20
‘I’ve got nothing to do with this. I’m just a victim’
—Jan Ullrich
Although the setting seemed incongruous, it was somehow also fitting that Jörg Jaksche, a professional cyclist, had his first conversation with Eufemiano Fuentes in a destination that has become notorious among skiers. The ‘Streif’ or ‘Stripe’ run down the Hahnenkamm mountain, above Kitzbühel in Austria, is one sport’s synonym for risk, speed and lethal danger, and Jaksche stood in its shadow as he made the acquaintance of an individual many associated with the same things in cycling. It was New Year’s Eve 2004, and Jaksche’s new team’s manager, Manolo Saiz, had told him to expect Fuentes’s call. Speaking English and a little German – for Fuentes would later tell Jaksche that he had learned much of what he knew in the DDR – they made plans for what would be their first meeting in person in Gran Canaria. They then wished each other a goodnight and Guten Rutsch into 2005. After which, Jaksche stomped through the snow and back indoors to where his friends were celebrating.
A year and a half later, Jaksche was at a Liberty Seguros training camp in northern Spain when he learned that Manolo Saiz and Eufemiano Fuentes had been arrested.26 Jaksche booked the first flight out of Bilbao the next day, fearing that he too could soon be in handcuffs.
Instead, within days, in the second week of June, Jaksche was lining up at the Tour of Switzerland oblivious to the fact that he was in the same or a similar bind to his former teammate, Jan Ullrich. Meaning that they were both clients of Eufemiano Fuentes and, so, dead men riding. Jaksche had his suspicions about CSC’s Ivan Basso and knew for sure that his own Liberty Seguros teammates weren’t the only riders for whom Fuentes had provided a bespoke blood-swapping service. Fuentes had rather given this away one day when they were making arrangements for Jaksche’s ‘refills’ at the 2005 Tour de France. ‘He pulled out this route map of the Tour,’ Jaksche remembers, ‘and he’d written so many numbers on it that you couldn’t even see France. He was like, “Ah, here’s the third stage . . .” and I was squinting to even see it. I think there were fifty-one different numbers on it, and I knew we didn’t have fifty-one riders in our team. At that moment I was sure it wasn’t only Liberty.’
In Switzerland, Jaksche looked for clues that Ullrich was also fretting, also feeling, like Jaksche, that ‘the shit had hit the fan’. But he saw and heard none. ‘I even chatted to him at the race and he was just completely cool about the whole subject. Like, “Nope, it’s not an issue for me.” I took from that that he definitely wasn’t involved with Fuentes. Now, I think that he was sure they couldn’t catch him because they never had any telephone contact; it was Pevenage who arranged everything. There was that and the fact that, in those days, we really didn’t think we were cheating. Attacking when the yellow jersey had stopped for a piss was cheating, but not blood transfusions. You didn’t really like doping, but you also didn’t want to stop, because, even if everyone else said they’d stopped too, you wouldn’t trust them.’
Jaksche had realized he was probably doomed when he watched Spanish TV news footage of the 23 May raids and saw one Guardia Civil officer removing a blood bag labelled with his code name, Bella, from Fuentes’s freezer. After that, he went to Switzerland assuming that performances there might offer pointers as to who else’s wings had been clipped. Instead, he says, it was like the last days of Rome, with five riders who were later confirmed as Fuentes clients finishing in the top ten on general classification.12
Ullrich was the best of the lot. Aggressive in the mountain stages and superlative in the final-day time trial, he had sent out the clear message that he was heading into the Tour in his best form since 1997. There were ten days to go until the Tour’s Grand Départ and he spent them hammering up the steepest, toughest climbs he could find near Scherzingen, and even some over the border in Austria. Andreas Klöden sometimes trained with him. Klöden’s coach, Thomas Schedewie, told acquaintances later that he had never seen Ullrich looking so strong, so motivated, with such fire in his eyes and his legs. Ullrich had also never been so happy: he told Bild Zeitung that Sara Steinhauser had just accepted his marriage proposal.
He even seemed unfazed when, shortly after his final training session before leaving for France, Ullrich learned that El País had presented the most damning evidence against him to date. The newspaper knew about the business card for the RAFA restaurant that the Guardia Civil had found in Merino Batres’s wallet – and what was written on the back. The paper alleged that the code names scrawled in biro were Fuentes’s clients and Ullrich surely had to be ‘Hijo de Rudicio’ – ‘the son of Rudy’. Ullrich promised T-Mobile’s Head of Communications, Christian Frommert, that he had nothing to do with any of it – and repeated the denial twice for emphasis.
It was at roughly this point, however, that Rudy Pevenage started to think that their game was up. ‘I knew a few days before the Tour that something was going to happen, I just wasn’t sure what,’ he tells me quietly. ‘I told Jan we were in trouble, but he replied that everyone was in the same boat.’
Pevenage has one major regret. He knows that it may not have mattered, but one mistake still gnaws at him.
‘I always used to use public phones with Fuentes, whereas the others were obviously using their mobile phones,’ he explains. ‘I told Fuentes I wouldn’t take the risk and he said I was being stupid, that they were free in Spain, but I was paranoid about getting caught. It was very stressful. We were at the Giro, Jan had won the time trial . . . I didn’t have contact with Fuentes every day. From time to time, we’d speak – “Ah, it’s going OK . . .” and so on – but, there, Jan wins the time trial and I decide to call Fuentes. The problem is that my Italian pre-pay card has run out and I can’t recharge it. Anyone in Belgium can buy a pre-pay card, but not in Italy; you need a passport. A friend of mine had bought this one for me. But she wasn’t around on this day, so I called Fuentes on my Belgian phone to tell him Jan had won, that we’d see how things went in the mountains and so on. They had my number then. Maybe they would have rumbled us anyway, but now they had proof.’
As well as text messages and calls that led them directly to Pevenage and Ullrich, the Guardia Civil also had multiple bags of Ullrich’s blood. According to a calendar found in one of Fuentes’s apartments, Ullrich had been due to have two bags removed and two put back in on 20 June, two days after the end of the Tour of Switzerland. That blood was now in the Guardia Civil’s DNA storage bank in Madrid, so Ullrich had presumably had to make alternative arrangements.
Fuentes had at least offered Jörg Jaksche an apology. The doctor called him one day to say he was sorry for everything, that he hoped it would all end well. That now seemed unlikely, given that Jaksche’s team sponsor, insurer Liberty Seguros, had pulled out within forty-eight hours of Manolo Saiz’s arrest. Alexander Vinokourov, their star, had saved the team by securing funding from the city of Astana in his native Kazakhstan, but the prospects of the Tour organizers letting them race looked bleak.
Jaksche had also started to think that Fuentes’s service may not be the slick, boutique operation his premium prices implied. Long-held doubts now crystallized. Many of them focused not on Fuentes but his assistant, the kindly but creaking Merino Batres. When Operación Puerto finally came to trial in 2013, Merino Batres was excused from taking the stand and the charges against him dropped on the grounds that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Jaksche wondered whether the cardiologist’s first symptoms hadn’t started to manifest themselves years earlier, when he was in his early sixties.
‘Merino Batres never went to races. He was too old,’ Jaksche says. ‘I probably saw him six to eight times, and every single time he said, “My friend, where are you coming from today?” I’d say, “Austria, Innsbruck.” To which he’d reply, “Ah, I was there for skiing in 1968.” Every. Single. Time. I eventually said to Fuentes, “Are you sure this is the right guy for this job?” ’
Forgetting someone’s travel arrangements or nationality was one thing. Mixing up two clients’ code names and their blood bags would be another, with potentially deadly consequences. This was presumably why Merino Batres always kept a list of code names in his pocket – or that could have been a relatively new innovation. Fuentes client Tyler Hamilton’s 2004 positive test for a homologous blood transfusion – essentially having traces of someone else’s blood in his system – was a first for the sport. But only a few weeks later, Hamilton’s teammate and fellow Fuentes patient Santi Pérez tested positive for the same thing. It was never proven or even widely suggested that Merino Batres gave Hamilton’s blood to Pérez and vice versa, but, today, Hamilton tells me this or some form of sabotage remain his ‘two best guesses as to what happened’.
Unlike Jaksche, Hamilton received no mea culpa from Fuentes. ‘If I met him today I’m sure we’d have an, er, interesting conversation. There are certainly some questions I’d like to ask him,’ the American says.
Jörg Jaksche stops short of Luigi Cecchini’s ‘Fuentes is the nicest bloke in the world’, but he also can’t help but embroider a romantic, almost chivalresque mythology that has grown around the doctor. From the moment Fuentes collected him at Las Palmas airport in January 2005 and they tore through the city streets in his choked-out Toyota, with Fuentes talking Jaksche through his complete catalogue of steroids and hormones as they went, Fuentes fully lived up to the image of the caddish, thrill-seeking outlaw – a lab-coated Robin Hood toting his syringe in place of a bow and arrow.
‘He was a fun guy,’ Jaksche confirms. ‘He also wasn’t super strict about the money; the most important thing was that one of his riders won. He was the engineer. I always described his behaviour in terms of . . . he would jump a red light just to see what happened. For example, one day we met in this bar in Calle Zurbano, where he had one of his offices. He came in, looked at me, and I thought, Ah, it might be Eufemiano but it might not. Because he had these fake glasses on and a beret. I didn’t really know if I should say hello or not. But he came over and was like, “Hola, amigo!” I asked him why he was in disguise and he explained that he’d been at the presentation of some new blood bag made by Baxter [a major healthcare company]. This one lasted longer in the fridge or something like that. Anyway, then he does the fake trumpet sound, “Da-da-ddaaaaa!”, and pulls one of these bags or a prototype out of his briefcase. “How the hell did you get that?” I said. He told me he’d been sitting in the last row at this convention, the last seat on the right-hand side, and the guys presenting had passed one of these prototypes around and told everyone to pass it to the person on their right. “And there wasn’t anyone on my right, so I put it in my bag!” Fuentes said, grinning at me. He was a funny guy. If he was here, we’d be having a lot of fun . . . but you also never forget what he did.’
Indeed – whether it was the shameless profiteering, the lawbreaking, the lying and the recklessness that Hamilton has described at length, and which Jaksche saw in glimpses.
‘I never really had bad experiences with him, but sometimes he would forget you were coming, forget to take the blood out of the freezer, and he’d have to immerse the bag in hot water to defrost it . . . but it’d still be freezing cold when it got injected and you’d be close to collapsing. One time he had an Italian rider, and this Italian rider came with a friend who had the same blood group. Normally it should have worked out because they were the same blood group, but when they did the re-injection he got like an allergic reaction and couldn’t breathe. I just know from this guy that Fuentes was like, “Ach, stop being a pussy!”’
‘I don’t care. Tomorrow I’m riding the Tour de France.’
At around lunchtime on 30 June 2006, Christian Frommert had heard these words and let their empty conviction dissolve into the huge sweat cloud filling Jan Ullrich’s bedroom in the Hôtel au Boeuf in Blaesheim, near Strasbourg, with Ullrich at its centre. Frommert’s efforts to make Ullrich understand the allegations in the morning papers and explain their implications had come to nothing. Jan had simply carried on hammering the pedals on his turbo trainer. He was in the form of his life – ‘Bombenform’, as he kept telling teammates. Frommert now surveyed the ropes of bluey-green veins protruding out of his calf muscles and decided that these might have been the only true words that Ullrich had spoken all week.
A few metres away, Ullrich’s directeur sportif, mentor and friend, Rudy Pevenage, sat on Ullrich’s bed, staring at the floor. The previous Monday, the team management had confronted the Belgian with reports in Spanish newspaper El País claiming that Pevenage – and by association Ullrich – was dishonourably mentioned in the files seized from Eufemiano Fuentes in May. Pevenage’s initial denial had been unconvincing, so they asked again.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with it,’ Pevenage repeated. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with it,’ he told Frommert for a third time now.
Frommert made a curious candidate for a pivotal role in what was turning, minute by minute, into one of the greatest scandals of Tour de France history. Just a week or two earlier, he had been only an entry in journalists’ address books, a business card in their wallet, or a nameless face under a thick canopy of jet-black hair whom they occasionally saw at races, almost invariably with a cigarette dangling from his lips. His official title was T-Mobile’s ‘Director of Sports Communications’.
That morning, he had stood with three colleagues staring at a fax machine in a greenkeeper’s shed at the back of the Kempferhof golf resort, waiting for lights to flash. There were flags, shovels, spades, and barely enough elbow room for four to stand. The Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the media group that runs the Tour de France, had promised to send over everything they would receive that morning from the Spanish police on Ullrich, Pevenage and their involvement in the Operación Puerto. Finally, at precisely 9.35, the machine started spitting its truths. Luuc Eisenga, the team’s multilingual press chief, took the pages and translated as he read, his expression darkening with every line. Pevenage was heavily incriminated. Worse, Ullrich could also be identified from various code names and numbers used by Fuentes.
At this exact moment, Ullrich and the other T-Mobile riders were on their way to the Kempferhof in the team bus. T-Mobile had organized what they were calling a ‘Grand Déjeuner’ for the day before the Grand Départ. The canapés were arrayed, champagne was on ice. Microphones had been checked. The riders’ late arrival didn’t seem to bother the reporters; the nibbles tasted good, the wine already flowed, plus, hey, not even the Germans are punctual all of the time.
What the journalists couldn’t know was that the T-Mobile team bus had parked up outside the entrance to the golf club, awaiting further instructions from Frommert. After Eisenga’s translation and a quick brainstorm, Frommert called and gave the order to turn the bus around and return to the team hotel in Blaesheim.
Frommert then went to inform the media that there was a problem.
A couple of hundred kilometres away, over the German border in Stuttgart, Ullrich’s manager, Wolfgang Strohband, had stepped off a plane and picked up his hire car. Strohband was approaching the Rhine Valley when then the first item on the 11 a.m. radio news bulletin almost sent him off the road: ‘Jan Ullrich suspended and out of the Tour de France.’
Strohband grabbed his mobile phone.
‘Jan, where are you?’
‘On the rollers, in my room.’
‘What about the presentation?’
‘We turned around.’
‘So what now?’
‘Just get here.’
At around midday, Strohband was pulling up in Blaesheim, hurrying inside and asking for Ullrich’s room number. On his way through the corridor, he passed a sobbing Oscar Sevilla, Ullrich’s Spanish teammate and a fellow Fuentes client. When Strohband finally found Ullrich, he, in contrast, was defiant. ‘I want to ride. I’m in . . . Bombenform.’
Only Strohband and two or three others knew that this was supposed to be more than just another Tour de France, Ullrich’s ninth. All being well, it would also be his triumphant last. Ever since 1999, there had been repeated threats to quit cycling, to leave behind a world that sometimes felt to Ullrich like a prison. These had been fits of pique, but they also revealed a cumulative fatigue that had brought Ullrich to a resolution: he would put everything into winning the 2006 Tour de France, then bid the sport adieu at the Deutschland Tour in late August.
While Strohband and Ullrich now considered desperate measures, sometime in the early afternoon, Frommert invited Bob Stapleton to join him for an impromptu meeting. Since selling VoiceStream Wireless to Deutsche Telekom in 2000, Stapleton had followed his passion for cycling on a meandering path over the next four years. In 2006, he had combined his position as the manager of T-Mobile’s women’s team with a consultancy role that now required him to be with the men’s team in Strasbourg.
All year, on his trips to see the team, Stapleton had got ‘bad vibes’. The riders he didn’t know seemed secretive, shifty, even allowing for their mistrust of anything or anyone from outside of their inner sanctum. The ones he did know had told him they were well paid but miserable. Their mood seemed even to have spread to the wives and girlfriends. ‘They just had a bad feel, all round,’ he says now.
Frommert invited Stapleton to take a seat in the Hôtel au Boeuf’s closed, deserted bar. He then laid out what would be the T-Mobile strategy: they would stay at the Tour without Ullrich and Sevilla; the company would honour its sponsorship for the time being; and, finally, they wanted Stapleton to take over the team.
Stapleton let Frommert’s proposition sink in, then replied that, yes, he’d be open to the idea of helping in any way that he could.
This was good, Frommert told him, because now Stapleton would have to send Ullrich home.
‘Er, I’ll tell him with you . . .’ Stapleton replied.
Soon Ullrich sat before them in the same empty hotel bar. Frommert did most of the talking, in German. Stapleton picked up what he could, which wasn’t a lot. Ullrich didn’t flinch, didn’t protest, and generally displayed the body language of a man who had accepted his fate. Frommert finally told him that there were press waiting in front of the hotel and that they would have to make a statement. They discussed what he should say and went outside. Ullrich let out a deep, eloquent sigh, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jogging bottoms and stepped into the huddle of journalists. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with this. I’m just a victim. I’d prepared for this Tour de France like never before . . . This is the worst thing that’s ever happened in my career.’
Questions were neither invited nor answered. Instead, Ullrich turned and went back to his room. His best friend, Andreas Klöden, was one of several riders who argued that the whole team should pull out, in solidarity. Ullrich told him not to be so stupid.
His manager, Strohband, had spent nearly the whole afternoon with his phone pressed to his ear and clinging to a frail chance. Strohband’s lawyer had ordered him to ask Frommert for the evidence incriminating Ullrich, whereupon Frommert showed him the three sheets of paper that he had pulled out of the fax machine at the Kempferhof that morning. There was plenty in that to incriminate Pevenage, much less pointing to Ullrich. OK, Frommert said, but the Tour was going through Spain, and if Ullrich didn’t leave now he could be yanked out of the race, maybe in handcuffs, when they got to the Pyrenees. Strohband called his lawyer again. The lawyer said that he would phone a judge in Aachen, where the team’s holding company was based. The judge’s verdict: Ullrich may still be able to challenge the decision, but they would need the second and third opinion of two colleagues. Unfortunately, neither of them would be available before Monday.
And with that, Ullrich packed his bags, said his goodbyes, and followed his brother Stefan, one of the team’s mechanics and now his getaway driver, across the car park and into a black Audi.
Throughout an unusually cold, snowy winter, and even more so during the early spring of 2006, the German media had raised and repeatedly returned to the same two questions: would home support galvanize Die Mannschaft to victory in the football World Cup; and, perhaps of greater significance, could hosting the tournament that summer somehow crystallize a common identity, a sense of German-ness that had eluded the unified nation since 1990 and Die Wende?
The first signs had not been good. A reminder of Germany’s sheepish, strained relationship with its own past was served mere hours before kick-off, when the city of Berlin formally acknowledged the location of Hitler’s bunker for the first time. A lonely information board, rising out of a car park a few blocks down from the Brandenburg Gate – inconspicuous enough not to encourage ghoulish tourism – was the capital’s sombre, tentative nod to this, one of its many embarrassing recesses.
Next had come the opening ceremony in Munich. Some hailed it as a masterpiece of involuntary symbolism – not of what it represented to be German but of the beer-swilling, bratwurst-guzzling, oompah-playing caricature already embedded in the world’s collective imagination. More than that, the whole half-hour confirmed what the social commentators had been saying for months: the amalgamated Germany had no idea who or what it was, and was about to embark upon a gruelling month on the psychoanalyst’s couch with the world watching on.
‘Foreigners know precisely what Germany’s identity is,’ wrote Dirk Kurbjuweit in Der Spiegel. ‘To be German means to wear Lederhosen and dance around slapping one’s knees. This is exactly what they saw in the opening ceremony of the World Cup . . . If you were German and not from Bavaria, though, you didn’t feel represented by any of the commotion happening on the pitch. It was quite absurd.
‘Identity and Germany are contradictions. Indefinite and forever changing populations and borders have seen to that. The Holocaust is another major obstacle. Germany can’t create an identity with it, but certainly can’t without it. Any attempt to do that in the foreseeable future will be doomed to fail.’
The general sense of disorientation continued when, after their Costa Rican opponents, the German players lined up for their national anthem. The song itself is controversial, the first two of its three verses having been culled in 1990 on grounds of political incorrectness and historical inaccuracies. Long before that, Friedrich Nietzsche had declared perhaps the most infamous lyric, ‘Deutschland über alles’ – ‘Germany above all’ – the ‘most stupid words in the world’.
As the players lip-synced, the soporific, barely audible dirge of the one surviving stanza groaned around the Allianz Arena.
Despite the less-than rousing send-off, Germany went on to win 4–2.
Further victories followed against Poland, Ecuador and Sweden, setting up a quarter-final with Argentina on 30 June.
The change in the national mood could now be measured in the decibel level of the ‘Deutschlandlied’ before every match, and in the number of national flags flapping from car or bedroom windows, or displayed in shops and schools. ‘If you had hung a German flag outside your house before the 2006 World Cup, people would have assumed you were a Nazi. Now, suddenly, everyone was doing it,’ the journalist Andreas Burkert says today.
The Patriotismus-Pegel, the subjective ‘Patriotism Gauge’, as the media had christened it, was about to surge again as the Germans faced Argentina. 72,000 packed into the stadium. One million turned the ‘Fans’ Mile’ between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, where nine giant screens had been erected, into a roaring river of noise and emotion.
German were heading for defeat until Miroslav Klose equalized with ten minutes to go. Extra-time ended goalless, meaning a penalty shootout would decide the result. But, of course, to paraphrase a famous line from the former England player Gary Lineker, football is a simple game: twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes – or 120, if absolutely necessary – and, at the end, the Germans always win.
The English-based Süddeutsche Zeitung and Guardian reporter, Raphael Honigstein, admits now that it was hard, as a German watching these joyous outpourings, not to get swept along. In his book, Das Reboot – How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World, Honigstein quotes one of the German substitutes against Argentina, Thomas Hitzlsperger: ‘The summer of 2006 was Germany’s Summer of Love, our generation’s Woodstock.’
‘It was just this huge snowball that kept getting bigger,’ Honigstein says now. ‘For the first time that I or pretty much anyone else could remember, people just started to feel relaxed about being German. For the first time, we presented ourselves to the world as fun-loving, hospitable, the kind of people you wanted to be around. I don’t think that had happened since the war. There was nothing aggressive or unwelcoming about it; it was our party and everyone was invited. Like Oktoberfest in Munich, but on a huge scale. The team itself also came across as nice guys, good winners, good ambassadors for Germany. Whether that was the reality or not didn’t matter; that was the impression. It also didn’t matter whether you were from the East or the West. If there was a divide, it was between those who were and weren’t proud to be German, and it just felt as though everyone was piling over the top to be with those who were.
‘On the day of that game against Argentina, life just stopped. It was utterly overwhelming, almost too much to take in. You could have robbed two banks that day and got away with it.’
Honigstein’s memories, like those of many others, are plasma-sharp.
He admits that he has clean forgotten just one thing: that, on the same giddy evening as Germany reached the semi-final, an athlete responsible for another moment that had enraptured and briefly reconciled the same, disconnected people nine years earlier, exited the stage of his intended virtuoso performance without playing a note. Not only that, he left with his head bowed, never to reappear.
To be precise: at 18.42 Central European Time, just one minute after Klose’s equalizer and twelve before the full-time whistle in Berlin, Jan Ullrich climbed into a car and was driven away from Strasbourg, out of the Tour de France and out of cycling.
It was indeed a good time to rob a bank . . . or to vanish.