18
‘I think maybe 2003 sort of broke Jan. After that he wasn’t even close’
—Johan Bruyneel
Like Jan Ullrich, Brian Holm had known and raced for Telekom before the team’s first Tour win in 1996, he’d known the team afterwards, and after a short hiatus a little like Ullrich’s, he knew the environment into which Der Kaiser would be returning in 2004.
Holm had rejoined the team as a directeur sportif at the start of 2003. And it’s fair to say the Dane had not been impressed.
‘You had the Spanish division on one side, then Matthias Kessler and Andreas Klöden and those guys on the other. The Germans didn’t speak one word of Spanish and the Spanish didn’t give a shit about the Germans and probably didn’t like them. Fucking weird team. It was the biggest team there has ever been in cycling and for sure the worst.’
The world of magenta and white again revolved around Ullrich, but he wasn’t the callow, wide-eyed lamb who had sung Cranberries songs in the hotel room he shared with Holm at the Classique des Alpes in 1995.
‘Everything about the young unspoiled Ullrich that I’d known had changed,’ Holm confirms. ‘He was still a nice kid but to me it looked like he fucking hated his life. He’d gone away for a year, then came back with Rudy . . . and he wasn’t that unspoiled kid any more. He liked a glass of wine, for sure. I got the impression – of course I could be wrong – but he hated every second of standing there every day in front of the media. It had become big, big, big. He had become that superstar. Bjarne could handle it, Lance could definitely handle it, but Ulle didn’t like it. He wasn’t cut out for that stuff. I think, you know, if you have two or three glasses of wine maybe things start to look a bit brighter, a bit more optimistic, then you sleep and you get up and go through the same cycle. Unfortunately, there was no one with the balls to stop him. There was not one person who had the balls to say, “OK, if you do this or that, I’m fucking sending you home.” Because he was too big. And another problem was that he was such a nice guy: you didn’t want to hurt him, and you would never start a conflict just to make him look silly.’
One of the few constants throughout the Telekom life cycle had been Walter Godefroot. The wise but increasingly jaded old owl had nurtured his baby through its first growing pains, seen the team mature and prosper and was now presiding over its age of bourgeois opulence. ‘And the dimensions it took . . . I didn’t like,’ Godefroot notes, referring to the year-by-year increase in both the team’s budget and its fetishization by a certain cadre of rich and influential Germans. One man in particular, the politician, Rudolf Scharping, had become Telekom’s most prominent fan and a frequent visitor to races and training camps. Gregarious and controversial, Scharping became a popular figure of fun in the German media when the celebrity magazine, Bunte, published photos of him frolicking in a Mallorcan swimming pool with his girlfriend, a countess, in 2001. Scharping, the defence minister at the time, had stepped out of a meeting about imminent German military deployment in Macedonia and straight onto an army plane, which had flown him to the Balearic Islands at a cost of over 100,000 euros. The proximity of another Mallorcan tryst to the 9/11 terrorist attacks earned him an invidious nickname: ‘Bin Baden’. ‘Baden’ being the German verb ‘to swim or bathe’.
‘Scharping was no gift for me,’ Godefroot says now of the politician’s close affiliation with the team. ‘When I first met him he was standing for German Chancellor as Helmut Kohl’s opponent. He came with two bodyguards, an armoured vehicle – and we drank too many beers. We were drunk, and I said to him that he could come in the second team car the next day. One of the bodyguards says, no, they couldn’t leave the armoured car, to which I responded that we’d be fine because one of our soigneurs, Eule Reutenberg, was an old Stasi man . . .’
Wolfgang Strohband remembers another of Scharping’s visits when he was standing for the German Chancellorship, another boozy evening ending with Scharping going to bed and his bodyguard announcing to the gathering he’d left, ‘If they make him the Chancellor, I’m leaving the country.’
At the time, Godefroot saw the glad-handing as a necessary evil – a reasonable quid pro quo for Telekom’s financial largesse. He did, though, occasionally draw the line. Like when Telekom’s marketing men informed him they had done a deal with Audi that would see Ullrich, Bjarne Riis and Erik Zabel given A8 models, the rest of the team A6s and Telekom’s under-23 riders A4s. ‘There I put my foot down,’ Godefroot says. ‘Jürgen Kindervater told me about it and I went silent. He asked whether I didn’t think it was a good deal. I said, well, one, it’ll go to their heads, and two, what happens when we suddenly don’t have a sponsor who can give us that?’
In the autumn of 2003, Godefroot had also had to be firm on another point: just because Jan Ullrich was ‘coming home’ to T-Mobile, that did not mean Rudy Pevenage was forgiven or welcome to return. Godefroot made that clear as soon as Ullrich’s return was mooted in the summer.
‘I was happy to have Jan back, of course. Jan’s a good rider. You always want good riders. He’s also a nice guy. You can’t say he’s an arsehole. But as for Rudy, there’s a phone call, not from Obermann but the guy under Obermann who’s in charge of the team, Martin Knauer – ‘We have to talk.’ I think it was a Friday morning. I said OK, but he should call me Monday. No, it was too urgent for that – I had to go to Bonn. I had a few things to do but in the afternoon I was there. 300 kilometres to Bonn. I go into the office and there’s a huge photo of Jan in the yellow jersey. Then I knew what was going on. The reason they’ve brought me there is to ask me whether I’ll work with Jan . . . and Pevenage. I say I don’t trust Rudy, and once the trust is gone, it’s gone forever. So I refuse. But Knauer . . . There were a few of these guys. One of them had been in the car at the Tour the previous year. I’d had to drive the second car for a day so that I could entertain this guy from T-Mobile. I’d told him how it all worked – the race director’s car, the commissaires, how the peloton worked, the feed zone – and he was shocked because he thought the riders got off their bikes to eat. That was the level. And now here I was with this guy telling me I had to work with Pevenage.’
Eventually a compromise was struck whereby T-Mobile and Godefroot would tolerate Pevenage working privately with Ullrich, but he would not be allowed to stay in their hotels at races. Godefroot tells me he would occasionally see Pevenage and mumble a hello, no more. ‘It was strange, yes. Rudy himself said he was the best-paid bag carrier in the peloton. But the bottom line was that I didn’t trust him.’
Pevenage, for his part, felt that in 2003 he and Ullrich had felt liberated – and they were returning to the golden cage.
‘We’d felt free of the big Telekom machine in 2003, so it was a weird situation. Jan said that he’d draw up a personal contract for me, that he didn’t want to leave me in the shit. But only seeing him in the evening – that wasn’t what I was good at. I could go to the hotel in the evening and see Jan at the start, but I couldn’t have any other contact with the team. It wasn’t good for me or Jan.’
The factory reset seemed from the outside to be working out well enough for Jan Ullrich in the final months of 2003 and the period that had typically been his Bermuda Triangle, between Christmas and the season’s start. Before that, he had been reminded once more of how far and how loudly his exploits the previous summer had resonated when Mikhail Gorbachev presented him with the ‘World Connection Award’ at a gala in Hamburg for having waited for Lance Armstrong at Luz Ardiden – a supposedly exceptional contribution to international relations. Which was curious and a little awkward, given that Armstrong was about to bring out a second autobiography with a new take on what had occurred – namely that Ullrich hadn’t slowed down at all.
Hearing this, Ullrich laughed, and there was further merriment on a visit to Kazakhstan to see his friend, rival in 2003 and now teammate again, Alexander Vinokourov. A L’Équipe journalist, Philippe Le Gars, was also on the trip, and Le Gars came to feel later that it was the first time that Ullrich had truly opened up to members of the press. Later in the year, on the eve of the Tour de France, Ullrich would call Le Gars with an idea: he wanted to assemble a collection of wines, all from 2003 and produced in regions that the race would visit in the forthcoming edition, to gift to his daughter Sarah Maria, born the previous year, on her twentieth birthday. When Le Gars enquired about a budget, Ullrich replied with one word: ‘Unlimited!’
To other members of the media, and particularly those who attended T-Mobile’s team launch in Mallorca in January, changes were harder to discern. Some even thought there had been a regression. At T-Mobile HQ in Bonn, he was no longer just Jan Ullrich but, internal memos said, ‘Premium Product Jan Ullrich’, an ambitious new PR-strategy having been elaborated to ‘leverage the asset’. Jürgen Kindervater, Telekom’s old communications chief and a sort of spiritual father for the cycling team, had left not long after CEO Ron Sommer in 2002, and Wolfgang Strohband thought some of the team’s soul had departed with Kindervater. ‘I wouldn’t say going back was a mistake. We just thought that it would be the same as at Telekom. But it was totally different. At Telekom everything came from Kindervater and Sommer. It was more human. At T-Mobile it all started with the 108-page contract which, admittedly, we later got down to forty pages. It all smacked of an approach that was all about putting business first, the athletes second.’
Some saw just the escalation of a process that had begun with Ullrich’s Tour win in 1997, or even the year before with Bjarne Riis’s. Ullrich had occasionally faltered, often fell short of expectations, but the cake kept rising and everyone wanted their slice. Another major German team, Gerolsteiner, had got richer and more ambitious every season, and in 2004 the German calendar would feature a total of ninety-nine days of UCI-ratified racing, compared with forty-seven in 1996. Stuttgart was also about to win its bid to host the UCI Road World Championships in 2007. The German economy may have been struggling, so much so that French and British analysts gloated that Germany was now the ‘sick man of Europe’ with its record unemployment, but there was one sport and one sportsman who could still get the moneymen pulling out their wallets.
And if Ullrich was the Sun, Telekom and everything else in his orbit was the Earth, basking in a golden glow. This was certainly how it felt to riders like Rolf Aldag, who soaked up the rays while also wondering about the long-term effects. ‘The Belgians go to the Tour of Flanders and if one of their riders wins they’re happy, but they’ll go anyway because they went there with their granddad, with their dad, and they’ll go with their son. That never existed in Germany. So that’s why it was a little bit strange. I’m not sure everyone knew how to handle it. And then in my opinion it was also a bit overdone, with two German television stations coming to the Tour with more people there than the host broadcasters, the people who send everything up in the air. It was like the Germans had occupied the Tour de France. It was a little bit of a weird feeling, not always the right feeling, because you always think, like, we lost two World Wars, now we try it with cycling, with power, with money.’
The analogy is a little overblown, Aldag knows, but that’s also his point.
‘It was over the top, but we also enjoyed it a lot,’ he picks up. ‘If you went to a hotel and they gave you a better room because of who you were, that was also nice.’
Brian Holm simply felt that the team which had reabsorbed Ullrich in 2004 was choking on its own hubris.
‘Even Team Sky would look like a village team compared to that. That was another level. I mean, which team has racing caps in different sizes? The Audis . . . At the team meetings, if they wanted to take us to play ice hockey, there’d be an ice-hockey kit in Telekom colours with our name on the back. If they took us go-karting, we’d have a full, personalized go-karting suit waiting for us. Fucking biggest hotel I’ve seen in my life. We were as spoiled as hell. I mean, who wouldn’t like that? But basically the riders were overpaid, with no results. That was T-Mobile. They really lost it. Too much red wine and too little ambition.’
Ullrich was at least used to fighting for elbow room with Erik Zabel – and the hierarchy had been re-established at the T-Mobile team presentation in January, when the riders all filed onto the stage in alphabetical order with one exception – Ullrich coming after Zabel. It didn’t appear to unduly fluster Ullrich that in interviews Zabel kept offering the team’s assorted successes in 2003 as proof that it was perhaps a good idea to pursue other goals besides the Tour.
A bigger concern for Ullrich was the glut of talent that Godefroot had assembled in T-Mobile’s stage-race division. The Australian phenom Cadel Evans and the Colombian Santiago Botero, a double stage winner in the 2002 Tour, had already been signed to partially fill the Ullrich-shaped void in 2003. For 2004, Godefroot had also added the 2002 Giro d’Italia champion Paolo Savoldelli. The aggressive recruitment drive, together with Vinokourov’s rising stock, prompted speculation about internal rivalries that Ullrich found unsettling. The various language barriers and quirks of some of the characters involved, particularly Evans – whom Andreas Klöden said later was ‘a peculiar character who didn’t fit in’ – provided rich material for stories like the one in Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad calling the team ‘a snake pit’.
Not that any of this was an excuse for Ullrich to again start slipping into bad old habits. Page after page in his new contract was dedicated to anti-doping clauses and protocols, but there was still little, it seemed, that Walter Godefroot could make Ullrich do about his weight and fitness early in the season. His various colds and flus between January and March were, this year too, either cause, effect or aggravator of his excess kilos and shortage of form. In January, it had been Lance Armstrong justifying dietary choices after his new girlfriend, the pop star Sheryl Crow, made an offhand comment to a reporter at an LA Lakers game – ‘I’m a bad influence: I always head for the Krispy Kremes.’ But when Armstrong and Ullrich clashed for the first time in 2004 at Vuelta a Murcia in March, Armstrong looked taut and ready while Ullrich’s belly drooped. A few weeks later, Ullrich was abandoning La Flèche Wallonne and admitting that he had ‘overestimated his body’. Meanwhile, Rudy Pevenage and Walter Godefroot now sat at either side of a farcical, Kafkaesque impasse – with Godefroot blaming Pevenage for Ullrich’s lack of application while at the same time refusing to let him in from the cold. Pevenage felt as though he had seen and tried it all before with Ullrich. ‘If T-Mobile come along and offer you that much money, like they did in 2004, you have to maybe change your life to make sure you give them back what they want. But Jan never could,’ Pevenage says now.
Luigi Cecchini had appeared to crack the code the previous year, but he now claims to have only casually advised Ullrich after 2003, explaining, ‘He would come to dinner and occasionally ask me to get the Vespa out and motor-pace him, but that was all, because he was back at Telekom.’ This contradicts what Ullrich would tell Philippe Le Gars on the eve of the 2004 Tour, in a story clearly planted to head off another journalist who was about to ‘unmask’ Cecchini as Ullrich’s coach. Walter Godefroot said at the time he was ‘flabbergasted’ by that news. But no one should have been, because La Gazzetta dello Sport had already linked Cecchini to Ullrich in October 2003.
Regardless, Cecchini’s charisma could accomplish many things but had not provided a lasting solution to the brain-twister of Ullrich’s weight. ‘When he came here he’d still have the odd glass of wine, but he wasn’t out of control like I’ve heard he could be at other times,’ the doctor says. Cecchini also disapproved of the extreme springtime diets that had previously wowed teammates and fast-tracked Ullrich to something like his target weight but done so at a price. ‘The problem comes when you don’t eat much, you do six hours, then you get home and you could eat a horse. You’re not replenishing your glycogen stores, and suddenly you can’t train as well. Jan’s problem was that he started off six or seven kilos overweight or more. I always tell them that six or seven kilos is too much to put on, that they have to control themselves when they stop racing in the winter. Many listen but most don’t.’
Lance Armstrong’s coach, Michele Ferrari, was reputed to be an even bigger stickler for calorie control than Cecchini. After years of observing Ullrich’s struggles from afar, Armstrong was also mystified as to why, almost a decade into his career, his rival hadn’t yet found a way to exercise more self-control. ‘The weight thing has to be food,’ Armstrong says. ‘I mean, you’d hear stories about ice cream . . . just bad habits.’
Speculation about new-fangled diet pills and obesity drugs like Xenical also lit up the peloton switchboards, especially when Ullrich suddenly seemed to transform himself in the spring months. Those rumours also reached Armstrong. ‘I’d hear that and be like, Man, just push the plate away in the winter,’ he says.
At the same time, the Ullrich method also included remarkable feats of endurance and sacrifice – brutal two- or three-month purges as the Tour approached that left teammates open-mouthed. Beppe Guerini, Ullrich’s mountain sherpa for many years, says that no one else could have extracted so much from their body in such short periods, or even contemplated trying. ‘There were years when he got through races like the Tour of Switzerland in June eating practically nothing because he still had so much weight to lose. On the first day he’d barely be holding on and by the end of the week he’d be climbing with the best guys.’
Another of T-Mobile’s Italians, Daniele Nardello, agrees: Ullrich’s starvation-on-demand springtime ritual was remarkable – but also unsustainable. ‘You can’t train for a Tour de France on a bowl of muesli,’ Nardello says. ‘You might be OK for a week or so, or two weeks, but you can’t compete with Lance Armstrong like that.’
The other question was whether years of the same, self-imposed feast-to-famine pattern hadn’t mentally ground Ullrich down. Since turning thirty in December 2003, he had already noticed that his body was reacting differently. Teammates and friends could also easily imagine how years in the same spiral had built layer upon layer of mental scar tissue. Beppe Guerini rejects the idea that it was a disillusioned, listless Ullrich who had rejoined his old team in 2004, but occasionally he did give that impression. On one occasion, Guerini thinks at the start of 2004 or 2005, Ullrich punctured 50 kilometres from the team hotel at their Mallorca training camp and hurled his bike into a field, muttering that he felt like giving up.
Jan Schaffrath had spent his whole career at Telekom. Primarily a Classics rider, he didn’t often ride the same races as Ullrich, but an experience in 2005 did leave him wondering about the burdens that his fellow East German was carrying.
‘I think the last two or three months before the Tour every year took a lot out of him. When he had to train so intensively, live so seriously . . . somewhere you also need an escape valve, and Jan’s escape valve perhaps got bigger every year. That was my impression. I base that mainly on something I did in 2005. I’d had a really bad spring, and we decided that I’d do the Giro, mainly to lose weight. In a grand tour you always feel that you’re eating too little anyway – but there I really restricted myself, ate no desserts, and was going to bed hungry every night. Well, I lost weight . . . but mentally I was completely dead at the end of the Giro. And it pretty much finished me off as a pro bike rider. It cost me so much energy, mentally, to be that disciplined every day. I came home from the Giro, went to a Hofbräu house in Berlin and just stuffed myself up with food and beer. My girlfriend said that it simply wasn’t possible to eat that much.
‘So then, thinking about Jan,’ Schaffrath continues, ‘you add the weight issue to the general pressure of being a general classification rider, and it’s so extreme. Jan had battered himself for months to get himself down to the right weight, then he went in knowing that he couldn’t afford a crash or a lapse in concentration. You’re on a knife edge the whole time. All you can think about is food . . . then you have the added pressure of knowing that your season begins and ends with the Tour. I could really understand Jan and why certain things happened after that experience at the Giro. I also thought about other people who had experienced the same thing. For example, the East German swimmer, Franziska Van Almsick, had the same stuff thrown at her. They called her fat too. You start to think about what effect that can have on a young person. You also know how some people react to the stress: by eating and drinking. It becomes a vicious circle.’
However strong the vortex into which Jan Ullrich had fallen in early 2004, by June he was, as usual, finally swimming with the current and back in his flow. Having roared into the Tour of Switzerland with his first win of the season on stage one, Ullrich rounded the race off with victory in the final-day time trial. He later said he had been inspired by the presence of partner Gaby and daughter Sarah Maria, and especially the photos that Gaby had sent him moments before he left the start ramp. Ullrich looked in magnificent shape. ‘He is just gliding through the other riders. It’s awesome to watch,’ swooned Bradley Wiggins.
Lance Armstrong’s form offered Ullrich further encouragement. Armstrong had been thrashed by Iban Mayo and his old teammate Tyler Hamilton at the Dauphiné Libéré, most notably on the mountain time trial up Mont Ventoux. According to his US Postal teammate, Floyd Landis, no sooner had Armstrong towelled himself down and checked the time gaps than he was calling the UCI president, Hein Verbruggen, to forcefully suggest that the drug testers keep a closer eye on Mayo and Hamilton. Hamilton claimed in his autobiography The Secret Race that, the same evening, he received a summons to Switzerland from the UCI. Their subsequent meeting amounted to a warning, Hamilton believed, or possibly a threat that he could soon be cut down to size.
Armstrong perhaps felt doubly sensitive, extra paranoid because of concerns about how he was going to ‘optimize’ his own performances at the 2004 Tour. A few months earlier US Postal had fired one of their doctors, Luis Del Moral – and in so doing lost his expertise in the delicate art of blood transfusions. The team had also been put on edge by the release of David Walsh and Pierre Ballester’s book, L. A. Confidentiel, which contained a litany of doping allegations against Armstrong, just days before the Tour. ‘Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary proof,’ would be the take-home line of Armstrong’s pre-Tour press conference in Liège, and the death stare he shot at Walsh the most abiding image. As far as many were concerned, the Irish journalist and his French colleague had assembled by far the most compelling case to date for Armstrong being a cheat.
The narrow margin of his victory over Ullrich in 2003 had also unsettled Armstrong to the point that, in the winter, he had called all of his equipment suppliers to a fancy Los Angeles hotel to demand better from them in 2004. Everything he would use at the Tour had to be lighter, more aerodynamic, more badass. Between them, Mayo, Hamilton, Ballester and Walsh had also now done their bit, stirring in the final ingredient to Armstrong’s motivational soup – not just opponents but enemies, people to fuck with and destroy. Armstrong would boil down his recipe into a single, four-word mantra later in the Tour: ‘No gifts this year.’
Ullrich claimed in Liège that he was the lightest he’d been at the start of a Tour since 1997. For once, he had also done even more route recces than Armstrong, the American having stayed in the USA with his kids in April. On the subject of fatherhood, one of the German tabloids, Bild Zeitung, had responded to the release of Ullrich’s own memoir in June by diving deeper into his family life. A Bild reporter had located Ullrich’s estranged dad, Werner, in a village in the far north of Germany. Werner Ullrich said that he would be happy to finally reconnect with his son, twenty years after walking out on his family and just over a decade after last seeing Jan, fleetingly, at a race in Berlin. He was living ‘alone and forlorn’ in Schleswig-Holstein, close to the Danish border.*
‘Forlorn’ would unfortunately also describe Jan Ullrich’s mood halfway through the Tour. After a lacklustre prologue and team time trial, he flopped in the first Pyrenean stage to La Mongie. His friend and domestique, Andreas Klöden, was even ordered to leave Ullrich behind and went on to finish the stage third, twenty seconds behind Armstrong and Ivan Basso. Ullrich conceded nearly two and a half minutes.
No one in the team let on that Ullrich had fallen ill a few days before the Tour and been put on a course of antibiotics, and neither did Godefroot consider these mitigating circumstances. In the past he had questioned Ullrich’s professionalism; now he said he wasn’t sure whether Ullrich even had the will to fight. It was left to one of the T-Mobile directeurs sportifs, Mario Kummer, to leap to Ullrich’s defence, observing that in his position many riders would already have given up. ‘Sometimes we had to lie, or at least keep things private,’ Kummer admits to me in 2016. ‘In my opinion the press sometimes praised him to the skies when things were going well but then lost touch with reality and put an incredible amount of pressure on him. And when it didn’t go well, they really hammered him.’
There was some truth to that, but it would also have been disingenuous to talk about an outbreak of Schadenfreude. One German media outlet, ARD, would even face allegations of an unhealthy pro-Ullrich bias when their pundits criticized Jens Voigt for chasing him down on the first Alpine stage – despite the fact it made perfect tactical sense given that Voigt’s team leader, Ivan Basso, was a rival for the podium places. The harshest criticism had been levelled at Voigt by ARD host Hagen Boßdorf, who just happened to be the ghostwriter for Ullrich’s autobiography. Moreover, ARD were a co-sponsor of the T-Mobile team and, personally, of Ullrich. The following day, Voigt finished the mountain time trial to Alpe d’Huez close to tears, having been booed and called ‘Judas’ or worse by German fans all the way up the climb.
Armstrong, too, was spat at and abused on the Alpe, but almost seemed to relish the hostile atmosphere. Without Ullrich to seriously challenge him, he cruised through the three weeks, meting out summary justice whenever and to whomever he pleased. By stage eighteen, with the Tour as good as won, there was still one antagonist left to crush: the journeyman Italian, Filippo Simeoni, who two years earlier had testified against Michele Ferrari in a trial that would end years later with Ferrari overturning a one-year prison sentence for ‘sporting fraud’ i.e. doping athletes including Simeoni. Armstrong’s response to Simeoni’s accusations had been to call him a ‘liar’, prompting Simeoni to sue Armstrong for defamation. Now, two days before the end of the Tour, Armstrong hunted Simeoni down as the Italian tagged onto the back of an innocuous breakaway on the road to Lons-le-Saunier. ‘I have a lot of money and I’ll destroy you,’ Armstrong allegedly told him. Later in the stage, while Simeoni wept at the back of the peloton, Armstrong could be seen giggling with Ullrich as they rode side by side, before turning to the TV camera and zipping his lips in mime. One of Ullrich’s teammates, Beppe Guerini, was later disciplined by the Italian Cycling Federation for also having verbally abused Simeoni.
The incident would cause further, lasting damage to Armstrong’s credibility and popularity, in spite of him wrapping up his record sixth straight Tour win three days later. Ullrich’s Tour, meanwhile, had been the worst of his career and the first he had finished as neither the winner nor runner-up. He had not even been the best rider in T-Mobile colours, Klöden taking second and Ullrich a further two minutes back in fourth. He was proud to have finished the Tour but angry with Walter Godefroot, who had spent much of the last week bemoaning Ullrich’s mental fragility. ‘Mr Godefroot doesn’t even really know me,’ Ullrich snapped in a post-Tour appearance on Germany’s most popular TV chat show, Beckmann.
In truth, Godefroot wasn’t the only one who thought Ullrich had looked like a permanently beaten man in July 2004. Johan Bruyneel had reached more or less the same conclusion.
‘You know, Lance and Jan never really spoke that much. They basically didn’t speak, but I’ll always remember being with Lance at the doping control after he’d won the final time trial in 2004, and Ullrich coming over and giving Lance a hug. He said, “Ach, come on, Lance, it’s only a bike race.” And we all commented on that afterwards. We said, you see, it’s only a bike race for him – it’s not the most important thing. Which is what it was for us at the time.
‘I think maybe 2003 sort of broke Jan,’ Bruyneel says. ‘After that he wasn’t even close. He wasn’t even that out of shape in the winter any more – he got better at that – but I think mentally he was just broken in 2003.’
Broken, resigned or just happy enough with the status quo. Peter Becker had watched the Tour from his home in Berlin and reached the latter conclusion. ‘He simply thought that what he was doing was enough. Like, he’s won the Tour once and that’s enough – what else do people still want from him? “I’m up there, fighting for the Tour.” That was how he saw things – he was satisfied and fulfilled. He simply wasn’t prepared to invest any more.’
The question seems gratuitous, almost rhetorical, but I put it to Becker anyway: would Ullrich have won the Tour, say, five times, if the approach taken to talent incubation and development that he’d known in the DDR could have been frozen in time and transposed to a reunified Germany?
‘I think so,’ Becker says. ‘Back then they all wanted to go abroad, they all wanted to do the Peace Race, they all wanted to go to the Olympics, and there were also financial implications for everything. There was this pressure on them all back then that forced them forwards. So, no, Armstrong could have shown up in whatever condition he wanted . . .’
A couple of weeks after the end of the 2004 Tour de France, on a restaurant terrace in Sezze, his home town in central Italy, Filippo Simeoni offered me his postscript to a race that had brought him worldwide notoriety but no peace of mind. ‘Time is a gentleman’ Italians are wont to tell each other in times of crisis, but from Simeoni’s point of view Armstrong’s actions in France hurt just as much a fortnight later as they had at the time. As bad, if not worse, was the behaviour of the other riders, for more gestures or messages of solidarity had come Armstrong’s way than Simeoni’s. ‘I don’t know how much the punter who waits for hours at the roadside wants to see a doped athlete. But there’s no solidarity, no medium through which to deliver this message,’ Simeoni lamented.
It had been a bruising year all round for cycling and its reputation. The latest and perhaps until-then worst in a conga line of dismal seasons for the sport’s credibility began with the Cofidis team all but imploding after a series of doping-related raids and arrests. In February, the man who in 1998 had halted all talk of an extended Jan Ullrich reign in the Tour de France, Marco Pantani, had died in Rimini not from performance-enhancing drug use but an overdose of cocaine. Pantani had fought an addiction to the recreational drug after failing a blood test at the 1999 Giro d’Italia that strongly indicated the use of EPO, thereafter spiralling into a pit of depression, shame and self-loathing. His death came just weeks after the eerily similar demise of another once-brilliant climber, the Spaniard José María Jiménez.
If those tragedies united the cycling world in grief, a previously little-known Spanish rider named Jesús Manzano was soon shaking the sport to its gangrened core and laying bare exactly the kind of hypocrisy Filippo Simeoni decried later in the summer. In a series of interviews with the Spanish newspaper AS, Manzano delivered the grisliest exposé of doping practices within the pro peloton to date. Perhaps most shocking was Manzano’s account of how, on the first Alpine stage of the 2003 Tour, while riding for the Kelme team, he had fallen off his bike and, moments later, into a coma after attacking on a climb. Manzano claimed the blackout had been caused by an injection of an experimental blood substitute. He alleged his team doctor had administered the drug and that his team manager had also ordered him to refuse all follow-up tests when he was rushed to hospital, lest his poison be discovered.
Kelme rubbished Manzano’s claims and publicly received the widespread backing of their peers and the authorities, despite their invitation to the Tour de France being withdrawn.24 Privately, though, for many riders and directeurs sportifs, the AS stories were confirmation of what they had been hearing about certain Kelme riders for years: if nearly everyone in pro cycling played with fire, some of the boys in green, blue and white were pyromaniacs who would light, fan and eat roaring flames. They were reckless, feckless and, for the unwitting spectator, sensational to watch. Their doctors, Walter Virú and, until the end of 2002, one Eufemiano Fuentes, were believed to possess or dispense magic powers – in Fuentes’s case, as Jan Ullrich’s ex-Bianchi teammate Félix García Casas says, ‘the ability to turn a very average rider into a very good one’.
The repercussions of the Manzano scandal would play out way beyond 2004, in ways neither Jan Ullrich nor anyone else could foresee. Jörg Jaksche was also destined to end up in the crosshairs, but in the summer of 2004, Jaksche says, his fears and paranoias had mainly been triggered by a news flash from Switzerland. The Swiss 1998 world champion Oscar Camenzind’s positive test for EPO was extraordinary in that testers from the national Olympic Committee had identified and stopped him in the middle of a training ride and demanded a urine sample on the spot. To fans, it sounded like just another cheat getting his comeuppance; to riders up to the same tricks, like Jaksche, it looked like a shot across their bows.
‘There was a broad spectrum of how people dealt with the stress of cheating and hiding it,’ Jaksche remembers. ‘In 2004, there was this Camenzind story and everyone was suddenly frightened about going to those alpine resorts that had always been popular for altitude training, St. Moritz in Switzerland or Livigno just over the Italian border. Suddenly everyone started dressing in black [to remain inconspicuous on training rides]. I was riding for CSC at the time. It was like, “Problem! We have a problem!” And straight away I went to a bike shop to buy some black kit. I took it to the till and the guy was like, “Oh, it’s funny, you’re the fifth pro I’ve had in here buying black stuff. Don’t you not get that from your team or what?” So people got stressed. This was also the reason some guys got caught; when you’re stressed you make mistakes.’
A mistake was what it would usually take for someone to get busted, according to Jaksche. Out-of-competition testing was infrequent and, says Jaksche, sometimes circumvented by hiding behind drawn curtains or a rider pretending he was, say, the brother of the pro cyclist who was out on his bike and uncontactable. Only in 2005 would the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) roll out ADAMS – the Anti-Doping Administration and Management System obliging athletes to provide their whereabouts for an hour every day. It would be a game-changer. Certainly for riders who, until that point, had found it harder to hide their doping from partners and family members than from the testers and their own conscience.
‘I got EPO in Spain from a pharmacy when we were at training camp,’ Jaksche recalls. ‘You can buy like 2,000, 5,000 and 10,000, so I bought like 40,000 units of EPO, which was enough to do it up to Paris–Nice [in March]. I had this crazy girlfriend at the time and she stressed me out so much that I just kept crashing, so my season was pretty much done after Paris–Nice anyway. I broke my elbow, my vertebrae. I was living in her place in Innsbruck and I was always hiding stuff in her fridge. For example, this was a typical trick: you would get a Toblerone, drill a hole in the middle of it and the syringe would fit perfectly. Someone had come up with this because hotel minibars pretty much always had a Toblerone in them. So with our criminal minds, we thought of that straight away.’
There were elements of pantomime, like this, but also moments when the sport seemed not so much to have mislaid its moral compass as lost contact with Earth’s magnetic field. In September 2004, Tyler Hamilton offered a further window into the beckoning dystopia when he tested positive for a homologous blood transfusion – injecting the blood of a different person – and initially offered a jaw-dropping defence: that he may have absorbed, in utero, DNA from a deceased embryonic twin – a genetic condition known as chimerism. If this sounded like gallows humour, it was nothing compared to the jokes allegedly tickling some of the Kelme riders who had been incriminated by Jesús Manzano. Sometimes, Manzano said later, they would moo or bark at each other as they left team hotels depending on whether they had taken Oxyglobin, a medicine used to treat anaemia in dogs, or Actovegin, an extract of calves’ blood.
The Italian rider Danilo Di Luca had also been barred from the 2004 Tour due to his involvement in a doping investigation. Years later, Di Luca described the peloton’s prevailing worldview thus: ‘The cyclist thinks that if fifteen drops are good then thirty are better. He’s used to giving everything of himself, as a man and an athlete, because this is a sport which demands that. There’s no other way to see or live it . . . There’s a huge dose of unconsciousness, of arrogance and of egotism . . . If you finish the stage alive you’ve already won and you don’t care about the consequences.’
While the 2004 and 2005 seasons would shatter many myths, T-Mobile and Jan Ullrich kept themselves largely above suspicion – except among a well-connected few. Sylvia Schenk tells me that worrying noises about the University of Freiburg and their work with the team reached the German Cycling Federation at the end of 2003. ‘Someone told me at the end of 2003 that stuff was going on at Freiburg, but we had no witnesses on the record, so no proof. It was someone important in the federation. They said to me Telekom were doing stuff, just enough not to get caught. I said to them that we had to do something. But this person wouldn’t speak publicly and I knew they would deny it all if I tried to say something. From that point on I tried to look more closely and dig around, but I couldn’t find anything.’
Not only did Schenk fail to uncover any evidence of wrongdoing, she also praised T-Mobile in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in September 2004. They had ‘given [her] hope . . . by reacting so determinedly to the 1998 Festina scandal.’ Schenk was referring mainly to the people in the boardrooms in Bonn and particularly the way they had dealt with Ullrich’s positive test for ecstasy in 2002. But the uninitiated among the German public almost certainly didn’t make the distinction – T-Mobile was Ullrich and here was another figure in authority vouching for both team and star rider. Among Spanish desperados, Italian mafiosi and American gangsters, T-Mobile – like other great German brands – had successfully harnessed all the tropes of modern Germany’s self-flattery and its positive traits as seen by the rest of the world: its efficiency, its high morals and, yes, in certain respects and arenas, perhaps an intrinsic superiority over neighbours and enemies.
In ‘After The Catastrophe’, his essay about the burden of guilt in post-war Germany, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung said that the Germans’ centuries-old obsession with their own prestige had always truly come from insecurity. Jung recalled Frederik Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘pale criminal’, who ‘will stoop to every kind of self-deception if only he can escape the sight of himself’. He continued:
Nowhere does [this] appear to be such a national characteristic as in Germany. This condition can easily lead to an hysterical dissociation of the personality, which consists essentially . . . in wanting to jump over one’s own shadow, and in looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others. Hence the hysteric always complains of being surrounded by people who are incapable of appreciating him and who are activated only by bad motives; by . . . a crowd of submen who should be exterminated neck and crop so that the Superman can live on his high level of perfection.25
Even in a wider context of worsening decay, surrounded by scandal, somehow ‘Germany’s team’ and its own Superman, Jan Ullrich, had wriggled clear of every accuser and kept burnishing their halo. Released in June 2004, a fly-on-the-wall documentary focusing on Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag at the 2003 Tour provided a saccharine, technicolour ode to the yeomen on bikes and their honest toil. The subject of doping was conspicuous by its absence – because the director said he’d seen none and, besides, he was a ‘filmic storyteller and not an investigative journalist’. When asked, Rolf Aldag said it was more simple than that: there was no need to establish ground rules about whether and how the subject was broached because ‘at T-Mobile there’s no doping’.
Not in 2003, 2004 or any other year.
Throughout the highs, lows and assorted vicissitudes of Jan Ullrich’s decade as a professional cyclist, one person had remained at his side and in his heart. Rarely interviewed by the German media and hence little-known, Gaby Weis deviated far enough from the stereotype of the trophy blonde to enhance Ullrich’s homespun, boy-next-door schtick but not far enough to arouse genuine curiosity. Profile pieces afforded her a short paragraph and epithets that were neither inaccurate nor uncomplimentary, though could seem patronizingly blasé. ‘The winemakers’ daughter from the little village on the Rhine,’ she would read – and feel her insides stiffen.
The release of Ullrich’s book in June 2004, with its long passages about how Gaby’s support had seen him through his darkest hours, had caused a ripple of new interest. That, though, only made it more painful when, just three months later, Gaby found out that Jan had fallen for Sara Steinhauser, the sister of his teammate and training partner Tobias.
When Gaby confronted Ullrich, he didn’t try to lie. For weeks that ran into months over the late summer and autumn of 2004, they talked about saving the relationship while knowing that Ullrich’s love already resided with another woman. In February 2005, Gaby still hoped things could be salvaged, particularly when she was in hospital getting treatment for an abscess and Jan interrupted his training in Tuscany to visit her. Gaby and Sarah Maria went back with him to Italy, but by then the whole thing had started to feel doomed. Mother and daughter would soon be returning to Germany and the realization that Jan – ‘the man of my life, with all his little flaws’, as Gaby later told Bunte – wasn’t coming back. It was ‘official’ when Ullrich told Bild am Sonntag that he and Gaby were no longer together. He had never been that categorical in conversations with Gaby. Reading it in a newspaper, she said, felt like a ‘slap in the face’.
Ullrich swore that there was no one else involved, but the Berliner Zeitung was soon reporting a possible liaison with his physiotherapist Birgit Krohme. And at a training camp in Mallorca, he was sighted in the disco of the Robinson Club, where T-Mobile were gathered, in the company of a woman with whom he seemed ‘intimately acquainted’, according to Bunte. The mystery female wasn’t named or identified at the time. But then almost exactly a month after Ullrich announced his new single status, he wanted to set the record straight, this time to Bild: his new girlfriend was Sara Steinhauser, whom he now called ‘the love of my life’.
Rudy Pevenage surmises bluntly that ‘for a while Gaby suited him, then there came a point when another woman suited him better’. That was no doubt true, but Ullrich’s handling of the situation struck many as clumsy. Wolfgang Strohband, Ullrich’s manager, is maybe stating the obvious when he says, ‘Gaby suffered but I don’t think Jan did’.
Gaby’s friends and family would indeed confirm that every mention of Ullrich’s new romance by newspapers layered a further insult on top of the injury; whether it was Ullrich announcing in November 2005 that he wanted a child with Sara or the news that he had moved her into the house in Scherzingen, bought her a new Audi and persuaded her to give up her job in the marketing department of Munich-based ski manufacturers Elan. For months, Gaby couldn’t stand the sound of his voice when he called every two days to speak to Sarah Maria. Jan hoped they could one day be friends, but Gaby told Bunte she was ‘too wounded’ and thought he still hadn’t realized he’d done anything wrong. Luckily, she still had her sense of humour: on the day she rounded up her things and left Scherzingen for good, she joked to friends that she was leaving her VIP status at the border.
Meanwhile, Wolfgang Strohband advised Ullrich against throwing himself too wholeheartedly into his new relationship. Strohband was worried that Ullrich’s naivety, or gullibility, could make him vulnerable – not that Strohband particularly suspected Sara of impure motives. Nonetheless, one Sunday in December 2005, Strohband took a break from jet-washing the oak leaves off his apartment terrace in Hamburg to give Ullrich a lengthy pep talk over the phone – or, as he called it, ‘some fatherly guidance’. He had nothing against Sara, he stressed, but maybe Jan should just, well, be careful how much he said about certain subjects and how much he put on display. It was sound advice that might have served Ullrich well. Just not in the way that Strohband intended.
With the exception of the 1999 and 2002 seasons in which misfortune and misadventure had kept him out of the Tour, and his 1998 annus obesus, Ullrich’s 2004 campaign had been his worst since 1995 – but he could still salvage it by defending his Olympic road race title in Athens. On a course that didn’t suit him, in forty-degree temperatures, Ullrich rode creditably to finish nineteenth, but the German team’s race was maybe most remarkable for something Jens Voigt blurted to journalist Klaus Blume after crossing the line: ‘I’ll never ride another Olympics or world championships . . . or at least not with Jan Ullrich!’ Voigt evidently believed his spade work had deserved better from his team leader. Ullrich was still expected to win a medal in the individual time trial, but slumped to sixth place. ‘Weißbier-Jan’ (Wheat-beer Jan), as Bild called him, was then ‘welcomed back’ to Germany by the newspaper’s unflattering pictures of him drowning his sorrows – a Photoshop stitch-up according to Wolfgang Strohband. Ullrich himself didn’t have the energy to cry foul. He noted only that, ‘Last year I was the golden king of hearts, whereas now suddenly I’m just Beer-Ulle.’
A final flourish in the end-of-season Italian races, including victory in the Coppa Sabatini, wasn’t enough to alter the storyline of the winter. Again, the German media asked what Ullrich needed to change – his coach, his diet, his race programme or his mental approach. Walter Godefroot had announced that he was going to retire as T-Mobile’s manager at the end of 2005 and pass the reins to Olaf Ludwig. Godefroot was winding down – but not about to climb down from his position vis-à-vis Rudy Pevenage, however much it had affected Ullrich in 2004. ‘David Beckham doesn’t sign for Real Madrid and say I want to bring my coach with me,’ Godefroot sniffed. At a press event in Amsterdam, Ullrich spoke about wanting a more relaxed atmosphere in the team, more like what he had at Coast/Bianchi, and not putting too much pressure on himself. These were more than just the idle musings of someone who was broadly happy with life in his new, old team. Soon murmurs had reached the German press that Ullrich was trying to wriggle out of his contract and sign for one of the big Spanish outfits – Liberty Seguros or Illes Balears.
He ended up staying but, for all the talk of fostering better team spirit, the harmony that reigned at T-Mobile team gatherings early in 2005 was at best fragile, at worst an illusion. Andreas Klöden and Erik Zabel had clashed over the former’s comments in an interview to the effect that T-Mobile would have more chance of winning the Tour without Zabel. Tension between the two dominant cabals in the team – one beholden to Ullrich and the other to Zabel – simmered closer than ever to boiling point. Klöden and Matthias Kessler, a precocious youngster from a wealthy family in Bavaria, were Ullrich’s closest allies and also increasingly viewed as troublemakers.
Brian Holm remembers a team-building exercise at the end of the 2005 season which, he says, did more to highlight who and what was wrong in the ranks than put it right. ‘We did this army camp, you know, the big T-Mobile happy family going off, climbing up a rope then having to count down and jump to conquer his fear. The soldier was counting down, “Ten, nine . . .” and then Kessler starts, “Neunundneunzig, achtundneunzig . . .” [‘Ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . . ’] You know, just starting shit. And that was the team. It looked great from the outside but it was a total mess.’
Years later, a serious accident when he was training in Mallorca left Kessler severely handicapped, which makes Brian Holm reluctant to dwell on the negative influence he had at T-Mobile. After leaving the team, Kessler would also apologize to certain members of staff for how he had behaved. Nonetheless, Holm is not alone in suggesting that he exemplified much of what had become dysfunctional at T-Mobile – Ullrich’s ‘being a mastermind at picking the wrong friends’, a growing sense of entitlement among riders, how they were indulged and the dwindling returns. Marion Kummer, another of the directeurs sportifs at the time, counters that, ‘Jan was the one who complained the least.’ But others saw a culture of excuses that poisoned the general ambiance. The first four months of the 2005 season were a disaster. The team registered not a single victory until Alexander Vinokourov saved the spring by winning Liège–Bastogne– Liège.
Jan Schaffrath, one of the team’s elder statesmen, pined for the more modest and more successful Deutsche Telekom of the early years.
‘Once upon a time you could win a stage of the Bayern Rundfahrt then celebrate with a beer afterwards, which everyone thought was fun, but later, when the team got bigger, you weren’t allowed to do that any more. And of course, as the boundaries got tighter, the excesses got greater – which was a response to dissatisfaction in the team. A reaction to the pressure as well. And there were excuses. We’re not winning because of the bikes or because we don’t have a big enough bus. Things that you never considered before. I remember when all the discussions about Jan’s weight were going on at the Robinson Club in Mallorca, at the training camp. We ate in the buffet with everyone else, but at a certain point a decision was taken that we needed healthier food, more “sporty” meals, and a separate room was found for us downstairs. Then, though, that wasn’t OK either, and it was finally decided that we could eat upstairs on the day before the rest day. These were huge discussions that, when you look back, were a massive waste of energy. Everyone had become so caught up in that artificial world. Only when it all fell apart did you really get things in proportion again. I can remember sitting with Matthias Kessler and Andreas Klöden years later, and them saying, “What the hell were we complaining about?” But that culture had set in and it became hard to change. It was just a consequence of the whole thing getting huge.’
Walter Godefroot had overseen the whole metamorphosis, from five-million-deutsche-mark-a-year minnows that were Germany’s first team at the Tour de France for nineteen years in 1992, to the 15 million-euro fat cats of the international peloton. The only thing that hadn’t really changed was Godefroot – the drill sergeant with the smile of an antiquarian bookseller, who would tell riders that cancer was the only good excuse for abandoning races and almost mean it.
‘Klöden is particular, but not a bad lad,’ he says now, responding to a direct question about Klöden, Kessler and their effect on Ullrich. ‘With Kessler it was more difficult. He was a bit of a skinhead. He had piercings and a shaved head when I first met him. He’s from a rich family. Dad had a lot of property in Munich. He would go on and on about lightweight bikes, so one day I said to him, “What’s the point of you having a lightweight bike? Get rid of all that other metal first, then we can talk.” Then, in fairness, he took out the piercings.’
Whatever other burdens were weighing Ullrich down in the early months of 2005 – be it guilt he secretly harboured over Gaby, the pain of missing Sarah Maria, problems in his team or, literally, the excess body weight he had carried into this season as well – he could at least be confident that one load was about to be lifted for good. After keeping everyone guessing throughout the winter or, as Ullrich said, ‘playing a little poker game’, Lance Armstrong confirmed that he would compete in the 2005 Tour de France after all. Then he would ride off the Champs-Élysées into the Parisian sunset and out of the sport.
Armstrong would be a young retiree at thirty-three, but he appeared to have had enough, bombarded by doping allegations, hounded by trolls and surrounded by lawyers. The runaway success of the yellow Livestrong bracelets that Nike had launched in 2004 to raise money for his cancer foundation, the 80 million people who eventually bought one, also suggested that he had outgrown the sport. Among colleagues, a prevailing omertà or law of silence perhaps helped preserve a force field of impunity, but it didn’t make him any more popular. One of the more notable reactions to his announcement about the 2005 Tour came from the Italian rider Franco Pellizotti: ‘I’m curious to see him go for a seventh Tour, although I much prefer Ullrich as a guy. Ivan Basso’s the only person in the peloton who likes Armstrong.’
Ullrich’s principle of non-aggression, by contrast, would continue until Armstrong’s very last pedal stroke. He reserved his resentment for critics who failed to grasp the sheer bad luck of his and Armstrong’s careers having coincided, not the nemesis himself, and indeed Ullrich said he was happy that Armstrong was going for number seven. Without him, the challenge wouldn’t quite feel the same. T-Mobile’s hype machine continued to push the idea of a fearsome, three-pronged Ullrich–Klöden–Vinokourov attack, but justifiable doubts persisted about how that configuration could work. In 2003, at Team Coast, Jacques Hanegraaf had come to the conclusion that Ullrich lacked any real tactical nous because of a preoccupation with merely getting and staying fit, after which he had come to believe his talent would look after the rest. Bjarne Riis, his old teammate and now team manager to Ivan Basso, said much the same in the Tour build-up: ‘Jan loses because he only concentrates on his own race and doesn’t look around. He doesn’t look at Armstrong and see what he’s doing.’
Meanwhile, perversely, it was the guy who kept winning who remained obsessed with his age-old rival, and with keeping Ullrich in the corner. Sometimes, for Armstrong and US Postal, it was less about getting a genuine edge than the feeling that they had outsmarted Telekom. Thus, three years after orchestrating Armstrong’s famous ‘coup de bluff’ over the radiowaves at Alpe d’Huez, Johan Bruyneel was delighted to discover that one of the team’s new sponsors, electronics company AMD, could supply them with scramblers for their intercom devices. This meant Bruyneel could continue to eavesdrop on T-Mobile’s in-race tactics while his counterparts tried to do the same and heard only crackles. ‘I suppose they could have figured out eventually what was going on, but then you’re not always talking in scrambled, so it confuses them and keeps them wondering,’ Bruyneel fairly chortles.
In a mismatched physiological war, Ullrich had long since been defeated, but Armstrong and Bruyneel weren’t about to let up. ‘It was May of 2005 and we were in the Pyrenees with Chechu Rubiera and Roberto Heras to recce the Pla d’Adet stage,’ Bruyneel recalls. ‘Generally on recons we wouldn’t do the whole stage because it was too long, so we’d maybe do the first 50 kilometres in the car. And on this day, on the drive, we saw three T-Mobile riders who happened to be looking at the same stage. It was Ullrich, Botero and Sevilla, I think. We didn’t want to be riding too close to them, so we passed them, and of course they saw us. We decided then that we didn’t want them to catch us, but we’d have to stop for a drink and a piss . . . so it was going to be a kind of race. We knew they would “chase” us and consequently our guys ended up riding a bit faster than they should have. Anyway, we finally got to the bottom of Pla d’Adet and went up, knowing that we’d see them on the way down. But we came down, didn’t see them and we thought we’d have some fun. On the first hairpin of the climb to Pla d’Adet there’s a spot where you can see right down into the village below, and we decided that we’d stop there and wait for them; we’d descend past them just as they were starting the climb, then we’d turn around at the bottom and pretty much race them back up the climb – and also show them they were doing it twice. But the thing was – and we couldn’t believe this – they never showed up. Later we found out that they didn’t do Pla d’Adet because they were going to miss their flight. So that was another little victory. You know, they’d rather catch their plane than do the last climb of a Tour stage. Meanwhile we were going to do it twice.’
Ullrich naturally didn’t mention any of this in his traditional pre-Tour briefings with the German press. He stressed that he wasn’t fixating on finally toppling Armstrong, no matter how hard journalists banged that drum. When Rainer Seele of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung asked whether recent turbulence in his private life had been a distraction, he answered like a man who didn’t know what it was to be thrown off course. ‘I’m a positive-thinking person and I can always motivate myself. I’ll think, right, now I’ll concentrate more on my sport and then I’ll figure out my life in the winter.’
Ullrich’s results in preparatory stage-races had also been better than in any season since 1997. In the Tour of Switzerland, where he so often stirred from his spring torpor, he won a long time trial and finished third overall. Armstrong told the press Ullrich looked better, more menacing than ever.
That was also Rudy Pevenage’s profound conviction a week before the Tour. Then, to Pevenage’s bafflement, something went awry. ‘He must have put on two kilos in that week. I think it was always the same problem – in his head,’ Pevenage says, shaking his.
The countdown to the Grand Départ on the island of Noirmoutier off the Atlantic coast was typical Telekom, quintessential Ullrich: a costly private plane journey from Freiburg, boasts about the unpredictably of their Ullrich–Klöden–Vinokourov triumvirate, followed by calamity in the final hours before it was time to race. Ullrich got too close to directeur sportif Mario Kummer’s team car on his recce of the opening-stage time-trial course and, when Kummer had to brake behind a lorry, Ullrich flew headlong through the rear windscreen. The location of Ullrich’s wounds, all up the left side of his neck, suggested that he’d been fortunate not to slice off his head. From a critic’s point of view it was a moment of pure Ullrich slapstick that, Kummer says sternly, ‘could have been very, very serious’.
If the injuries were ‘superficial’, their effect was clearly not. Armstrong has already described to me his mixed feelings at setting off a minute behind Ullrich in the time trial the next day, catching and passing him four kilometres from the line, and thinking, ‘I can’t go by this guy, I’m going to beat him over the next three weeks, but I can’t go by him here.’ Likewise, Johan Bruyneel almost squirms at the memory. ‘Oh God,’ he says. ‘That was terrible. The poor guy. I mean the crash the day before seemed like typical Jan . . . but actually that was sad. It was a sad sight.’
Mario Kummer scoffs when I relay these comments. ‘Armstrong says he didn’t enjoy it? I think that’s a lie. He’s a beast, is what I think, and he wanted to land a psychological blow there.’
Regardless, Ullrich had already conceded over a minute and the tone was set. Armstrong’s coach, Michele Ferrari, would tell the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney in The Armstrong Lie years later that his protégé was never stronger before a Tour than in 2005. ‘He won the Tour like this,’ Ferrari said, putting two fingers to his lips as though smoking a cigarette. ‘Lance took it easy because if you win too much, then everybody blah, blah, blah.’
Armstrong is surprised to hear this. ‘I thought 2001 was the best Tour I ever did, but 2005 was probably the easiest, the least stress. It’s funny – you telling me that makes me want to see that scene. I should see that documentary. He said my watts per kilo were my highest ever? Huh. Because they would have been high in 1999 . . .’
Ullrich and T-Mobile did give him one nervous moment early in the race. On stage eight through the Vosges mountains, US Postal disintegrated around Armstrong under modest pressure. Armstrong finished the stage in the yellow jersey but angry, not least because Klöden had gained half a minute – and he was one T-Mobile rider whom Armstrong definitely did not like.
Soon, though, the procession had resumed for its seventh straight year. Ullrich, Klöden and Vinokourov all did poorly in the first alpine stage, the trident supposedly made of tungsten made to look like a chocolate fork in a microwave. Vinokourov went on to take a consolatory stage win in Briançon, but the dream of denying Armstrong his perfect send-off had by now all but gone.
‘As usual it wasn’t so much the way he was riding as the way it was spun, as a big failure, that irritated Jan,’ says Beppe Guerini. Indeed, in interviews, Ullrich started to sound unusually tetchy. One day, the T-Mobile press officer even had to apologize for his snappiness and explain that he was just ‘letting off steam’. One writer, Klaus Blume, reported later that Ullrich had told friends he wanted to ‘get into bed and cry under the duvet’.
He rallied in the Pyrenees, justifying what Mario Kummer had said with an unfortunate turn of phrase: ‘Jan will fight until the last drop of blood’. The image would certainly have raised a smirk from the Dane Michael Rasmussen of the Rabobank team. A stage winner in the Vosges, Rasmussen planned to ‘refill’ with his second blood transfusion of the Tour ahead of the Pyrenean stages, only for his Rabobank team to veto it. Having looked like the strongest climber in the race and a potential threat to Armstrong in the Alps, Rasmussen suddenly found himself going backwards. ‘You can see it. You can feel it,’ he says. ‘I mean, you’re competing against the same guys every day. In 2005, from being able to ride to the top of Courchevel with Armstrong, they just dumped me five days later. Lance and Ullrich just went away. I assumed they probably just had another bag, like I had . . . only Rabobank wouldn’t let me use it.’
Rasmussen typified the peloton’s prevailing esprit de corps by railing not against the rivals he believed were doping but team management who stopped him from doing the same. Ullrich dropped him on the stage to Ax 3 Domaines, and again at Pla d’Adet before making a final attempt to bury the Dane’s podium hopes on the last big mountain of the Tour, the Col d’Aubisque. ‘Then, just on the little plateau after we’d gone over the summit, he rode alongside me, sort of shrugged and said, “Look, I’m sorry about that but I had to try.” I thought that was pretty nice of him.’
Even today, Rasmussen is still charmed, and slightly bewildered by the memory.
‘Jan was just an amazing athlete who never really fulfilled his potential,’ he goes on. ‘If you had the engine of Jan and the head of Lance you would have won the Tour ten years in a row.’
As it was, Ullrich finished third in Paris, just over six minutes behind Armstrong and nearly two adrift of Basso. The Italian and not Ullrich now looked the likeliest heir to the throne Armstrong was about to vacate. Ullrich nonetheless claimed he was proud to stand alongside Armstrong on his final Tour podium. He positively beamed as, in what became an infamous parting message, Armstrong took the microphone and told the thousands massed on the Champs-Élysées and millions watching at home that they should believe in Basso, Ullrich and the Tour. ‘This is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So Vive le Tour . . . forever,’ were his final words, to some ears a valedictory middle finger.
Ullrich would return the homage later that night. The speech that was still jerking at Lance Armstrong’s tear-ducts a decade later was delivered at 1.10 a.m., from the foot of a staircase in the restaurant at the Ritz Hotel. Ullrich’s hands were buried deep in the pockets of the pinstripe suit that suddenly drowned him, his white shirt was untucked and his smile was wide. When Armstrong passed the mic, he bashfully rolled his head around his shoulders and then finally spoke.
‘Congratulations for you,’ he said. ‘Seven times to win the Tour de France is unbelievable, so chapeau for this. I try all but you were too strong for me.’
It would have seemed self-evident on that long, emotional Parisian night in July 2005 that one of Jan Ullrich and Lance Armstrong had ridden their last Tour de France and one had not. Most – including Armstrong and Ullrich – would just have had it the wrong way around.
Armstrong was certain that he’d pulled off his last heist and left no fingerprints, but only a few weeks later the case for his prosecution as a cheat rather than champion was handed a smoking gun. L’Équipe journalist Damien Ressiot had got wind of the French Anti-Doping Agency’s experimental, retrospective tests on urine samples from the 1999 Tour, when EPO wasn’t detectable, and discovered that some of the new analyses had come back positive. Ressiot had then tricked Armstrong into giving away the reference numbers which identified his samples and found that six of them had contained EPO. ‘Le Mensonge Armstrong’ – ‘The Armstrong Lie’ was L’Équipe’s headline as they broke the story in late August. At the time, in the United States, the scoop received little airplay and was easily spun as a French conspiracy. ‘They don’t mind us when we’re buying their wine or storming German pillboxes. But aside from that, they don’t really care for us,’ said Mike Lopresti of USA Today.
Jan Ullrich and T-Mobile were noticeably cagey in their response. Even today, more than a decade on, after all that has happened, all that was revealed, doping is a taboo word even if then it wasn’t a taboo deed. ‘The system. I won’t use the word “doping”. I’ll say the system as it was then,’ Rudy Pevenage immediately set out when we established parameters for our interview in Geraardsbergen.
Pevenage was one of those who was neither surprised nor felt cheated after L’Équipe’s 2005 claims – much like Ullrich. Where they perhaps differed, Pevenage suspects, was how he and Ullrich felt about the ‘system’ in 2005.
‘He won’t agree, but I think that all of these stories – Festina and so on, the whole situation – I don’t think Jan liked it. The system, I mean. In winter I think he ate as a response to the stress. I think he was afraid of the system. Maybe afraid for his health. I think Jan was innocent when he got into professional cycling. He had been world champion in Oslo in 1993, third in Sicily the next year, and he came into a world where there was a different attitude . . .’
Pevenage’s voice is quiet, every word carefully measured. The roundness of his face and his garland of white hair give it an almost babyish outline, but the creases across his freckled brow are also scars. We are talking about a time, 2005, just before his whole career, his life, the way he saw the world and how it regarded him, turned irrevocably.
‘Jan will never tell everything. Never. And me neither,’ he picks up, softly, defiantly. ‘If I did say everything, it’d hurt a lot of people. Whereas Jan never hurt anyone. He arrived in a period when that’s just the way it worked. And I’ll say it again: if you put Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich in quarantine before a Tour de France, it’s Jan Ullrich who wins . . .’