later, Rudy Pevenage bows his lead. This one was on him. As he tells me, ‘There, it was me who messed up. Allez . . . I made a mistake that I wouldn’t usually have made.’
Vinokourov and Telekom drew the error, given that, parallel to his battle of wits with Johan Bruyneel, Pevenage was desperate to get one over on his and Ullrich’s old employer. In their three years together at Telekom, Ullrich and Vinokourov had built a close friendship, and it also now made sense for them to unite against a common enemy in Armstrong. However, when Vinokourov countered Ullrich’s attack on the last climb of the day, the Col de Peyresourde, Pevenage ignored one of the most elementary rules in the Tour de France instruction manual – that you always make the yellow jersey chase. Especially when he’s going for his fifth win. Instead, it was Ullrich who went to the front and Armstrong who enjoyed an armchair ride.
‘We had left Telekom and it was still war with them,’ Pevenage explains sheepishly. ‘Vino was my friend, Jan’s friend . . . but he was the captain of Telekom. Maybe we got our priorities wrong and thought too much about Vino. The plan in the morning was to race really hard and set Jan up for an attack on the Peyresourde, but we hadn’t recced that stage. The stress had also been too much from the start of the Tour. Getting the bus ready, the time trial bikes arriving with hours to spare . . . I still don’t know how we got it all together. Anyway, I’d got my timings wrong a bit on the Peyresourde. Our Spaniards should also all have been there, but they’d already gone out of the back – David Plaza, Aitor Garmendia, Casero. The Peyresourde was right into the wind, and Jan attacked too early. Lance jumped right onto his wheel, then Vino countered and went away. I should have stayed calm because Armstrong needed to win the race too. But I didn’t want Telekom to win the stage or the Tour, and I knew Vino was strong. I didn’t want to take the risk of Vino getting two minutes, so I told Jan to ride. Maybe there we should have gone for broke and seen what Armstrong could do . . .’
No maybes. Not according to Johan Bruyneel. ‘The Peyresourde was their big chance.’
Armstrong isn’t sure. Or doesn’t remember. Or doesn’t care. One of the three. He’s trying to decide. ‘I think there are probably guys who sit around and think about this shit all of the time. But if you don’t ask me these questions . . . I mean, to think about Louden-da-dee-da in 2003 . . . I mean, I haven’t thought about that in five years. I don’t care. I’m more worried about where I’m playing golf tomorrow. Or what legal bullshit I have to deal with. Or what time my kid’s game is tomorrow. I just don’t think about it. Is that weird? Or maybe not.’
Never mind. Vinokourov, who said later that Ullrich and Pevenage had committed a ‘big mistake’ had taken back forty-three seconds.
Two chances down, one to go.
Jacques Hanegraaf, the man who had struck the deal with Bianchi and salvaged Ullrich’s Tour, makes a good point years later: Jan Ullrich’s whole career had been a continuous, at times exhausting tussle with the same opponent – himself. He had never really paid much attention to anyone else. Every spring, in every race, his single preoccupation had been to inch closer to that physiological sweet spot at which he knew that he had once atomized the world’s best, at the 1997 Tour. As such, Ullrich had been a professional for eight seasons but had raced, truly competed, relatively sparingly. And that would show in a three-way fight that was now also a tactical puzzle.
Moreover, Rudy Pevenage could sense that Armstrong, the sleeping dragon, was beginning to stir. In their pre-race briefing in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Pevenage instructed his men and Ullrich to be on their guard. Regardless, one of the Bianchi riders, Fabrizio Guidi, stepped off the team bus and told an Italian reporter that Ullrich was going to ‘smash’ Armstrong.
But Johan Bruyneel had bad news for Guidi, Ullrich and his Geraardsbergen neighbour Pevenage. ‘If we wanted to win the race, there was no way we could go into the last TT with fifteen seconds, but I could see in the bus that, mentally, Lance was really ready. It was like, OK, this has to happen now.’
For its final day in the Pyrenees – the last mountain stage in what some pundits were calling the most thrilling edition in memory – the Tour would be blessed with a grandiose setting on its journey from Bagnères-de-Bigorre to Luz Ardiden. There were six kilometres to go to the summit of the Col du Tourmalet and forty-two to the finish line when Ullrich kicked. Armstrong followed for a few seconds then let go, as had Vinokourov. Suddenly everything Ullrich had done the previous day made sense: he had let Vinokourov cook himself in the sun while marinating Armstrong for the last supper. Now he stuck a fork in the American and would soon be licking the plate.
Only that’s not quite what happened. The gap grew to ten seconds, peaked at twelve, then Armstrong slowly, coolly clawed his way back. By the end of the descent, at the foot of the final climb, even Vinokourov would be back with them.
Why had Ullrich made such an early move? Rudy Pevenage couldn’t work it out; the plan he had laid out in the morning was that they would wait until the last climb. Félix García Casas wondered whether something had changed, for on the approach to the Tourmalet Pevenage had called him back to the team car and handed him a paper note. ‘Give it to Jan and don’t let anyone see,’ Pevenage said. Minutes later, Ullrich was attacking and García Casas was ‘flipping out, because that wasn’t the plan’. Indeed, according to Ullrich, the initiative had come from him, only him, and had been an attempt to give Armstrong a dose of his own mind medicine. ‘I wanted to show him that I could hurt him,’ he said later.
Johan Bruyneel remembers Ullrich trying again on the way down the Tourmalet. ‘Lance was getting a gel or something from the car at the time and he just put his head inside the window and said, “Well, that’s stupid . . .”’
For years, the spectre of what Ullrich could theoretically achieve had teased the best out of Armstrong without ever making him draw from that crimson, flaming pool of fuck-you determination that he could access when faced with adversaries that were also antagonists – chumps and punks like Iban Mayo or Marco Pantani. It was an impulse that had its roots in Armstrong’s childhood, though where exactly, Armstrong tells me he doesn’t understand. He has also never really dwelled on why, given that they were both the sons of abusive and absent fathers, raised by devoted single mothers, Jan Ullrich turned out so different. ‘I’m sure the whole single-parent thing is somewhere, has some influence on my story . . . I mean it must have been part of my make-up early on, because I was born to somebody that I had no contact with, was raised for ten years by someone who I ended up really not caring for or having any contact with, so a true critic or cynic would say that when I attacked I was thinking, OK, Fuck Terry Armstrong! Fuck Eddie Gunderson!* But that stuff never even crossed my mind. Did it, though, from those primitive years into middle school and high school, was it forming me? I’m sure. But I don’t think Jan ever leaned over his bike and said, “I’m going to show my dad, the guy who walked out on me.” Or maybe he did, but I had my own little fictitious rivalries to rile me up.’
A day or two before what was now clearly turning into the decisive stage, one of Armstrong’s teammates had seen a quote from Pevenage to the effect that Ullrich taking the jersey off Armstrong was only a matter a time. The US Postal rider had shown it to Armstrong, who had read it and snarled back, ‘They will never have that jersey.’
Now, on the climb to Luz Ardiden, for the first time in the Tour, Armstrong felt a surge of the old power, the muscular electricity for which he and teammate George Hincapie had coined their own jockish codewords – ‘No chain, baby!’ Iban Mayo was his on-switch: when the Spaniard attacked, Armstrong cranked harder on the pedals and roared past. Ullrich gasped but hung on until Armstrong sped up again, hugged the inside of a slight right-hand bend . . . and tangled with the yellow cotton bag of a young spectator. Suddenly Armstrong had crashed, also bringing down Mayo. Ahead of Ullrich was only open road.
A few years later, a similar incident would give rise to one of the Tour’s strangest ever incidents and images – of Chris Froome, the two-time champion, running up Mont Ventoux having lost his bike in a collision with a motorcycle. The following day, in L’Équipe, Philippe Brunel meditated on the question of whether the race jury had been right to neutralize the race from the moment of Froome’s mishap. Brunel’s conclusion was that trying to divorce the race from ‘imponderables to which the Tour is fatally exposed in the mountains, in the middle of a fervid crowd’ was to rip out its soul – that of ‘an open-air theatre, playing out in a heedless natural world, both beautiful and cruel, grandiose and threatening, where anything can happen.’
That ‘anything’ in 2003 had been a spectator’s cotton bag. One could well espouse Brunel’s romantic image of the Tour and its cosmos, or more mundanely point out that Armstrong should not have been riding so close to the crowd. But neither of these notions could distract Jan Ullrich from an unwritten cycling diktat – that, when a rival crashes or punctures, you wait, particularly if he’s in the yellow jersey. Armstrong had also slowed for him when Ullrich had crashed on the descent of the Peyresourde in 2001.
Ullrich said later it had been an easy choice because ‘fairness is everything in sport’. In the spur of the moment, Rudy Pevenage didn’t agree. He grabbed his intercom receiver and screamed in Ullrich’s ear: ‘It’s only once, the Tour de France. Just ride!’
Armstrong initially panicked – his foot slipping out of his pedal, nearly bringing him down again – before a huge, thermonuclear jolt of adrenaline brought him back to the lead group and, after another attack, straight past them. Ullrich also now looked like his old self – the spluttering diesel engine left behind. He sprinted at the top of the mountain to take third place and eight bonus seconds but by then Armstrong was towelling himself down beside the podium. The time gap now: one minute, seven seconds.
Ullrich headed down the mountain in a Bianchi team car. Usually he communicated with his Spanish teammates through Pevenage’s translations, sign language and his tiny but expanding Italian vocabulary. But now, with teammate Félix García Casas sitting alongside him, Ullrich stayed silent. ‘He was devastated. We all felt that night that the Tour had slipped from our grasp,’ says García Casas.
The first Tour that Ullrich had seen, the seed of the dream he’d realized in 1997, was the 1989 edition won by Greg LeMond. That year, a time trial had turned the race on its head and the same would have to happen here. But Ullrich didn’t need a miracle – a repeat of Cap Découverte would do. There he had gained on Armstrong at a rate of just over two seconds per kilometre. Do the same again between Pornic and Nantes and he would win easily – never mind that Armstrong had won the final time trial in every Tour since 1999.
Rudy Pevenage was still hopeful until, on the morning of the time trial, he woke to torrential rain. He and Jacques Hanegraaf then set off on a route recce . . . without Ullrich.
‘He’d really impressed me the whole Tour with his mentality, but there, suddenly, his mentality changed and he really disappointed me,’ says Hanegraaf. ‘In the morning, we’re there thinking this is it, we have to go for it, really study this course and get everything right and all of a sudden he decided not to get out of bed. It was very frustrating. I said to Rudy, “He has to go. This is the day.” But Rudy defended him. Rudy said that Jan must have a good reason. And he ended up staying in bed. I mean, how naive can you be? Thinking that a video could be the same preparation as doing the circuit? Then, when we’re on the course, we have a guy leaning out of the car to film it, and what’s the first thing we see? Lance Armstrong in his yellow rain jacket, doing the circuit. And of course that’s what Jan saw in his bedroom two hours later. It was not good.’
Ullrich told a Belgian documentary years later that he had decided to lie-in because the course was ‘so simple’. ‘There were a couple of roundabouts and that was it. Why go out in the rain just to see that?’
Having looked unusually tense and fidgety on the start ramp, he soon found his groove out on the road. At the 32-kilometre time check Ullrich set the fastest time . . . but it was only three seconds quicker than Armstrong. He pushed harder, forced a little more, tilted his front wheel a little more sharply into the wet corners. Pevenage yelled instructions through his intercom radio – ‘Right here! Left in 200 metres!’ – but he and Hanegraaf had spotted a problem with the notes they had made in the morning. ‘We’d used the odometer in the car to make notes about when the corners and roundabouts were coming, but the time trial started and there were discrepancies,’ Hanegraaf says. ‘It seemed like we had a different car from the one we’d used in the morning. Rudy panicked a bit, started saying, ‘Oh, it’s not correct. It’s not correct. The roundabout’s going to be later now . . .’
It was just as well that, as Ullrich said, the course was so simple, with just those ‘couple of roundabouts’. So simple that messages had been sent to Hanegraaf and Pevenage’s mobile phones to tell them two Bianchi riders had already crashed at one of them, 13 kilometres from the line. ‘But we made mistakes there,’ Hanegraaf concedes now. ‘I still recall that on this roundabout the message in [Jan’s] ear wasn’t that he needed to slow down.’
The result: a skid, a crash, a slide across the tarmac, and the end of whatever hope remained – at least in this Tour de France.
Ullrich at least hadn’t lost his sense of humour. ‘I skated better than Katarina Witt,’ he told his teammates. He would later insist the Tour had ‘felt like a victory’.
The 2003 Tour had been a different experience for Wolfgang Strohband. For years Telekom had asked him to make arrangements for their VIP guests on the last day of the Tour, and Strohband had felt too embarrassed to tell friends and acquaintances that he – like CEO Ron Sommer and Jürgen Kindervater – was staying in the Crillon. ‘Of course I wouldn’t be paying, but I’d sneak a look at the price for a suite. It was borderline excessive,’ Strohband tells me. In 2003, he followed the last week of the race but felt somehow marginalized, which was how Jacques Hanegraaf wanted it. ‘Strohband was following us everywhere. He was always in the hotel next door,’ Hanegraaf says. ‘I didn’t want him with us so I wasn’t booking his rooms. And I didn’t really realize what he was doing.’
There may have been no ulterior motive, but Strohband was well aware that, having crashed the previous summer, Ullrich’s stock was suddenly soaring. Just over nine million Germans tuned in to the Nantes time trial and an average of just over six million watched the Tour every day. This eclipsed even the figures from 1997.
But it was more than just numbers. The Ullrich of 1997 had personified the exhilaration and promise of youth, of a Germany struggling to reconcile its broken pieces, and the fragments of a society that still felt betrayed, alienated or ambivalent – whereas now he seemed to stand for something even more universal and relatable. As Rolf Aldag and Lance Armstrong have already told me, Ullrich was the fallible Everyman who everyone wished they could somehow shake out of mediocrity and into the kind of excellence he had nearly, so nearly produced at the 2003 Tour. It was a paradigm that could be applied to athletes, lawyers, milkmen – and resonated even with novelists like Burkhard Spinnen, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. For Spinnen, for Germany, ‘Ullrich and his story make him the kind of hero whose defeats we easily forgive because, with him, the difference between victory and defeat disappears.’ Even in Ullrich’s decision to wait for Armstrong on Luz Ardiden, Spinnen saw not adherence to an unwritten code but a common paradox – the fear and loneliness of approaching success, and the magnetic force that sucks us back towards our enemies, demons and, yes, defeat.
The inspirational value of a message like that was clear to René Obermann, who had been appointed the CEO of Telekom’s mobile division – T-Mobile – late in 2002. Obermann didn’t offer Wolfgang Strohband a suite at the Crillon but he did suggest that they meet in Paris ‘to talk about Jan’. Strohband knew immediately what it would be about: Telekom wanted Ullrich back for the rebranded team.
Soon, their legal team would be presenting Strohband with a contract. As Strohband remembers: ‘The lawyer from T-Mobile drew up this contract that was 108 or 109 pages long. We started negotiating – me and my lawyer, them with theirs – and I went away saying to myself, I can’t talk to people who have no idea what they’re on about. There were clauses like Jan never being allowed to go into a restaurant and drink a glass of water because there could be something in it. He had to go to the tap and pour it himself, or open the bottle himself. You couldn’t believe some of the stuff in there.’
They also didn’t sign – yet. A further meeting took place in Strohband’s Hamburg office on 1 September, followed by another one in Berlin. They finally settled on a ‘signing-on’ fee of two million euros and a salary that would rise from 2.76 million euros in 2004 to 3.26 million euros in 2005. Ullrich would also receive three payments of 500,000 euros for contributions to T-Mobile ad campaigns. And, of course, there were handsome results-related bonuses.
Jacques Hanegraaf and Bianchi were party to none of this. They had also met Strohband in Paris and believed that they, too, had an agreement: Tony Grimaldi of Bianchi would look for co-sponsors to secure the team’s future on the understanding that Ullrich was central to it. Over the next few weeks, Grimaldi and Hanegraaf sounded out multiple major companies, including Samsung and Deutsche Post, who had wanted Ullrich in a Bjarne Riis-led team a few months earlier. ‘Deutsche Post were willing to get involved . . . but only with Jan Ullrich,’ Hanegraaf remembers. ‘I got into a kind of triangle then: I couldn’t convince Jan Ullrich to sign up, and no sponsor would sign without him.’
Volkswagen was another lead: they were apparently ready to commit 30 million euros a year, almost double Team Telekom’s annual budget, to fund a team to promote a newly released minivan. Strohband was leading those talks, but they also ran aground, perhaps partly because Telekom had Ullrich on the hook and now wouldn’t let go. As Hanegraaf reflects now, ‘We’d talked about a figure of two million euros a year, but I got the feeling later that when Strohband had mentioned a number to Obermann, he’d just added a million on top.’
As September turned to October, Hanegraaf believed there was still one last chance. He and Tony Grimaldi would meet Strohband and Ullrich and tell him that sponsors were waiting, money was available. But first Ullrich would have to make a pledge.
‘We called this meeting in Switzerland, with Jan, Rudy and Strohband. We wanted Jan to give us a final green light, because the money was all there for the future. All that wasn’t there was Jan Ullrich. His behaviour had also changed a lot after I think he’d taken the decision. We’d had a lot of contact with Jan and especially Rudy, but after the Tour it was total silence for a week. And this was very strange to us. So, anyway, we decided to have this meeting in the Mövenpick hotel at Zürich and cut to the chase. And that’s where he told us he was going to another team. He didn’t say T-Mobile – but in fact the day before he had already had a meeting and posed for pictures in a T-Mobile jersey. Those pictures got released a few hours after our meeting. So that was very bitter. They told us, then Strohband got up, Ullrich got up and Rudy followed them, and we were left sitting there, me and Tony. Tony turned to me and said three words: “Let’s get drunk.” ’
A couple of weeks after the Tour, Ullrich had welcomed German celebrity magazine Bunte into his villa in Scherzingen, posed for pictures with Gaby and Sarah Maria, and opened up about his wonderful new life in Switzerland. Had he won the Tour, Ullrich revealed, he might have ‘given up straight away’. It was perhaps better that he hadn’t because now he had ‘one place left to aim at’. Regardless, no one could be happier than he was at that moment, ‘with success in every area of my life, a relationship that’s working well and the baby’.
There was similar talk of family bonds when, finally, T-Mobile unveiled Ullrich at a press conference in Bonn on 4 October. René Obermann said Ullrich was like a ‘lost son’ from whom Telekom had had to distance itself in order to appreciate, and perhaps vice versa. It should nonetheless not be seen as a comeback or a reunion, more a new beginning.
Ullrich also spoke about having returned to his roots. And maybe having turned back time. Whether this was a good thing or not was hard to say. He stopped mid-sentence in his answer to one journalist’s question, unable to remember what it was or where he was going. A bead of sweat glistened on his brow. ‘I’m a bit stressed,’ he told the reporters, smiling meekly. ‘I haven’t slept for days.’