PART ONE
1
‘It’s Merckx!’
—Raymond Poulidor
On his third day as a professional cyclist, Jan Ullrich pedalled into Andorra and would have needed no explanation for why Louis Le Débonnaire had equated the encircling peaks and their canyons to the ‘wild valleys of Hell’ over a thousand years earlier. Ullrich saw a white line flow under his front wheel then took time to contemplate a result as bracing as the surrounding landscape. The winner of the third stage of the Setmana Catalana, or ‘Catalan Week’, Alex Zülle, had finished twenty-two minutes earlier. For the second time in two days, Ullrich could console himself only with having ridden in alongside the reigning Tour de France champion, Miguel Induráin. Otherwise, he admitted later, his first trip into the Principality and indeed his maiden voyage on the high seas of professional racing had been nothing less than ‘depressing’.
Just over two years later, Jan Ullrich made his second journey into the Andorran mountains. This time things would go rather differently. Stage ten of the 1997 Tour de France, from Luchon to the Arcalís ski resort, was a monster at 242 kilometres. On the route were five Pyrenean passes, each glowing like hot coals in the July sunshine. Not that the heat was likely to faze Ullrich; the German press would later coin the term ‘Ulle-Wetter’ – ‘Ullrich weather’ – for those smouldering days when others wilted and he, the ‘Sun King’, as they also christened him, came alive.
As a child back in Rostock, he had not even been aware of the Tour de France’s existence, much less watched it. For cyclists behind the Iron Curtain, a tour of the communist bloc, the Peace Race, represented the sport’s pinnacle, its East German idols including Uwe Raab, Uwe Ampler or, long before them, Täve Schur. Ullrich had only caught his first, grainy glimpse of the Tour in July 1989, when he and a couple of other junior team members at Dynamo Berlin – the Stasi-affiliated multi-sports club they raced for – secretly adjusted the aerial on the tiny TV set in the common room of their dormitory block. They were lucky to witness arguably the most gripping Tour in the race’s history, a seesawing three-week slugfest between the American Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon of France.
Now, eight years on, he wasn’t only riding cycling’s most famous race but was widely fancied to win it. His repeated assertions that his teammate and the defending champion, Bjarne Riis, remained the Deutsche Telekom leader had been dismissed by the media as attempts to deflect pressure and curry favour with the Dane. On the morning of the first-day prologue in Rouen, L’Équipe had named Ullrich as its five-star favourite to take victory in Paris. He had, after all, finished runner-up to Riis the previous year. Pressure had also been building in the Deutsche Telekom camp over the first week and a half of racing; Ullrich’s room-mate, Jens Heppner, had spoken for many of the Telekom riders when he told the twenty-three-year-old that he was stronger than Riis and should ride his own race on the road to Andorra. The team’s directeurs sportifs, Walter Godefroot and Rudy Pevenage, had also tried to convince him, but Ullrich remained a reticent heir.
On the first four of those towering molochs – the passes of the Portet d’Aspet, the Port, the Envalira, and Ordino – he glanced continually over his shoulder or under an armpit to check Riis’s position. Later, when two Festina riders, Richard Virenque and Laurent Dufaux, accelerated high up on the Ordino, Ullrich purred in their slipstream as he waited for Riis to arrive. A mere yeoman for much of his career, thirty-three-year-old Riis had astonished some sections of the cycling world with his domination of the 1996 Tour. In the last week of that race, though, he had started to flag as Ullrich became stronger. Heppner, for one, had been sure that Riis would never win another Tour after 1996.
Finally, with around ten kilometres to go, Riis drew alongside Ullrich.
Riis told him that if they wanted to win the Tour, they would have to attack.
Ullrich glanced across: ‘What, you mean I should set the pace for you?’
Riis was going to have to spell it out. ‘No,’ he said, ‘if you can, go for it.’
The East German – schooled to execute the orders of authority figures, weaned in an education system equating excellence with compliance – now hesitated. Or rather, he instinctively sought the blessing of a higher power – the Deutsche Telekom manager Walter Godefroot. On the pretext of needing a drink, he dropped back to his team car and leaned in to hear what Godefroot was barking out of the window.
‘Give it a go! Try to attack!’
Moments later, he had swept past Riis and to the front of the sixteen-man group that was now sure to contest the stage win. Seeing the ten-kilometres-to-go banner, he rose out of the saddle and glided away from all but the Italian, Francesco Casagrande. He then paused again, as though assailed by second thoughts.
The doubts persisted until they reached El Serrat, a mountain hamlet of 180-odd inhabitants, one tiny chapel, three hotels, and two kinks in the road zigzagging towards Arcalís. On the first of those bends, the wide, graceful arc of Ullrich’s pedal stroke betrayed no hint of aggression or even acceleration – but the group behind him shattered. Riis, Casagrande, then, finally, the last to submit to both gravity and Ullrich’s diabolical rhythm, the Frenchman Richard Virenque.
Every professional sport lusts for heroes, and there is perhaps no more exhilarating moment than a performance heralding the arrival of a new virtuoso. Such events often come after a prelude – foretastes like Ullrich’s a year earlier, the rumble of an era-defining talent as it stirs – or, much rarer, they arrive as sudden, blinding explosions. What they share is the ability to redraw a sport’s landscape and its horizons within a matter of minutes, or even seconds. Just a few weeks earlier, in April 1997, Tiger Woods’s twelve-shot victory in the US Masters had done just that, prompting Sports Illustrated to hail ‘the week everything changed in golf’. Now, in Andorra, learned observers suggested Jan Ullrich was rescripting the future of another sport in an identical fashion.
Within a kilometre of his attack, Ullrich’s advantage over Virenque had grown to a minute. Within three kilometres, it was heading towards two.
The rare spectacle of a twenty-three-year-old decimating his opposition on the first major climb of a Tour de France was accompanied by another uncommon occurrence further up the mountain. As Ullrich approached, a hundred or more journalists abandoned their laptops, tore mesmerized eyes from the TV monitors in the press room and hurried, en masse, across a car park and to the roadside barriers.
One of the reporters craning to see was Hartmut Scherzer. Scherzer had covered his first Tour two decades earlier, in 1977. He had written about and befriended Muhammed Ali, travelled to see him defeat Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila, and two years later had the privilege of reporting on another historic occurrence on his first visit to the Tour: Scherzer’s fellow Frankfurter, twenty-two-year-old Didi Thurau, taking the yellow jersey in the prologue and holding it for over two weeks, longer than any German before him.
But instinctively Scherzer knew this was different, not a cameo but a consecration. He watched Ullrich’s silhouette appear from out of a tunnel, then glanced left and right at his colleagues, all beating their hands together like the fans. Only one spectator, standing, seemed completely impassive. The man was around Scherzer’s age and his features – the plump, pursed lips, heavy brow and boot-shaped nose – would have been recognizable to anyone with even a loose grasp of Tour de France history in the 1960s and 1970s. Raymond Poulidor could not have known or imagined, that afternoon in Andorra, that Jan Ullrich would one day surpass the three second-place overall finishes in the Tour that had earned Poulidor an invidious nickname: ‘The Eternal Runner-Up’.
When Ullrich had pounded past them and out of sight, and the journalists turned back towards the press centre, ‘Poupou’ was still propped against the barriers, processing what he had seen.
‘C’est Merckx,’ he said finally. ‘C’est Merckx.’
Jan Ullrich was not yet Eddy Merckx, the winner of five Tours de France and the greatest male athlete ever to have climbed aboard a bicycle. He certainly had not done enough yet to justify Merckx’s prediction before the Tour that he would be the ‘rider of the century’. Nonetheless, for the heady quarter of an hour since his attack, no comparison had seemed too outlandish. How many Tours, based on what everyone was watching, would he end up winning? In the coming days, Bernard Hinault would tell the French press that Ullrich seemed predestined to join him, Merckx, Jacques Anquetil and Miguel Induráin as the only five-time winners – before probably going on to take a sixth or seventh. A few days later, Hinault had changed his mind; now he told Der Spiegel that Ullrich would be unbeatable for the next ten years.
Lance Armstrong, mid-recovery from testicular cancer, had visited the Tour that morning in Luchon. Armstrong caught a few minutes of the Arcalís stage on a TV monitor as he prepared to board a plane back to Texas. He disagreed with Hinault’s prediction that Ullrich would beat all-comers for the next ten Tours. Armstrong thought Ullrich would ‘destroy’ them.
Another American, Greg LeMond, had climbed off his bike in 1994 and barely watched a Tour de France stage since. A three-time former champion, in retirement LeMond had grown increasingly disillusioned with what professional cycling had become, believing that the natural order had been completely disfigured, ruined, by that same venom that may also have curtailed his career: the banned but still undetectable hormone EPO being used by other riders.
LeMond, though, had heard about Ullrich. Curiosity now also drew him to a television screen to see for himself. In this instant, LeMond came to feel later, was everything that had enraptured him when he had seen the Tour for the first time, then when he had ridden it. There was everything that elevated cycling and the Tour out of the dimensions of mere sport.
In the last kilometre, even Ullrich began to suffer, but by then victory and its significance were secure. The sickly sweetheart of the French fans, Virenque, trailed home in second place, one minute and eight seconds adrift. To the reporters who thrust microphones towards him, Virenque said that the Pyrenean climbs suited Ullrich and that he may not be quite so strong in the Alps. A few moments later, he sat on the steps of his Festina team’s camping car and buried his head in a towel, disgusted by what he’d seen.
While he didn’t yet know it, Virenque would soon play a major role in turning Ullrich at Arcalís into a watershed for professional cycling. He had been the last to surrender on the mountain, but much more importantly, within a year he would help to change the lens through which the world watched the Tour forever as the central, pathetic figure of the Festina doping scandal. Ullrich’s 500-watt rampage from El Serrat had been, physiologically speaking, the most prodigious effort the Tour had ever seen on a long climb (and still hasn’t been surpassed in 2022), but it was also the last time that such a feat – the kind of which ninety-five years of Tour legend had been made – would be witnessed with undiluted awe. Hereafter – or, precisely, from the moment a Belgian customs officer opened the boot of Festina soigneur Willy Voet’s Fiat Mare on the eve of the 1998 Tour – every dose of brilliance would come with an antidote of distrust.
For now, Riis confirmed his abdication by wrapping his arms around Ullrich and grinning for the cameras behind the podium. Ullrich was the strongest, he agreed. Ullrich could have dropped him the previous day at Loudenvielle, he also conceded. This was no lie: twenty-four hours earlier Ullrich had felt even better.
The ‘New Giant’ himself, as L’Équipe called him the next morning, could barely compute what had just happened. Lacking any linguistic common ground, the international media had already deduced from Ullrich’s demeanour in and out of the saddle that they could safely paint from the usual palette of East German stereotypes: Ullrich was strong, silent, inscrutable. He now reinforced that image in his post-race press conference by showering them with clichés: he was ‘delighted’ that a ‘dream had come true’, but he was still taking ‘one day at a time’. It was only ‘half-time in the Tour’. There were still ‘two time trials and the Alps to come’.
Back home, the reaction was also measured – for now. Ten days later, though, Germany would have its first Tour champion, cycling its new messiah, and Jan Ullrich – a twenty-three-year-old pure product of the East – the unlikely, unsolicited, unbearable role as a talisman for the unified Germany.
In 2009, an East Berliner named Mark Scheppert penned a collection of vignettes about children of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik and dedicated one chapter to what he called ‘Generation Jan Ullrich’. Scheppert is almost exactly the same age as Ullrich. His father also worked for years as a cycling coach at the Dynamo Berlin club where Ullrich lived, studied and raced for three years before the end of the East.
Many of Scheppert’s readers were people like him, offspring of the same ‘Generation Jan Ullrich’ – conflicted souls with a foot firmly in the before and after. Scheppert himself had seized every opportunity that freedom had offered after the Wall fell – travelling, partying and eventually dating a ‘Wessi’, a girl from the West. One morning in July 1997, Scheppert’s sweetheart announced that she was taking him for a surprise weekend away. They boarded a train in Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof and, several hours later, stepped into blinding Parisian sunlight. She had wanted a romantic weekend and that’s what she would get – just not in the way that she expected. Choosing his moment carefully, Scheppert eventually broke the news that the Tour de France was finishing on the Champs-Élysées the very next day. More importantly, a cyclist whom his father had coached and Scheppert himself had once known was about to become the first ever German winner.
Scheppert tells me all of this on a wet September evening in a bar close to his home, and where he grew up, in Friedrichshain, East Berlin. All around us are the bearded hipsters and tattooed fashionistas who are modern Berlin’s rank and file, and the land and times that gave birth to both Mark Scheppert and Jan Ullrich seem an awfully long way away.
Even today, that sun-kissed Parisian afternoon in July 1997 remains one of Scheppert’s most vivid memories.
‘One of the most powerful things I’ve ever experienced, for what it meant to us as East Germans. The Wall had fallen nearly ten years earlier, Germany was officially unified, but our identities were not. They were still fractured and fragmented in so many ways. People from the East held on to whatever they could – and one of their own succeeding on the world stage, like Ullrich was doing – brought a huge amount of inspiration, hope and, yes, nostalgia.
‘Jan Ullrich gave the East a lot of pride, a lot of confidence,’ he goes on. ‘Franziska van Almsick, the swimmer, a few actors and actresses, one or two singers – they were all we had. When anyone from the East achieved anything, 17 million people celebrated the fact that they were one of us. They were proving that good things also happened in the East, that we weren’t this embarrassing, good-for-nothing bastard child that the real Germany had been obliged to take into care. That we weren’t just the Stasi. In 1997, Ullrich was still the kid from Rostock, and everyone in the East was proud of that. Even now, we cling to anything. For example, the footballer Toni Kroos being the only Ossi [East German] to become world champion [in 2014]. The majority of the top sportsmen now were born in a unified Germany but for a very long time it was a big thing when someone from the East achieved something. For a lot of East Germans, Jan Ullrich was this figure of hope, someone who instilled a lot of self-confidence in us. No one from Germany had ever won the Tour de France before – but, more to the point, no one from the West had ever won it.’