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‘You know. You climb this tree. It’s all you aim for. Right up there you see the fruit. I was climbing. Climbing. Ready to reach for the fruit. And then. Nothing. I sat in the car driving home from Strasbourg thinking: that was it. It is all over. And it was. I was right. For the next four years I sat in my house and looked out the window’
—Jan Ullrich to Rouleur magazine, 2015
One day in the early summer of 2008, Jan Ullrich momentarily broke free of the stresses that had enveloped him for the previous two years to poke fun at an old friend. Ullrich and Boris Becker had much in common – both red-headed Wunderkinder who had once captivated a nation, both now more frequently lampooned than celebrated in the land of their birth. Ullrich had been shamed for his doping, Becker for transitioning from tennis swashbuckler to tabloid editor’s piñata, the self-parodying protagonist of bankruptcies, tax evasion, heartbreaks and, maybe most infamously, a ‘five-second’ tryst on the stairs of a London restaurant while his then pregnant wife was in hospital – which itself led to another child.
This, as he pointed Becker to the altitude chamber that he still kept in his cellar in Scherzingen, is presumably what inspired Ullrich’s punchline: ‘So, if you want to have sex at 5,000 metres above sea level . . .’
Three years later, incidentally, Becker would, true to form, declare his membership of the Mile High Club on a German TV game show.
The joke was one memorable takeaway of Ullrich’s first public appearance in over a year, in an episode of Boris Becker Meetsc . . . on the ProSieben network. For all the staged bonhomie between the two friends – a speedboat trip across the Bodensee, a bike ride, their journey to meet Ullrich’s mum in Rostock and finally Becker pronouncing Ullrich ‘a really good guy’ who was ‘fully rehabilitated’ – the programme met with a snooty reception among media commentators. Most now seemed to agree they made a perfect double act: two delusional has-beens with the same blind spots and tiresome gripes about ‘Germans’ and ‘the media’, both expats and exiles, as similar in their thud to earth as they had been on their meteoric rise. Once they had been poster boys, now they were kitsch embodiments of a Germany to be disowned. Ullrich’s next notable public outing was also at Becker’s invitation – to a charity event at Oktoberfest in Munich. Dressed in Lederhosen, swigging one-litre Steins of Spaten-Franziskaner, Ullrich now seemed to exist as Becker had for several years – as a dehumanized cliché, a court fool to comfort his mockers’ sense of good taste and righteousness, so guileless that he laughed along with others laughing at him.
Out of the spotlight, though, there was nothing funny about some of the pressures that Ullrich was facing. Werner Franke, the Heidelberg microbiologist, had challenged the gag order banning him from alleging that Eufemiano Fuentes doped Ullrich – and Franke was a tenacious, brilliant opponent. Their legal battle would run for three years, from 2007 to 2010, during which Ullrich had tried but thus far failed to bed himself into a new identity. His feelings about cycling oscillated between pangs of longing and total repudiation. Rudy Pevenage had taken a job as the directeur sportif of the American team Rock Racing, a rogue’s gallery of mavericks and Operación Puerto survivors whose owner had also courted Ullrich. Ullrich declined that offer, but, Lance Armstrong tells me, responded to Armstrong’s comeback announcement in late 2008 with the suggestion they return to racing together – apparently not in jest. The revelation is hard to square with someone who, on other days, referred to pro cycling as ‘that hell’ and said he wouldn’t go back for ‘all the money in the world’. As it was, only one of them lined up for the 2009 Tour. Ullrich watched the key stages with the volume turned down, as always when cycling was on his TV.
In 2010, finally, the ‘psychological crisis’ to which his mother would later refer finally tipped Ullrich beyond his coping threshold. Ullrich himself talked about a ‘knot’ in his head that had become too big to untangle on his own. He needed professional help. He got it at a clinic in Zürich, not far from his home, along with a diagnosis of ‘burnout’ – often a vague description for a pot pourri of stress-induced symptoms, from anxiety to diminishing energy and self-worth.
His decision to open up about his illness – or at least publish a brief statement on his website announcing that he was undergoing treatment – was predictably greeted with sympathy by some, cynicism by others. The timing was certainly curious – on the same day that the Hamburg State Court officially lifted the gag order against Werner Franke. Ullrich didn’t want to say whether the two things were linked. A couple of weeks later, he was flatly denying rumours that he was in fact battling alcoholism.
In truth, Ullrich was about to rediscover something that years, maybe decades earlier, had felt like an addiction – the pleasure of riding his bike. ‘He’d hardly ridden for three years, but one of the doctors or nurses in the clinic said to him they’d love to ride with him. Sara then brought his bike and he slowly started up again,’ Wolfgang Strohband recalls.
Soon, Ullrich would be riding for three hours every day, feeling the knot finally loosen. It was that simple – or at least sounded so in the only public accounts of the period Ullrich ever gave. ‘I was there for two or three weeks,’ he told the Danish journalist Morten Okbo. ‘I talked with psychologists. And I learned that I needed to begin to train again. I realized that my head functions better on the bike. It got my spirits back.’
In another interview, he reflected on how and why he had hauled himself out of the mire whereas others from his generation found the climb too steep. Marco Pantani, for example, had seemingly never been able to cleanse the shame of his ejection from the 1999 Giro or clamber out of the legal quagmires of its aftermath. ‘The same couldn’t have happened to me. I never got to that point,’ Ullrich said. ‘I love life too much, and I also have a reason – with my life, and with my family now – to be really happy. I did end up in a state of burnout, but we soon realized that if I realigned body and soul somehow, and stayed active, and also let friends and family help me – and speak to a psychologist, as I did briefly then – it would quickly help me. I wouldn’t be so stubborn to let no one help me. For a very long time I thought I only needed myself, because I was the Tour de France champion, I was strong . . . and that worked for a few years, but then I went kaput.’
Another of those ‘reasons to be happy’ was the news that Sara was to give birth to their second child, a boy named Benno. Their first son, Max, had been born in 2007. The atmosphere at their home had by Ullrich’s admission been ‘awful’ before his treatment. Suddenly, his previously tortured, tired mind felt something that, after years of deprivation, it now barely recognized: the soft caress of hope.
Four years had passed since Operación Puerto. They had been cataclysmic for professional cycling in Germany, which had seen a nuclear meltdown of the races, teams and sponsors fertilized by Ullrich and Telekom’s success. Now, the Milram team, sponsored by a large German dairy, had announced that they, like T-Mobile in 2007 and the equally scandal-ravaged Gerolsteiner in 2008, were also pulling down the shutters. Germany would hence have no major team in cycling’s elite division in 2011 for the first time in twenty years. The UCI year planner made even more depressing reading: from a high watermark of fifty days of top-level racing in 2005 and 2006, Germany’s calendar had shrivelled to a mere thirteen days in 2010. On one single ‘Black Thursday’ in October 2008, the national broadcaster ARD had announced that it would discontinue its coverage of the Tour de France, to be followed an hour or two later by the news that the Deutschland Tour, resuscitated in 1999, mid-magenta and golden age, would cease to exist – at least for now. The gangrene had set in at all levels, even in the most remote organs and orifices of the sport in Germany – like the venerable Six-Day scene. Ninety years after its inception, the Six Days of Stuttgart had perished in 2008, as had the Six Days of Dortmund; the following year saw the forty-sixth and final edition of the Six Days of Munich.
After their 2009 hiatus, the organizers of the Deutschland Tour briefly imagined reviving their race in 2010, only for that prospect to quickly vanish. The former race chief Kai Rapp spelled out why: ‘Doping. It conditions everything – how attractive the race is to spectators, sponsors and host towns.’
Based on ratings from the 2005 edition (28 per cent audience share in Germany, 50 per cent in Belgium), where Ullrich had been the star attraction, Rapp had felt his race was well on course to become cycling’s second biggest televisual event, on par with the Giro d’Italia and behind only the Tour de France. ‘But then, unfortunately,’ he told Radsportnews, ‘there was a new development for cycling in Germany in 2006 . . .’
One day in May 2011, Jan Ullrich sat at the dining table in his villa in Scherzingen, surrounded by the faces and quotidian stage props of the last few years, with the Bodensee shimmering outside, and he began to describe how he imagined the next phase of his life.
Sitting next to Ullrich, smiling, nodding and chipping in their own ideas were Charly Steeb and Falk Nier. Both men were former tennis players, Steeb a three-time Davis Cup winner from the same golden generation as Boris Becker and Michael Stich and Nier a short-lived Challenger Tour hopeful who later became the German Davis Cup team manager. Now they worked together in a sports marketing agency, organizing events and managing athletes, including retired ones seeking self-reinvention. This was also why they had been summoned to Switzerland: after nearly five years and his recovery from burnout the previous summer, Jan had started to think about what could come next. Years later, Ullrich summed up his post-Puerto inertia thus to Rouleur: ‘For the next four years I sat in my house and looked out of the window.’
As Nier now told Ullrich, they would never know how the German public might feel about a rapprochement, let alone redemption, unless they tried. It was about Jan finally taking control. Never mind that the UCI and the Swiss Cycling Federation were still debating whether they could officially punish Ullrich’s doping, and that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was poised to have the final say.
While the lawyers dealt with that, Ullrich called Nier and Steeb a week or two after their meeting to say that he liked their pitch. He had realized the previous year that he needed cycling for both his physical and mental health; their idea of him inching his way back into the public eye and the cycling marketplace with Gran Fondos – mass participation, non-competitive rides often modelled on major tour stages – made perfect sense.
Another former German sporting luminary was also looking out for Ullrich. With hair like a metal frontman and the hips of a samba-dancing Carioca, Frank Wörndl had become an overnight sensation after his 1987 world slalom championship victory – and fodder for the tabloids when, the following year, he had to leave his Olympic silver medal in a strip club in Calgary as a deposit, having burned through all of his cash. A few years later, Wörndl met and gave Ullrich skiing lessons in Sölden in Austria. Ullrich didn’t wear a hat or gloves and blistered his feet to an icy pulp, which Wörndl found both horrifying and hilarious. They had become and remained good friends, and now Wörndl wanted to contribute to his chum’s ‘relaunch’. A friend in Sölden had challenged Wörndl to complete the infamous Gran Fondo finishing in the resort, the Ötztaler Radmarathon, in under eight hours. Wörndl took on the bet. And roped in Ullrich.
They decided to prepare by entering a multi-day event in the Italian Dolomites. Ullrich went ‘incognito’ under the name ‘Max Kraft’ – literally ‘Max Power’, with Max also, of course, being the name of his eldest son. ‘The disguise didn’t exactly work,’ Falk Nier recalls. ‘From the minute he got there people recognized him and wanted photos, but it was actually really good for him. He’d been out of the public eye for a long time, and people had built up this image of a guy hiding from the police or the authorities. We were also taking a first step with a view to him “coming out” in the long term, dealing with all of the questions so that he wouldn’t have to deal with them in the future. Jan had been on the same level as Boris Becker, Franz Beckenbauer and Steffi Graf. We thought that him opening up could eventually take him back towards that level.’
Steeb and Nier recognized that Ullrich would need convincing. For years, he had been telling anyone who asked that he couldn’t tell the truth about his doping for ‘legal reasons’, while friends and advisors cited the terms of his severance from T-Mobile. But Nier says these excuses were spurious: ‘At most, he would have had to pay a small amount back to, for example, his old sunglasses manufacturer.’
No, as far as Nier and others could tell, there was one lingering, overwhelming worry – that admitting his guilt would result in him being stripped of his 1997 Tour victory. ‘And in my opinion,’ says Nier, ‘it meant everything to Jan to be the only German Tour winner. If he loses that title, I think he loses everything in his mind.’
Others, like Ullrich’s previous manager Wolfgang Strohband, would disagree. Strohband’s partnership with Ullrich had petered out amicably post-2006 as Ullrich all but hid away and Strohband eased into retirement. In 2015, Strohband tells me, ‘No one can take those wins away from Jan in his head; if they did officially, he wouldn’t be a broken man.’ Regardless, in the court of public opinion – insomuch as Ullrich experienced it on the road, via the pedalling brethren into which he was now re-immersing himself – he found unexpected comfort. As he reflected to Morten Okbo of Rouleur later, ‘I couldn’t understand it when the people turned against me. The media. I thought the media was the people. They’re not. So when I came back out on the bike after those years, and when I met all the bike riders, I could see that they liked me.’
Ullrich’s training rides with Wörndl were long, slow and full of laughter. They were followed by dinners where he could refill his plate or glass without a directeur sportif whispering into his ear and conscience. Even with only a few weeks of training before the Ötztaler, he managed to keep pace with the best riders on the Kühtai, the first monster climb on the route, before stopping to wait for Wörndl at the first feed station and again whenever anyone asked for an autograph. Despite these interruptions, he finished in a time of just over eight hours, only an hour after the winner.
Nier, Steeb and Ullrich slapped each other on the back and moved swiftly onto the next stage of operation relaunch, a provocative ad campaign for the shampoo brand Alpecin. Its slogan: ‘Doping for the hair.’
The two topics – Ullrich and doping – remained indissociable, but the summer had confirmed to Nier and Steeb that leaning in was preferable to prolonging Ullrich’s exile. The machinations of his legal case would rumble slowly on throughout the autumn and winter of 2011. The competent body in Ullrich’s adoptive homeland, Swiss Olympic, ruled that their jurisdiction ended when he stopped racing, to which the UCI contended that in fact Operación Puerto was a second offence after his 2002 positive test, meaning he should be banned for life. Ullrich could do nothing – except finally start to take control of the narrative, tell his side of the story. Nier’s gentlest of cajolements would turn into a long process of persuasion, with Ullrich finally agreeing to put himself through a series of mock interviews. Nier says the sessions revealed one thing: the TV interview they had in mind, possibly with either ZDF or ARD, would be another own goal, like his self-immolation on Reinhold Beckmann’s talk show in 2007. ‘I think he had also been scarred by that. He was authentic but it wasn’t very polished or professional in some ways.’
So they would try a different tack. A print interview – but one that would be published this time, unlike the transcript of his meetings with the investigative journalist and TV personality Günter Wallraff in 2007. After allowing Sara to draft but never release a written confession in 2006, a few months later Ullrich had turned to Wallraff, who intended to document the 1997 Tour winner’s come-to-Jesus moment in Die Zeit. The interviews were so secret that not even Wolfgang Strohband knew. ‘One day Jan was supposed to be coming to see me in Hamburg, and I looked out of my office window and saw him getting out of Günter Wallraff’s car. He told me they’d met three times. No idea what he’d told him.’
The result of their conversations also never made it to the newsstand, for Ullrich had got cold feet.
Now, four years later, at Nier’s prompting, Ullrich began bearing his soul to another journalist who had made his name not collecting finish-line soundbites but reporting on elections and corporate fraud, Giuseppe Di Grazia of Stern magazine. Di Grazia travelled to Scherzingen and spent hours teasing out details that, Nier believed, would finally allow those who had condemned Ullrich to put his actions into their rightful context. They talked about Fuentes and doping, but also his childhood, his family, and his formative phases in Rostock, Hamburg and Berlin. ‘I think there were a lot of details that would have made people really understand him,’ says Nier.
The process ended up taking months. Meanwhile, the CAS verdict finally arrived in February 2012: the UCI’s appeal was upheld . . . partly. Ullrich would be banned for two years, not life, and he would keep all results up to May 2005, the date from which there was clear evidence of his ‘intensive’ involvement with Eufemiano Fuentes. Ullrich also now admitted that relationship for the first time via a statement on his website. More important, he said, was that the ordeal was now over and he could ‘look forward’ to the rest of his life.
If only it were so simple. On 24 August 2012, the eve of that year’s Ötztaler marathon, in which Ullrich was again due to take part, an old ghost returned to haunt him – Lance Armstrong. The USADA had concluded their investigation into Armstrong’s alleged doping with the recommendation of a lifetime ban and the loss of all of his seven Tour de France titles. As the runner-up in three of those Tours, Ullrich could now theoretically be considered a four-time champion, at least insofar as his results up to May 2005 remained officially if not morally intact.
Within hours, the German media had converged on Sölden. ‘We arranged a little press conference, thinking there would be ten or fifteen Austrian crews, but every German channel turned up,’ Nier remembers. They asked many questions but essentially got just one answer from a clearly uncomfortable Ullrich: in his eyes, Armstrong was still the winner because ‘the race that mattered was the one that happened at the time’.
In fact, every one of the Tour’s original podium finishers between 1999 and 2005 had now been found guilty of doping either during or after their careers, with the exceptions of Andreas Klöden, Fernando Escartín and Joseba Beloki. But a whole era had been desecrated. Hence, no one was surprised – and none of the aforementioned riders complained – when the Tour director Christian Prudhomme announced the ‘Armstrong Tours’ would remain winnerless.
When, in their Reasoned Decision a few months later, USADA called US Postal’s ‘the most sophisticated, professionalized doping programme ever’, that definition not only seemed to overlook two decades of systematic, state-sponsored doping in the DDR, but also to gloss over what the overlords of cycling’s biggest race had grudgingly acknowledged – next to none of its recent history was worth saving, including Ullrich’s legacy. The fact that he had retained his place in the Tour’s roll of honour owed not to a firm belief that his 1997 victory may have been clean; the Tour had simply taken the path of least embarrassment, as when they notionally stripped Bjarne Riis of his 1996 title following a belated confession . . . only to reinstate him a year later.
The story Ullrich had been telling Giuseppe Di Grazia could at least now complete its narrative arc. They met and talked for a final time in December 2012, Stern having slated the interview for publication in the New Year. As the date approached, though, Ullrich once again became anxious. Any notion that his sins were all forgotten received an ice-cold reality check from Armstrong – like so many of Ullrich’s fantasies over the years. The American had lost almost his entire suite of personal sponsors on what he later called a ‘brutal 75 million-dollar day’. Armstrong’s cancer foundation ditched him shortly thereafter. All hope of a ‘sweetheart deal’ with USADA – a light penalty in return for useful evidence – had also been dashed in a fractious meeting in Colorado. One day in November, on his social media feeds, Armstrong had posted a photo of himself reclining in his Texan mansion, admiring the seven yellow jerseys framed on his wall. The message was one of defiance. The response was one of outrage.
Next, Armstrong retreated to Hawaii and weighed up his next move. He ordered an old friend to bag up all of his Nike sportswear, railed against USADA in private meals with friends – but also took tentative steps towards a previously unthinkable surrender. A conversation with an old friend, Oprah Winfrey, peeled back Armstrong’s last reservations – and it was Oprah who would get the scoop. They sat face to face and the cameras rolled in Austin in the first week in January.
In Scherzingen, Ullrich’s stress levels were spiking along with his alcohol consumption. Nier could sense his anxiety. And that he wasn’t ready. Not to reveal his truth, nor for the consequences. Sure enough, Ullrich finally called Nier to request that Stern pull their article a few days before the publication date. At the time, he knew nothing of Armstrong’s interview with Oprah.
Thus Stern went on sale, with no Jan Ullrich exclusive, on 12 January. And the next evening around 15 million people watched Oprah Winfrey asking Armstrong whether it was all true – the drugs, the lies, the bullying – and Armstrong tell her it was.
It now fell to Falk Nier to inform journalists that Ullrich hadn’t even watched the Oprah interview and didn’t want to comment beyond what he had told the news magazine Focus: ‘I am certainly not going to go the same way as Armstrong and speak in front of an audience of millions of people.’ He added that, as far as he was concerned, his and Armstrong’s era belonged to ancient history and ‘no longer has any influence on my life’.
So it was that a week supposed to finally begin the public rehabilitation of Jan Ullrich arguably delayed and jeopardized that process further. A long editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argued that even now, at his lowest ebb, Armstrong had left Ullrich trailing, for he at least had revealed a clear agenda, a path, a project. His ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life winning back people’s trust’ was, wrote Michael Eder, ‘the sentimentally shaded printout of a clear calculation’ – one that aimed to get him competing, earning and thriving once again. Meanwhile, Ullrich’s paralysis prompted Eder to ask, and the rest of Germany with him, ‘what does Jan Ullrich intend to do with the rest of his life?’
The same article made a further astute observation – that another area in which Ullrich had always lagged way behind Armstrong was in making enemies, and even that contributed to his current bind. The Armstrong investigation had relied heavily on the testimonies of individuals with axes to grind, whereas even in confessing their own cheating Ullrich’s ex-comrades had taken great care to skirt around the issue of whether, how and when he had ever engaged in doping.
For a year there would be no prospect of that changing, or of anything else shaking him from his inertia until, in February of 2013, a French government commission gained access to the results of retroactive urine tests conducted on samples from the 1998 Tour de France for research purposes. A report was due to be published in July 2013. Meanwhile, the director of the Paris laboratory which had performed the 1998 re-tests told the commission that ‘almost all’ of the samples had tested positive for EPO.
Early in that summer of 2013, Falk Nier was getting married in Sardinia, with Ullrich among the guests. Nier took time out from rehearsing speeches and teasing flower arrangements to check in with his friend – or rather get something off his chest.
‘Basically, there I told him that, with this Senate report coming, he didn’t need a manager any more if he wasn’t going to confess,’ Nier remembers. ‘I told him there was nothing for me to do any more. He could do a few things in Mallorca, some training camps with weekend riders or whatever, but there was nowhere to really go with any of it if he wasn’t going to tell the truth. Our business relationship pretty much ended there.’
The Nier–Charly Steeb double act, which was itself about to fracture over an unrelated dispute, did take care of one last thing for Ullrich. The 2013 Tour de France would be the race’s one hundredth edition and, to mark the anniversary, multiple major TV networks, magazines and newspapers had requested – and were granted – an interview with Germany’s only winner. The news magazine Focus was the first to finally open the vault, Ullrich telling them that by doping he had simply been trying and, as it turned out, failing to level the playing field, for it was now clear that Armstrong had benefitted not only from the most high-tech drugs but also high-level complicity on the part of the authorities.
Once more, there was no chorus of sympathy. On the contrary. Ullrich’s longest-standing critic, the microbiologist, Werner Franke, now proclaimed him the ‘world record holder of lying’.
In the contemporary peloton, too, there were groans. The best German riders of the post-Ullrich generation were sick of a rider they had once idolized but long since ceased to name among their heroes. Now they faced a Tour de France in which, as the sprinter Marcel Kittel said, ‘all anyone will talk about is doping and not what we achieve on the bike.’ One German rider bedaubed as the national saviour way back when he wore the yellow jersey for a day in 2007, Linus Gerdemann, had temporarily quit the sport, partly in frustration at what he had described to me that spring. ‘It felt like I’d been sitting on a barstool talking to a German journalist about doping every night for four years, but the conversation wasn’t moving forward. The questions were still all the same.’
The new, would-be prophet Kittel took the first yellow jersey and went on to win four stages. Tony Martin and André Greipel also notched one each, making it Germany’s most successful Tour since the Ullrich era but far from its most watched, the state broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, having binned their live coverage in 2012. The race’s sinking credibility in Germany was reflected in audiences that had dropped from their 3.1 million average for live broadcasts in 2003 to 1.26 million in 2011. The ARD and ZDF bosses now also said it was unlikely that live transmissions would resume any time in the next few years.
The release of the French Senate report was finally delayed by a few days, until the week after the Tour. But the bad news, yet more of it, duly arrived: Ullrich’s urine samples from the 1998 Tour were ‘positive’ for EPO, just like those of the race winner, Marco Pantani – and those of Erik Zabel. After a first, untruthful confession in 2007, Zabel had known what was coming – and dallied over a fuller admission for several days before finally summoning Andreas Burkert of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. ‘I’m the arsehole now,’ he told Burkert. As well as a mea culpa, though, Zabel’s was a mournful ode to a period and above all to a generation whom he had once envisioned growing old like his eighty-year-old dad and his buddies, meeting up twice a week and going on coffee rides. Instead, Zabel now glumly evoked a ‘so-called generation of sinners’ who, on the rare occasions when they had got together, showed each other their mobile phone displays before they said a word, to prove they weren’t recording.
Some time, in fact years later, Zabel’s reply to my interview request for this book suggested some wounds had healed while others never will. ‘I went back over it all in 2013 to try to find closure. It was a good time overall but unfortunately, in retrospect, it was defined by the failings of my generation. That’s the price we’re paying. But it makes no sense to live in the past.’
In all, Falk Nier and Charly Steeb had spent two years trying and failing to catalyse the redemption of Jan Ullrich. In the end they stepped away with no hard feelings, but some frustrations and concerns.
‘The lack of self-leadership was an issue, one hundred percent,’ says Nier today. ‘In a way it made it quite nice to work with him because we’d go to him with proposals and he’s just say, “Ach, you know what’s best for me, you decide.” OK, Sara did a lot, but maybe she also did too much. She can’t take on every role; she can’t be wife, mother, secretary, manager – this never works. In the first few years after his career Sara did everything. Everything. When we started working together, it was hard for Jan to write emails. I remember once we had a long flight to Miami, and I used it to try to teach him a few basic things like how to respond to a letter. I think the first emails Jan ever wrote were when he started to work with us. Telekom also did absolutely everything for the riders. I remember checking into the hotel on that Miami trip and Jan asking me what he should wear the next day. It was a bit of a shock for someone like me who’s used to tennis, where everyone organizes everything themselves. He wasn’t very independent . . . He’s a really nice, nice guy, with his heart in the right place, but you always needed to protect him.’
Nier’s replacement was a goatee-bearded, slick-haired marketing agency director from Gütersloh, Ole Ternes. Just a few months older than Ullrich, Ternes partnered his client on bike rides and went with him on ski trips. He was fluent in marketing jargon, and could talk enthusiastically about ‘repositioning the Jan Ullrich brand’ and future book deals or even a biopic. Ternes was making some headway, notably signing Ullrich up to an endorsement deal with the upmarket apparel brand Rapha, when the next setback arrived in May 2014: a car crash a few kilometres from Scherzingen, caused by Ullrich’s Audi smashing into the back of another vehicle stopped at a junction and spinning into another. Ullrich was relatively unhurt, but two of the passengers in the other vehicles needed hospital treatment. When word reached reporters from the Swiss tabloid Blick and they called to get Ullrich’s version, he swore he had not been drinking and was travelling at 20 kph over the speed limit. ‘These things can happen,’ Ullrich said. In reality, Ullrich had been drinking with friends for much of the afternoon, was more than three times over the alcohol limit and somewhere between 52 kph and 63 kph over the 80 kph speed limit. The ‘somewhere between’ was significant, for anything over 60 kph would automatically mean jail time under Swiss law.
It would be more than three years, between assorted delays and disputes, before justice could be served. Finally, Ullrich was given a twenty-one-month sentence suspended for four years and a fine of 10,000 Swiss francs. Among the extenuating circumstances put forward by Ullrich’s legal team was that, ‘Mr Ullrich is an elite athlete. His body reacts differently to alcohol from other people’s.’
While Ullrich was naturally relieved, others thought he had been lucky. Here was yet another stain on his image, a further reason for critics to either condemn or pity rather than forgive him. In 2014 he had also ridden tandem events with Matthias Kessler, the former T-Mobile teammate partially paralysed in a training crash four years earlier. But acts of philanthropy received minimal coverage compared to any news item re-emphasizing the established narrative. One journalist, Michael Ostermann, detected symptoms of what, in his view, is perhaps not just a German word but a national malaise, at least in the media: Schadenfreude. ‘The public actually love Jan and show him that when he gets out there among them, but the lines of communication were broken because Jan stopped talking to the press and so did his friends and management, to protect him mainly. And the German media does tend to let people fall. Boris Becker also did some stupid things and you in Britain still love him, whereas in Germany he’s just a joke. We don’t see mistakes as charming; we love to take people down.’
This portrayal of Ullrich as a victim of an unforgiving, bloodthirsty media has supporters, including Ullrich, who said to a sympathetic, nodding Becker in their made-for-TV bro-down in 2008, ‘I still can’t understand how they tear good people apart.’ But in 2014 there were also those, like former teammate Rolf Aldag, who were struck less by the sadistic delight of reporters than Ullrich’s umpteenth act of self-sabotage, at a time when judgements about his past may have been softening.
‘You take the tabloid press, Bild Zeitung. They would love to have him back, celebrate him again, because for years the national treasures were Boris Becker, Michael Schumacher and Jan,’ Aldag says. ‘But then he does something like the car crash and they say it’s clearly not the moment. I mean, just the way he dealt with that, and his PR people. “It shouldn’t happen to a family man like me.” It shouldn’t happen to the binman! Drinking and driving is a pretty active thing. It’s not like you’re being hit by a thunderstorm.’
Infuriating, indefensible, seemingly incorrigible – and yet impossible to completely disown, for the part of the German psyche that identified a kindred spirit in the body of a physiological Übermensch. This paradox had perhaps been central to Ullrich’s appeal from the start, as Aldag suggests. ‘Zabel probably analysed it really well in 2004 or 2005. He said, “You know what, if I want to be a star like Jan, I should get divorced twice and go crazy . . .” Because that made Jan so popular in Germany.
‘Erik was always perfection, and people don’t love that, while every January, there’s a photo of big fat Jan and a headline, “Dicker Jan”, but what it really does is that common people read it and say, “See! He’s having the same problems as me! Christmas was fucking shit, I had dinner with the family twice – that was three more kilos . . .” Then this fat guy goes and nearly wins the Tour de France. You know, you’re the best bike rider in the world, and you run over twenty bikes with your 200,000 deutsche mark Porsche, that’s kind of funny. People read it and think, you idiot, but, ja, that’s Jan. And that really made him normal. Whereas Lance was totally different, totally impossible for most people to connect with. His girlfriend was from Hollywood, he’s hanging out with Bono in his private planes . . . no one can connect with that as a fan. While Jan is one of 80 million Germans who are suffering here and there, having their good and bad times.’
On the twentieth anniversary of Jan Ullrich’s Tour de France victory, the race returns to Germany for the first time since a 35-kilometre cameo in 2006. The 2017 edition of the race is to celebrate its Grand Départ in Düsseldorf – though the occasion is no homage to Ullrich, and indeed looks more like a version of the cult tragicomic film Goodbye, Lenin!, in which a woman in a coma in 1989 East Berlin regains consciousness after the Wall has fallen, and must be protected from finding out at all costs. Christiane Kerner’s family ends up sealing her inside a private time capsule, in a parallel universe where capitalism (still) doesn’t reign. Similarly, over a weekend in Düsseldorf, it is as though the Tour de France must be shielded and blinkered, lest it learn or be reminded of Jan Ullrich’s existence.
Thomas Geisel, the mayor, has lured the Grande Boucle to the northern Rhine at a cost of nearly six million euros to the city and the same again to private sponsors. Geisel and the Tour organizers say they’ll supercharge tourism and bike use while celebrating Germany’s reconciliation with professional cycling after a decade in which the scene here – from teams to races to public interest and confidence – had dissolved to almost nothing.
On a weekend four months before the big day, Geisel reaffirms his pledge when we speak at a Saturday-morning event to drum up interest in the Tour among local schoolkids. To a question about Ullrich and whether he’ll be welcome, Geisel responds, ‘Everybody is welcome. Jan Ullrich is also welcome. As a Christian, I think that every rueful sinner has a second chance.’
There is a difference, though, between being ‘welcome’ and being honoured. Or even invited in any official capacity. The same weekend, over a coffee in the market square from which his race will roll out in July, the Tour chief Christian Prudhomme also seems, if not embarrassed when I broach the same subject, then at least reluctant to dwell. ‘We’re not particularly going to invite Jan Ullrich,’ he says. ‘We don’t want to look back. But there’s no acrimony. In Germany, even if roots are important, we mustn’t forget what happened. We need to look forward. Regarding Ullrich specifically, I think he got caught in a spiral but had real, real qualities to be a champion.’
The politicking comes as no surprise, but something I hear on the same weekend stops me dead. A cluster of promotional stands on an esplanade overlooking the Rhine are publicizing the Tour’s imminent arrival. I happen to be walking by when, at one of them, a gentleman armed with a megaphone is trying to whip up excitement among a small group of inquisitive locals.
‘Who here knows the name of some German riders who’ll be in the Tour de France?’ he squawks.
Several seconds go by and no one as much as twitches. Laughing nervously, the MC decides to offer some assistance.
‘OK, so what about Marcel Kittel, Tony Martin or John Degenkolb? And what about famous former German riders from the past? Who remembers the famous Telekom team? Names like Rolf Aldag, Jens Heppner . . .’
A former national hero is being extinguished, obliterated, cancelled before my eyes and ears. I am watching a real-life enactment of Goodbye Ullrich!
Even to German colleagues who saw a form of collective post-traumatic stress disorder take hold after 2006, the idea that Ullrich will be invisible come July seems realistic yet unfathomable. I find myself standing alongside Chris Hauke, the editor of Procycling magazine’s German edition, while Geisel delivers another speech about the ‘unique opportunity for Düsseldorf’ in a packed town square. Hauke smiles meekly; he is also excited the city of his birth will welcome the sporting event that stole his heart, but, equally, taboos never sit easily, especially not with Germans.
‘All of the new generation – the Kittels, Degenkolbs, the Martins – they all grew up watching and getting inspired by Ullrich and Zabel, so it’s just weird Jan won’t be there,’ Hauke murmurs above the din. ‘If the people here invite him to the Tour, they know that will just drag the conversation back to doping, and they would prefer just a bit of awkwardness, rather than that overshadowing the whole thing.’
Whether the same rationale would prevail elsewhere is a moot point. In traditional cycling powerhouses like Spain, Italy and Belgium, drug cheats are invariably condemned but almost never ostracized. Usually they return to competition or jobs in the media and their former place in fans’ affections once their punishment is served. There is a tendency to attribute such willingness to cultural and religious stereotypes – Catholic precepts about sin and atonement – but a moral divide also exists between cycling’s Old World and the sport’s newer frontiers that owes partly to something else: the fact that, from the inception of drug testing in the 1960s to almost the end of the twentieth century, when the sport existed almost solely within the confines of Western Europe, doping was treated and sanctioned as a minor peccadillo, often with a suspension of no more than a few weeks or, at most, months.
Ben Johnson’s positive test at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul (and some accompanying, implicitly racist coverage) was one event that contributed to heightening and changing sensibilities about illegal performance enhancement, as were revelations about state-sponsored doping behind the Iron Curtain. But it was cycling’s Festina scandal in 1998 that caused a true paradigm shift, with its police raids, dripping syringes and the shocking realization that, in EPO, cycling had become hooked on a substance with the potential to upend whatever natural order was thought to exist. The World Anti-Doping Agency was created soon afterwards in acknowledgement that the game, or games, had changed – that sport had to get tougher on what were now no longer isolated acts of mischief but Frankenstein-ish, lucrative and sophisticated forms of treachery. Attitudes were remodelled accordingly, except in places with an entrenched professional cycling tradition and the less proud habit of overlooking, forgiving and minimizing doping. Germany had no such heritage, none of the same attachment to the sport’s pockmarked history. As Zabel had already suggested in 1997, it had been a Jan Ullrich boom, not a cycling boom. And so it was now a Jan Ullrich bust.
But there was also something perhaps distinctly German in the way Ullrich had been not just cast aside but seemingly erased. As though his sins were in fact a mark of a nation’s shame, an evil that had to be purged, scoured like an ulcer from Germany’s own flesh. Germans, of course, have a word for this process of, if not self-excoriation, then at the least the rigorous exercise of reflection, recognition and atonement for the atrocities committed during the Second World War and the abuses of the SED dictatorship in the East. The endowments of this Vergangenheitsbewältigung are everywhere in modern-day Germany: in government texts, the monuments of every town, the almost daily headlines about the unmasking of some SS guard or Stasi informant, a whole sub-genre of literature and visual arts and, for inhabitants of Berlin or other major cities, literally on the pavements where we tread in the form of Stolpersteine – the little brass plates outside the former homes of SS victims, engraved with their names and how and when they met their death.
As the only journalist working for a major TV network anywhere in the world employed solely to report on doping, one could argue that Hajo Seppelt is himself a product of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, albeit one of its subtler offshoots. Seppelt agrees: when we meet in London in 2015, he says that ARD’s decision to give him this unique mandate is in itself revealing. He believes that an inbuilt sense of national guilt after the Second World War in particular has, besides certain negative consequences, instilled in modern Germany a thirst for moral self-inquiry that may be unique in the world.
‘Germans are very good at punishing themselves. In fact, we are world champions in that,’ Seppelt explains. ‘For example, the way we dealt with the whole issue of the Stasi files, the commitment to transparency, was an example for the rest of the world. I’m not a patriot, absolutely not, but this was very good, because you can only create something for the future if you learn from the past. I think the very, very bad experience we had with the Second World War created this sense that we had to be more conscious, more sensitive than other nations. You see it with the way we deal with so many things, from nuclear energy, to Israel, to other conflicts in the world. And you also see it with the way we reacted to Ullrich and the Telekom scandal.’
A simple sense of conscience and responsibility or a crippling moral prudishness bordering on sanctimony? Whatever it was, come July 2017, the reflex contributed to keeping Ullrich well away from VIP enclosures, celebration dinners and indeed all official ceremonies and events. In May, his surprise appointment as the race director of the Rund um Köln – followed four days later by his withdrawal – had served as a portent; the main broadcast rights holder for that race, WDR, had reacted so unfavourably to Ullrich’s involvement that it became an impossibility.
Wounded by that experience, Ullrich decided to keep himself well away from Düsseldorf, although he could be found, and was by several journalists, at the side of the road in the little town of Korschenbroich, 75 kilometres down the route of stage two. Korschenbroich’s mayor, Marc Venter, had reached out because no one more than Ullrich ‘embodied the highs and lows of professional cycling in the last twenty years,’ he said. Ullrich also proved to be a good and jovial guest, smiling and clapping as the peloton swished by. Later, Venter called him onto a stage and a chorus of ‘Ulle, Ulle!’ echoed through the old town. When he was signing autographs, one elderly lady insisted on giving him a hug. Upon hearing about the Tour organizers snubbing his old rival, Lance Armstrong had pointed out that other convicted dope cheats worked on the race every year in prominent roles. ‘Fuck ASO,’ Armstrong hissed on social media. Meanwhile, Ullrich said it was ‘all less dramatic than everyone had made out’. He could have gone to Düsseldorf, he insisted, but he wanted to be with his daughter, Sarah Maria, who was celebrating her fourteenth birthday.
He left Korschenbroich feeling heartened, accepted, even loved – just not by the kingmakers that Armstrong had also decried. Having publicly maligned the legacy of Ullrich and his generation for many years, now even the new crop of German riders, led by Kittel, said they disliked the way he was being treated. Times were a-changing, clearly. One day in the autumn of 2015, Sara and Jan had also taken the sudden decision to relocate from Switzerland to Mallorca; they were on one of their frequent walks on the Bodensee shore, huddled in their jackets, the hills around them submerged in fog, when they had begun asking themselves what was actually keeping them in Switzerland. They had many friends in Mallorca, as most wealthy Germans do, and the island was brimming with exactly the kind of cyclotourists who would pay handsomely to train or spend time with Jan. They also both liked the idea of immersing their three children in a new language and culture. Nine months later the family moved into their new home – a seven-bedroom, 500-square-metre villa with a swimming pool and an elaborate, landscaped garden dotted with sculptures, between Establiments and Esporles, fifteen minutes north-west of Palma.
They planned to suck it and see for one year, but by the summer of 2017 they were no longer sure if they would ever leave. The kids were settling in at school and becoming fluent in Spanish and English. Sara was also back in the classroom, studying holistic health and nutrition. Soon she would be raving to friends about a business idea that would surely keep both her and Jan busy – a health food and bike cafe where Jan could be a kind of maharishi in residence, riding with customers in the morning and spending afternoons dispensing tips and stories from the good old days over lattes and green juices. Jan’s friend, Guido Eickelbeck, another former German pro, thought the cafe could be a goldmine. Meanwhile, Casa Ullrich was already spilling over with friends, children, toys and pets – ‘like a scene from Pippi Longstocking’ as one journalist who visited Ullrich, Johannes Krayer, wrote in the Mallorca Zeitung. Another reporter and long-time confidant, Philippe Le Gars of L’Équipe, flew in to interview Ullrich in June 2017 and came agonizingly close to cracking him open; the conversation meandered from the safe harbour of small talk to the brink of a soul-bearing confession, with Ullrich volunteering his memories of Fuentes and how he had trusted the doctor. Then Sara appeared on the terrace and reminded her husband of what they had agreed – that this topic was and would remain off-limits. It was time to face forwards, not back.
Throughout the summer, either side of the Tour, Ullrich reconnected with old teammates and other cycling buddies at charity events, conferences and training camps in Switzerland, Germany and back in Mallorca. Cycling was balsam for the spirit but, in Ullrich’s case, not for a creaking, overstretched body: a cyst on his left knee, his ‘good’ one for most of his career, had flared up on rides over the summer and eventually stopped him riding altogether.
He would need an operation in mid-September and chose Erich Rembeck, a Munich-based specialist and Boris Becker’s long-time doctor, to do it. The surgery was a success in that Rembeck did the necessary repair; it was disastrous in the sense that, according to a story later published by Die Welt, soon after the operation Ullrich lay surrounded by empty whisky and wine bottles and ashtrays brimming over with cigarette butts.
Not long later Sara was deciding that she and the children would move back to Germany. One of Ullrich’s friends in Mallorca tells me this created two unbridgeable voids in his life. ‘He says that he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] and, if he can’t work out, he has to move on to other stuff. The combination of the two things was disastrous.’
Others and Ullrich himself would argue that losing both his wife and his children is enough to send any man over the edge. To a devoted father like Ullrich, it was a doomsday far worse than Strasbourg in 2006.
‘No one has a more badly scarred heart than me,’ he would say one day that summer.
Reports of how Jan Ullrich had spent the evening of 3 August 2018 shocked and bewildered everyone except the few dozen friends with whom he had been in regular contact throughout the summer. For several weeks, he had been bombarding them with videos on WhatsApp, sometimes at a rate of over a hundred a day, beckoning them through the keyhole of his new-found bachelordom on the island paradise known to Germans simply as ‘Malle’. He sent so many of the clips that most of the recipients had stopped opening them, because they were horrified, not bored. The incessant notifications on his old mate Matthias Kessler’s phone were keeping him up at night.
In one home video that later leaked to the German media, Ullrich filmed himself staggering around his empty villa, visibly drunk or high, alternating deranged boasts with dark laments about his dire predicament. He claimed to have set a new world record by smoking 999 cigarettes in nine hours. It was no doubt an exaggeration, although the rasp in his voice did make one wonder.
His ravings about old friends who could now ‘lick his arse’ foreshadowed a text message that many of them had received on that same, eventful 3 August. The missive invited them to be grateful he hadn’t ‘gone the way of Cat Stevens and decided to call myself Ysufu’. He signed off on a tender, but emphatic note – he ‘loved them all’ despite their ‘pessimistic predictions’ about his future. For years he had lived an ‘ascetic existence’. Now he wished they would ‘leave him alone to enjoy his life’.
One member of his old support network in Mallorca says that one thing was abundantly clear: ‘There was absolutely no way Jan wrote that.’
The inference – that he would now wilfully vanish from their lives – also turned out not to be true. For, within twenty-four hours, upon turning on their TVs and phones, they discovered that Ullrich had been arrested for breaking into the back garden of Til Schweiger, the much-loved yet also much-derided star of films like Inglourious Basterds, and Germany’s most successful export to Hollywood. Schweiger was having a party to celebrate the end of filming on his latest project, Honey in the End, but Ullrich wasn’t invited. In fact, it wasn’t the first time that Ullrich had showed up unannounced at Schweiger’s island hacienda that week, the actor told Bild. Or even the second. One day he had appeared suddenly in Schweiger’s hallway and berated his neighbour for not telling him that he was home. A few hours later Ullrich was back, this time grabbing a fistful of Schweiger’s hair and imploring the film star to ‘Hit me! Hit me!’ The next day, it was Schweiger visiting Ullrich. ‘Get help,’ Schweiger told him. Also: ‘I don’t want to see you on my property again.’
But within hours, Ullrich was trying to break in once more, finally leaving in tears after half an hour of negotiation with Schweiger through a locked door.
Then came Friday, the day of Schweiger’s party. The gathering had decanted into the pool house, where, in happier times, Schweiger and Ullrich would kick back and watch Bundesliga games. Now Schweiger was showing his guests a music video when suddenly Ullrich’s teetering, disorientated silhouette loomed behind them. According to Schweiger’s account, Ullrich immediately lunged at one of Schweiger’s friends with a broomstick, prompting Schweiger to call the police. Within minutes, a team of Policía Nacional officers was pouring onto the property. They would be there interviewing witnesses for several hours.
Ullrich was handcuffed and taken to a cell in Palma, where he would spend the night and most of the next day. Late the following afternoon, he stepped out of a police van and through the doors of one of Palma’s main courthouses with four other detainees. By now, paparazzi and other emissaries of the German media’s formidable Mallorcan colony had descended, prompting Ullrich to cover his face with a makeshift white shroud. He emerged later having been given a restraining order stipulating that he was no longer allowed within fifty metres of Schweiger, or to contact him electronically. ‘I just want to go home now and to be left in peace,’ he told the waiting reporters. Alas, within hours of him returning to his villa, the Diario de Mallorca would be publishing photos of him staggering across its tiled-roof.
Some months later, a few blocks from where Ullrich spent his night in police custody in Palma, I meet one of the adopted locals who knew and had become close to him and his family long before his 2018 summer breakdown. The friend prefers not to be named. They say they do not want to overplay their role trying to pull Ullrich out of the mire. Moreover, several months on, Ullrich’s equilibrium remains delicate.
What the friend will tell me on a sunny December morning is that the events of early August were a surprise only insomuch as they and other friends of Ullrich had feared much worse for some time. A second knee operation in six months in February had been supposed to put Ullrich back on his bike – one of the only places he could free his mind. Instead, those who visited him after the surgery in Munich found him in a sorry state. A fond Easter tradition existed among the Ullrichs’ Mallorca set – a brunch or lunch where families got together, the kids could play and the adults could guiltlessly embody a non-dom, island-life cliché, with its linen shirts, Breitling watches and endless conversations about housekeepers and international schools. Although everyone in the group knew about the Ullrichs’ recent issues, they were pleased to discover that Sara and the kids would be joining them as usual and that Jan would also be there.
But Ullrich didn’t show up to the Easter brunch. When, over the subsequent weeks, mutual friends told Sara how they would try to help her husband, she sounded grateful but demoralized. April was bad, May worse. Not that Ullrich necessarily agreed. One night he was eating in a restaurant in Palma when he spotted a pretty brunette at another table and sent over some flowers. A month later, the girl had moved into his villa in Establiments. She was thirty-four, Cuban, a former waitress. Her name was Elizabeth Napoles Prado.
The friend of Ullrich’s that I meet in Palma says that Napoles seemed like a good influence – ‘the only person in the house not doing drugs and drinking’. Ullrich showered her with gifts, but her affection seemed genuine, her intentions pure. Other acquaintances are less complimentary about the collection of rum characters who were increasingly casting a spell over Ullrich as spring turned to summer. A former pro rider named Jan Bratkowski arrived in mid-June and immediately assigned himself the role of Ullrich’s personal trainer – as numerous videos later uploaded to Bratkowski’s Facebook page demonstrate. In one we see a skeletal Ullrich in denim shorts and a trucker’s cap woozily doing sit-ups on his pool terrace while the bald, muscular Bratkowski paces back and forth cajoling him. In another, Bratkowski plunges terrifyingly down a flight of outdoor steps on a mountain bike. Ullrich at one point tried to copy him and reportedly injured himself in the process.
Like Ullrich, Bratkowski had been hailed as a German cycling prodigy in the early 1990s, but became a journeyman misfit, more notorious than he was famous or successful. John Wordin, the manager of the US-based Mercury Mannheim team who signed Bratkowski in 2000, will not forget him. Wordin’s buyer’s remorse kicked in roughly when Bratkowski was interrupting a group ride at the team’s Los Angeles training camp to park his bike outside the front gates of Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson’s Mulholland Drive mansion and beg her to come out. Or when, says Wordin, he rode solo, in full team kit, into the Chatsworth neighbourhood – otherwise known as the world capital of the porn industry – and demanded an audition at an adult film studio.
A row with a hotel receptionist about the ‘quality’ of the in-room entertainment at one race later in the season, whether real or apocryphal, inspired Bratkowski’s teammate Floyd Landis to pen a haiku: ‘I don’t pay for this. The titties are much too small. And the dicks are shit.’
John Wordin says that Bratkowski’s Mercury career ended a few weeks later, when Wordin ‘literally kicked him out of the car at a train station somewhere’ midway through the Tour of Switzerland due to anomalies in his blood-test results that were highly indicative of doping. ‘We knew what his natural values were,’ Wordin says, ‘so I told him his ass was fired and I never wanted to see him again.’
Bratkowski would race for a few more years before reinventing himself – as a kite-surfing instructor, a sportswear impresario selling T-shirts and caps adorned with slogans like ‘No Doping-No Fun-No Coca-No Party-No Porn’. Somehow, he had now also become one of Jan Ullrich’s new gurus. This despite Bratkowski’s own reckoning with the law in August 2018 – the announcement of his eighteen-month suspended prison sentence for fourteen counts of fraud arising from his latest gig, selling bikes and fitness equipment in Treuchtlingen in northern Bavaria.
The former ice hockey player Stefan Blöcher was another mainstay of Mallorca’s German jet set and part of the old support network who despaired of Ullrich’s ‘new life’. Blöcher told Die Welt Ullrich would reach for an air rifle whenever, in the grip of his assorted paranoias, he thought he was being observed or in some way scrutinized by a face that flashed onto his TV screen. He would then pepper the screen with pellets, destroying ‘two or three TVs a week’.
One person could in fact ‘spy’ on Ullrich. Stern magazine reported that Sara had access to the villa’s CCTV footage via an app on her phone. Whether she wanted to observe her old family home degenerate into the hellhole visitors later described – part frat house, part halfway house – was another question. Old friends couldn’t fathom exactly who some of the now seemingly semi-permanent lodgers were or how Ullrich had become entangled with them. There was Bratkowski, but also one of his friends, a heavily tattooed, Ferrari-driving habitué of strip and boxing clubs from Schweinfurt in Bavaria, who in 2014 had been convicted of violent crimes. A passion for ‘adult entertainment’ appeared to be one common denominator between this pair and Richard Steiner. Born in Yugoslavia, Steiner had joined the French Foreign Legion as a young man and served time in a Brazilian jail, where, aptly, he claimed to have been enlightened by reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. More recently, Steiner had become well-known in Austria for two things: a bestselling memoir about his journey, as he put it, from ‘red-light king to Buddhism’, and a 2013 criminal trial in which he stood accused of exercising a ‘reign of terror’ over Vienna’s bars, brothels and nightclub scene. The manhunt leading to Steiner’s arrest had been the most expensive police operation in Austria’s history, though resulted in only a modest conviction: a three-year, non-custodial sentence for tax evasion.
That was October 2013. Four-and-a-half years later, Steiner was enlisted by Guido Eickelbeck to transform Jan Ullrich in the same way that Steiner had supposedly transformed himself. A tattoo on Steiner’s shoulder – ‘Omertà’ – augured poorly. Nonetheless, Steiner attempted a strong-arm ‘detox’. But not even he could do much beyond keeping Ullrich alive.
There were indeed those among Ullrich’s true friends who, far from lamenting the public nature of the Til Schweiger incident, considered it a blessing. Guido Eickelbeck, Charly Steeb and even Schweiger himself had come to believe that only force or law enforcement could help Ullrich. On the one occasion when Steeb and Eickelbeck succeeded in bringing him to a rehab clinic in Palma, he stayed around five minutes, the time it took for receptionists to produce an admission form. His mother flew in from Rostock and was rebuffed in much the same way, Ullrich ‘kicking her out after two days’, as one witness put it. Steeb and Eickelbeck feared that Ullrich quite simply wouldn’t make it through the summer.
A month after Jan Ullrich’s impromptu, forced entry to the Schweiger compound, I am standing outside the front gate of his villa in Establiments, on the spot where, a few days after the incident, a wild-eyed, bare-chested Ullrich angrily faced down a camera crew reporting on the latest stage of his meltdown.
Today, the property seems deserted behind its high walls. The label on the letterbox says ‘Fam U’, but reads like a forlorn rebuttal of what I know to be true – that the domestic idyll once created here has now been shattered.
Any doubt about that was erased by Ullrich’s hebdomas horribilis – the infernal week that began in Schweiger’s back garden and would end for Ullrich in the direst circumstances in Frankfurt. He had travelled to Germany on a private jet arranged for him by another of his dubious acquaintances, a gentleman referred to in the German press, for legal reasons, only as Gerd K. This individual, believed to be in his early fifties, had befriended Ullrich a few months earlier and was now giving him financial advice. Specifically, Ullrich’s friends say that Gerd K persuaded him to shell out 18,000 euros on a ‘nano wave’ machine designed to diagnose and treat health problems that were either undetectable or untreatable by conventional means. Ullrich swore by it, just as he believed Gerd K’s claim that Ullrich could double or triple his money if he sold the old family pile in Scherzingen and reinvested in cryptocurrency. Now, in mid-August, Ullrich had reportedly signed over complete control of his finances to the mystery friend.
Gerd K claimed to have Ullrich’s best interests at heart; from Frankfurt they headed straight to a rehab clinic, where Ullrich would finally be able to reset. In Palma, he had alarmed airport staff with his bizarre behaviour – compulsively jumping on the spot while smoking three or more cigarettes at once. Now he was to spend his final hours of ‘freedom’, the twilight of his ‘old’ life, in Frankfurt’s Villa Kennedy Hotel – and it was from there that he would leave the following morning, bound not (yet) for the Betty Ford Clinic in Bad Brückenau but, as it transpired, another police station. This time Ullrich had been accused not of trespassing but something much, much worse: in the early hours, some time after being ordered from the Kennedy’s ‘JFK’ bar, Ullrich had allegedly physically attacked a woman whom every paper and news bulletin was referring to as a prostitute. Ullrich had been under the influence of drugs and alcohol, hence could not immediately be interviewed by police.
The alleged victim was able to give her full account to the police – and a few days later to the television network RTL. She identified herself as ‘Brandi’ and was thirty-one years old. Ullrich or his minders had hired her via the Diamond Escort website. Her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, her facial features pixelated and her voice electronically altered, she described being led to Ullrich’s suite by one of his friends or associates and realizing after a first glance around the room that the party had long since started. Things progressed relatively normally for an hour or more until she took a moment to telephone and wake her young son. When the call ended, it was evident that Brandi was dealing with a different Jan Ullrich. She claimed Ullrich became violent and told her never to utter the word ‘son’ again. She was finally able to wrestle away and alert a member of the hotel staff, who promptly called the police.
From the police station, an ambulance took Ullrich to the Hohe Mark psychiatric clinic for a compulsory examination. Then, reluctantly, a few hours later he was driven to the Betty Ford addiction centre in Bad Brückenau that had been his original, intended destination. When they heard that Ullrich had been released from police custody, some of his friends in Mallorca were aghast. ‘We all said, OK, great, now he’s in custody and therefore he’s safe,’ says one of them, ‘but they let him out of there when it was obvious the guy was out of his mind.’
Ullrich’s complicated relationship with alcohol had been an open secret for years. What few outside his inner circle knew was that he had also become reliant on an amphetamine derivative which a doctor had prescribed years earlier for Ullrich’s hyperactivity. Recently he had been taking as many as fifteen pills a day, Elizabeth told Stern – and by his own admission supplementing that with cocaine. His choice, he had told friends – ‘My life is rock ’n’ roll. Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, Iggy Pop . . . and Jan.’ He didn’t mention, but they had all witnessed, the less romantic side effects – the head-splitting insomnia and violent mood swings.
In the scramble to apportion blame, tender pity or just to understand, one of the more provocative contributions came from someone who did not know Ullrich personally but felt as though she had heard a version of his story many times before. Like Ullrich, Ines Geipel was born in the DDR, selected for a KJS sports school at fourteen and went on to make sporting history as a quarter of a world record-breaking 4 x 100-metre DDR team in 1984. Where Geipel and Ullrich differed was in the way they looked back on their respective careers, Geipel having disowned hers on the basis that her achievements were chemically enhanced beyond reasonable comparison. She had also embraced a new life as an acclaimed author and, for five years, the chairwoman of the Doping Opfer Hilfe – the organization set up to support and compensate victims of doping in the former DDR, whose offices I visited in late 2015.
Now, Geipel was struck by something about ‘Generation Jan Ullrich’ that the author Mark Scheppert had also profiled – children of the DDR who had been teenagers when the Wall came down. They were well represented in some jarring, cautionary tales in recent German history: Robert Enke, the football goalkeeper who committed suicide in 2009; Lutz Bachmann, another footballer and later the founder of the populist, far-right Pegida movement; other notorious figures of a similar political orientation to Bachmann. They were also numerous among the sick and crestfallen individuals that Geipel had been meeting for years at the DOH. ‘They sat there and talked about what you’d call disorientation and being uprooted,’ she wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ‘They know a lot about radical self-deception, lacking identity, emptiness, scars and erosion. All a kind of oblivion in which boundaries can melt away.’
Geipel didn’t know – and it has never been firmly established* – whether Ullrich was, like her, a victim of State Planning Theme 14.25, an unwitting consumer of Oral Turinabol. But, while the DOH had for years been collecting evidence about the long-term neurological side effects of stimulants and steroids, she had also observed a form of existential rewiring that occurred irrespective of the athlete’s particular poison. Again, it was to do with blurred lines – the creation of an inner mythology whereby a developing, perhaps already fractured sense of self became untethered from the developing body and medal-laden simulacrum. Eventually, when the spotlight went out, the parts somehow had to be rejoined – and for many this was too much to bear. Often it turned into a battle, said Geipel, ‘between the original and the denial of the original’.
With one winner and, maybe in Ullrich’s case in the summer of 2018, one clear loser.
Towards the end of Jan Ullrich’s first week at the Betty Ford Clinic in Bad Brückenau, I receive a message in the middle of the night from Lance Armstrong. He assumes I’m following ‘the Jan Ullrich situation’. Evidently, Armstrong has been aware since the early summer that Ullrich is spiralling, based mainly on messages from Ullrich himself. Now, Armstrong wants to help and, he tells me, has just landed in Germany. He hopes I keep that to myself for the moment. Nonetheless, in a few hours, on his social media feeds, he’ll be posting the first picture of Ullrich in rehab, smiling and flanked by . . . Armstrong and Frank Wörndl.
Later, Armstrong will admit to being shocked by what he found. ‘It was like his body had been taken over by an alien.’
Soon, there are other visitors to Bad Brückenau. A crew from RTL, whose peek behind the scenes of Ullrich’s rehab is also far from reassuring. They film him manically doing press-ups, pull-ups and hitting a punchbag, then answering questions about his problems, the incident in Frankfurt and his future. He tells them it’s wrong to call him a drug addict – that he has too much energy and amphetamines simply help to bring him down, like ‘sleeping pills’ for ‘normal people’. In Frankfurt he ‘didn’t hurt anyone’. That his accuser was a prostitute shouldn’t be a compounding charge or indeed anyone else’s business, he said. His wife had left him and broken his heart. Plus, his new girlfriend, Elizabeth, had no objections. ‘I need sex,’ he said.
Hearing this, his friends back in Mallorca were understandably concerned. They believed the Betty Ford Clinic afforded too many freedoms – for instance to escape to the next-door Dorint Hotel, with all of its temptations, and to receive visitors who were less concerned with Ullrich’s recovery than Armstrong and Wörndl.
The Betty Ford programme was also short. By the first week of September Ullrich was back in Mallorca with Elizabeth and Jan Bratkowski. He had plans to fly with to Cuba Elizabeth to meet her family, then travel to the United States to begin another stint in rehab. Meanwhile, he continued drinking and was again accused of lashing out at a photographer who approached him on a night out with Elizabeth. Adding to his sense of being followed, hounded, hunted was the fact that his villa had been broken into three times while he was undergoing treatment in Bad Brückenau.
Armstrong had wanted Ullrich to go next to a detox facility in Colorado, near Armstrong’s Aspen home, but, finally, midway through October, Ullrich put his fate in the hands of another individual referred to in the German press only by his initials – who also forcefully requested not to be named in this book. The man was once a cyclist himself, but had since plotted a mazy, enigmatic career path on the fringes of the showbusiness world, often posing in photographs taken in exotic locations beside sports stars and world leaders. Now he was accompanying Ullrich from Germany to Miami – though not before Ullrich had allegedly attacked a waiter in Hamburg airport as he prepared to board his flight. The waiter had reported the alleged assault to police, who announced that they had started an investigation. Another friend of Ullrich’s who had been with him at the time of the incident said that he had simply tried to give the waiter an exuberant hug.
On the flight itself, via London Heathrow, Ullrich had taken selfies with the crew and been recognized by fellow passengers. ‘Stay strong! You can do it!’ one American gentleman told him, clasping his hand around Ullrich’s as they boarded. Ullrich smiled and nodded without making eye contact.
A few hours later he was checking into one of the most exclusive hotels in Miami, the Philippe Starck-designed Delano, ready for the start of his therapy the following day.
Jan Ullrich would not be pictured in public again for three more years.