The journey from Freiburg’s main train station to Merdingen can be easily split into three parts, each of them no more than five kilometres or a few minutes by car: the first, a Queen’s Gambit through the chessboard of the city’s outer fringes, between glistening office blocks a few hundred metres in distance but centuries in architectural style from the half-timbered splendour of the Altstadt; the second, flat and straight westward, skirting the vast wooded expanse of the Freiburger Rieselfeld; and the third and last stretch, beginning in pretty little Opfingen, into a dreamy mini-verse of gently rolling hills dotted with vines and farmhouses bedecked with geraniums, and foregrounded by the larger outlines of the Black Forest’s mountains.
Finally, a church spire appears, the whole village unfurls in the valley floor and the road dips to meet it. Jan Ullrich’s first address in Merdingen was a little further down the same main street, just beyond the town hall, in a large gabled house belonging to Gaby Weis’s parents. He later had a new property built a few blocks away before moving to Switzerland in late 2002. And now, two decades on, for reasons that even many who know him can’t quite explain, Ullrich has returned to this oasis where he spent his most fruitful professional years.
The exact timing and motivation of Ullrich’s return here sometime late in 2018 may be shrouded in mystery but Merdingen’s appeal is there for all to see. The climate is the best in Germany and, sure enough, when I visit in the first week of March 2022, thatched roofs covered with solar panels sparkle like the edges of dazzling gemstones. ‘Sleepy’ seems an apt description – yet Merdingen has enough of a pulse not to feel isolated, dead or forgotten: three or four hairdressers; one cafe, a restaurant and a bakery; a large Rewe supermarket on the road that points towards the French border ten kilometres away; a variety of cars and houses that suggests the population nowadays is more white collar than brown overalls, despite the village’s ancient winemaking tradition; swarms of children of all ages that disgorge from school buses halfway through the afternoon. A place, in short, where one could comfortably hide, recharge, reset without cutting the cord – either to the life already lived or the one that lies ahead.
One thing that has remained a constant in Merdingen over several decades is the Gasthof Keller. Its owner, Erich Keller, is himself a kind of institution. He orchestrated Ullrich fever in the 1990s, creating the first fan club and organizing the annual coach trips to the Alps, Pyrenees and Champs-Élysées. Now in his early seventies, he looks back on those years through misty eyes, telling me bluntly, ‘They were the best times of my life.’
Certainly here, in March 2022, it must all seem terribly distant. Today at lunchtime the ‘Jan Ullrich Platz’ that doubles as a car park is deserted and the Gasthof’s rooms are all empty. Soon, groups will start to arrive – cycling clubs and junior teams drawn by the weather, the climbs and the pristine tarmac that once lured Jan Ullrich. But Erich doesn’t know how many more summers it’ll all last. Three years ago, he lost his beloved wife to a heart attack. Nowadays, tourists also want different things. English, for example, which Erich doesn’t speak. In fact, a friend who has interviewed Keller in recent weeks ‘warns’ that I may also find his Badisch dialect a struggle to understand. When I relay this, Erich cackles. He assures me he’ll try to speak ‘proper German’.
He says that Merdingen itself has also changed over the years. Once, to find a neighbour at any hour between dawn and dusk, the best place to look would be out in the vineyards. ‘Hardworking folk . . . politically normal folk,’ Erich says. He used to know everyone, or least it felt that way. ‘But more and more are moving in,’ he says, noting that the population now exceeds two thousand and would be much bigger if all of the planning applications were granted. He can understand them; Erich also says he never wants to leave. Even in March he can be skiing on the Feldberg in half an hour or on the Ballon d’Alsace in the French Vosges in forty minutes. And the cycling is paradise. Which is why, he reminds me, Ullrich came in the first place.
If there is an image, a memory that returns most vividly to his mind’s eye, it is of those early summer days when Ullrich’s focus would laser in on the Tour, and Erich would help to get him ready. Peter Becker’s arrival would usually signify that the operation was about to enter its commando phase. Sometimes, Becker would hold court with journalists in the Gasthof’s dining room – and Erich says with a chuckle that you could hear everything Becker said from the car park. At other times it was just Jan and Erich out in the hills, Jan aboard his Pinarello, Erich pacing him on a moped. Mornings in the mountains, then afternoons speeding down the Rhine from Breisach towards Basel, ‘because there’s not a single town and two junctions in sixty kilometres’. On that stretch, Ullrich would take a hand off his bars and signal to Erich to go faster, faster, until they hit 80 kph. ‘You get to that speed and you’re no longer talking about a human being; it’s a machine,’ Keller purrs.
Yes, those days may be long gone, but still Erich was delighted when, one day three years ago, he discovered that Jan was back and living in the village. In the two decades since he’d left he’d still been a regular visitor, mainly to see his daughter, Sarah Maria. Keller had also dropped in on Ullrich at his new ‘home’ in Switzerland. But as everyone dealt in their own way with the events of 2006 and their aftermath, so some relationships that had been knitted around Ullrich and his success survived while others frayed or broke. At times, like when a decision was made – Erich doesn’t remember precisely when or by whom – to take down the ‘Welcome to Merdingen: home of Jan Ullrich’ sign greeting road users arriving from Freiburg, he thought that maybe some people in Merdingen had lost their minds, or at least that they were overreacting. But then he could also see how personally they took the affront, how deeply they felt let down. Some of the most disappointed were members of the fan club.
Now he doesn’t see Ullrich every day or even every week in the village, but he seems to think his old friend is in good hands, and certainly in the right place to find himself again. Once Ullrich had Wolfgang Strohband, who sadly died in October 2021, to act as a filter, a buffer, a protector. That role has been taken by one of Ullrich’s first friends in Merdingen, a jovial, now forty-something ex-German motorcycle-racing champion named Mike Baldinger. Erich has known Baldinger for longer than he can remember. A few months ago Keller also met another of the pillars in the life Ullrich is rebuilding – his girlfriend Elizabeth, who eventually moved with him from Mallorca. Other locals who have met her are impressed that she is learning German. ‘A Cuban,’ Erich says thoughtfully. He thinks she seems perfectly nice.
In the past three years a lot else has certainly happened, both within Ullrich’s world and its wider orbit. Early in 2020, while almost total silence reigned about Ullrich’s location and health beyond that he was ‘in the Black Forest and doing better’, Rudy Pevenage published his own autobiography and revealed further lurid details about the Ullrich years – despite telling me in 2015 that he would never commit his memories to print. Pevenage invited old pals to a launch evening near his home – and Eufemiano Fuentes sent a typically chortling, roguish video message to congratulate his old chum ‘Rudicio’. The clip was projected on a screen and provoked gasps and laughter in the audience. Ullrich also sent a message, though Pevenage later admitted that Ullrich wasn’t exactly thrilled with the book’s revelations. Johan Bruyneel, too, was unimpressed with what he saw as Pevenage’s belated stab at self-justification. In a follow-up interview with the Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws, Pevenage claimed that T-Mobile were mere ‘amateurs’ in all matters doping compared to Armstrong and US Postal. He said that US Postal and the UCI conspired together to protect Armstrong, the sport’s golden goose, and that T-Mobile had ‘no other choice’ but to cheat. Bruyneel’s caustic retort on social media – ‘Rudy, it’s all Lance’s and my fault! WE made you do it . . . ’ – was widely echoed.
Pevenage’s case wasn’t helped when Fuentes appeared on camera again a few months later, this time on the Spanish interview series Lo de Évole. That cameo was also vintage Fuentes, artfully sprinkled with winks, boasts and scurrilous half-admissions about his work with footballers and tennis players. Also typical of Fuentes is that, within hours of the broadcast, Real Madrid were threatening to sue him.
The more things change, the more they stay the same – as much as perspectives on the calcified prehistory of lives already lived can shift and acquire texture. People themselves can also evolve. Another production, Marina Zenovich’s four-hour documentary for ESPN, LANCE, aired in the spring of 2020. It showed an Armstrong four years on from our game of golf early in 2015, four years more healed, four years more reconciled to the past, anchored in the present, arrowed towards his future. Which is not to say necessarily four years more redeemed or widely forgiven. ‘I needed a nuclear meltdown and I got it,’ he reflected at one point in the film. Perhaps most curious was how he was still taking the chance to take part in a process, even just in the conversation, unlike Ullrich. A few months later another feature-length documentary hit the screens, this time in Germany from the broadcaster NDR, its title Deutschland: (K)ein Sommermärchen, or Germany: (No) Summer Fairy Tale, its focus not a rehabilitation but a moment frozen in time: Ullrich’s Tour win in ’97. The talking heads included a few of the former teammates, gurus and critics interviewed for this book. ‘I don’t know how much anyone is still interested in hearing a Jan Ullrich confession,’ was the journalist Andreas Burkert’s closing thought – and indeed the whole film and its wistful indulgences seemed to sag with a distant, mostly unspoken but palpable regret. Images of Ullrich riding onto the Champs-Élysées were soundtracked by The National’s ‘Fake Empire’, a song about denying uncomfortable realities. In his seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how individuals who are traumatized ‘continue to organize their life as if the trauma were still going on – unchanged and immutable – as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.’ Not long ago this diagnosis applied to the German public and its cycling scene vis-à-vis Ullrich. Nowadays it seemed to apply more to Jan Ullrich vis-à-vis them.
Former teammates Rolf Aldag and Udo Bölts both featured in the film and as always could draw on whatever words they needed to contextualize personal narratives. But, as mere domestiques, they also had a lot less to lose by owning and now retelling their truths. I wonder whether Ullrich doesn’t feel about his career the way the author Maxim Leo feels about his youth in the DDR, as already discussed in Chapter 3. Just as East Germans don’t get to wax romantic about the mundane pleasures of ordinary childhoods, lest they be accused of Ostalgie, so Ullrich may never summon the energy or language to persuade his countrymen that it wasn’t all bad. To turn Leo’s example into metaphor, that it didn’t always rain in cycling in the 1990s. That drugs didn’t make the emotions any less real. That talent existed. That his lungs still burned, his legs stung. That, in spite of all those days when he was being criticized or didn’t want to train, it still felt like the time of his life and of theirs.
Ullrich couldn’t bring himself to be interviewed for this book, either. That is one of the reasons why I have travelled to Merdingen in the first week of March 2022 – the idea that, if I can’t have his voice, I can at least briefly frame myself in the context that he currently calls home. Parallel to this impulse is something that may also have been in the back of the NDR documentary-makers’ minds in 2020: a desire to unspool the tape, rewind this story back to the mid-1990s and its happy beginning while we wait, lust, pray for a sunnier postscript. The delusion that by leaning in, embodying the original story, we might cajole Ullrich to break his paralysis, somehow thaw his trauma response.
It would be a stretch to say that the same unconscious desire was what made Jan Ullrich return here in 2018. One of his oldest friends, Mike Baldinger,* certainly wasn’t aware of any such grand design. He mainly observed Ullrich’s 2018 demolition derby from afar – that is, from here in Merdingen, just a phone call away but out of the front line – until his phone rang at around five in the evening one Sunday in October 2018, after Ullrich’s detox in Miami. Baldinger stood surrounded by bricks and sacks of cement on a building site for the family’s construction company. He didn’t recognize the Spanish number but knew the voice at the other end. ‘I’m in Basel. I’m in a bit of a desperate situation. Can you come and get me?’
An hour or two later Ullrich was climbing into Baldinger’s car with only ‘two suitcases, a pair of sunglasses and a phone with no credit on it’. Baldinger instinctively set off towards Merdingen and only later asked Ullrich where he wanted to go. Ullrich replied that he had no idea. ‘So I just took him to my house. He ended up living with us for three weeks.’
Mike’s twin brother Frank had an apartment that could provide a longer-term solution, and soon, without having planned or even really thought about it, Ullrich was back living in Merdingen nearly two decades after he’d left. ‘He’d just come in here every day and smoke out of the window while I was working in the office next door,’ Baldinger remembers as we sit in a meeting room of the family construction firm. At this point there wasn’t so much a plan as hurdles to overcome, the damage of the previous months to repair. He had no driver’s licence. An investigation into a serious alleged crime hanging over him. Blocked credit cards. Debts. Shady individuals from the summer of mayhem still calling. A wife who wanted a divorce. Finally they retained a lawyer in Berlin, who helped to bring the case in Frankfurt to a speedy conclusion, with a sympathetic punishment: a 7,200-euro fine to go with what Ullrich paid the accuser privately in damages. Contact with his younger kids was restored. He was also now living around the corner from his eldest, Sarah Maria. Elizabeth had stuck around. He became less angry. His hands stopped shaking. He even stopped asking Baldinger to go to the supermarket to load up on cigarettes. As Baldinger says, ‘We could see that he was getting better and better, more confident. Slowly coming back to earth.’
But it was not, couldn’t possibly be, an overnight rebirth. Old traits hadn’t been erased. ‘If you put pressure on him, nothing works any more,’ Baldinger observes. He provides the example of his attempts to get Ullrich back on his bike early in January 2019, when every prompting from Baldinger would bring a new excuse. ‘First he couldn’t do it because he had back pain, so we went to the doctor. Then it was his ears. We got that looked at . . . Then his knee. Eventually, I said to him, “Look, for every ailment you say you’ve got, I’ll take you to another doctor or a physiotherapist until it’s sorted. I won’t leave you alone. Now I’m getting my dad’s e-bike out of the garage and you’re coming with me.” ’ One ride through Ullrich’s old, beloved vine-cloaked hills led to another, and it wasn’t long before the motor in Mike’s pedal axle was spluttering to keep up. ‘The speeds he can go at, after just a little bit of training . . . It’s brutal.’ It was all the more shocking for Baldinger having seen the state to which Ullrich had reduced himself a few months earlier. ‘Neither of us probably would have survived what he took and what he did to his body that summer in Spain . . .’ Mike says solemnly.
Ullrich’s organs had made a fast recovery. Even in 2018 a brain scan had reassured him that his excesses had caused no lasting damage. ‘When there’s nothing there in the first place, it can’t get broken,’ he joked at the time. But, in truth, his neural circuitry had always been a complex, tangled and sometimes contradictory web. There are still ticks that those who have known him for years can’t understand. Like how, says Mike, he can go incommunicado, off the grid for days, apparently desperate to be left alone, yet still think it necessary or advisable to spontaneously call Bild Zeitung and impart some piece of personal news or insight. Or how he has no radar for parasites or bad influences. His issues with loneliness. Why he doesn’t grasp that what he has survived says so much about his potential. And why he sometimes talks about his ‘demons’ and almost sounds as though he is romanticizing forces that have caused him immeasurable harm.
In Baldinger’s frequent sighs, there is more affection than anger, more optimism than fatalism. Nonetheless, he says that his friend has to play his part, that there are certain provisos to his support.
‘I’ve told him, if we offer you our help and you trample all over it, then we’re going to remove that help. I’m going to try to keep you on the straight and narrow just as long as you show that you want it, as long as you prove that you want to make something of your life. Recently I read an article or interview with Robbie Williams, and he was talking about being hooked on espresso and Red Bull and various other things. The click came for him when his wife or partner basically said that if he didn’t get therapy, she was leaving. She didn’t expect him to be able to go cold turkey but he had to show willing. That’s what I’ve told Jan. We’ll always be there for him but he has to give something back.’
The latest reminder that it may be a long process came just a few weeks before Mike and I meet in Merdingen. Initial reports spoke of a relapse triggered by a brief split from Elizabeth. Ullrich denied them to Bild: drugs and alcohol weren’t involved, he said, and he’d simply been unlucky to be struck by deep-vein thrombosis on a flight home from Cuba. What Ullrich did confirm was that he had somehow ended up in a hospital room in Cancún, Mexico, with Armstrong at his side. Only weeks earlier the old rivals had been enjoying a poignant reunion on a bike-touring trip in Mallorca that is one of Armstrong’s many recent ventures. They had posted pictures from their rides and even recorded a podcast. On it, Ullrich admitted that he had ‘nearly gone the way of Marco Pantani’ in 2018, while Armstrong wanted their listeners to realize that Ullrich’s was ‘one of the biggest comebacks in the world’. Everyone on the trip was indeed thrilled to see Jan looking so happy and healthy. Even if, to one or two, things looked almost to be going too well, given what had come before.
The Cuba and Cancún scare brought a reality check. A warning. Another reset. ‘There he sort of used up a credit,’ Mike says, shaking his head. ‘You’re someone who needs the fire brigade, yet you’re going about with a petrol can in your hand . . . He has to learn that’s not always going to end well, that people will turn away.’ More pep talks and home truths have been sent Ullrich’s way since. New therapists enlisted. A support network that includes Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel and Andreas Schmid, one of the doctors behind the Freiburg-Telekom doping conspiracy, reinforced. Mike knows there’ll be sneers. But for now the priority is Ullrich’s health, not his image.
Anyway, Baldinger would defy anyone to tell him that Armstrong hasn’t been a true friend over the last four years. He says that within hours of him calling, Armstrong was with Ullrich in Cancún. He’s also willing to entertain the idea that sprinkled in with the generosity there could be pinches of guilt. ‘I think there could be some of that, or at least a sense of responsibility. That’s just the feeling I get. I think Lance knows that Jan was more talented . . .’
Nowadays, in their post-career lives, Baldinger agrees, the comparison is even more withering than when they were riders. Armstrong has ‘an elephant’s skin – you could shoot him with a bazooka and not knock him over’. Whereas, personality-wise, Baldinger says his friend more closely resembles another rider: ‘Jan . . . vulnerable, can be thin-skinned, has addictive tendencies. More like Pantani . . .’
Pantani also became imprisoned in silence when accusatory fingers pointed in his direction in the late 1990s. The ‘challenges’ that Baldinger and I have discussed so far seem to exist in isolation from the vortex into which Ullrich disappeared in 2006. But as the conversation turns to the future, so we inevitably begin talking about conscience and the part that has also played. In short, Baldinger agrees that Ullrich’s inability to open up, to recognize that shame cannot survive the light, has at least compounded his turmoil over the last few years. Part of the paralysis initially came from his fear of implicating or hurting others, to which was added a long-standing phobia of explaining himself though the media. Plus, of course, the knowledge that, as Mike says, ‘Jan didn’t invent doping.’ But whatever the reasons, injustices and excuses, Baldinger is adamant that Ullrich needs to discharge his burden. And says that he will finally do so: a deal has been signed with a major film production company, and a multi-part series in which Ullrich reveals his whole truth will hopefully land on a major streaming service in the next few months. ‘For three or four months he didn’t want to [make the film], said that it would only cause more problems, then finally it became clear to him that maybe the solution to the problems he has is explaining how things were . . .’
Baldinger hopes the documentary will spell out and demystify several things. That a DDR sports system in which pre-pubescent teens learned to hang their whole identity on sporting success was not only dehumanizing but dangerous. That no product of that education, faced with the ‘dope or be doomed’ catch-22, could be expected to take the path of most resistance. That Telekom had their share of the glory but not of the ignominy. That now Ullrich wants one thing: ‘a normal life’. That, as Mike says, ‘he’s basically a lovely, lovely guy . . . and if he finds his way again, he’ll have come through an unbelievably hard time. I guess that’s what I’d like people to see. That cycling was a gift and a curse for him. He wouldn’t have earned those millions without it, but he’s had to endure a lot of pain because of it.’
Right now Baldinger says that he’s mainly concerned with ‘preparing Jan for the summer’. Meaning that, with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ullrich’s Tour win on the horizon, requests will flood in, strobe lights will shine. Indeed, they are already flickering in early March. A handful of reporters have turned up unannounced on Baldinger’s doorstep over the last few weeks; his mobile phone is under assault. His role as Ullrich’s guardian angel but also de facto spokesperson is further complicated by another paradox – that Ullrich wants to be left alone, but also recognized, re-integrated into the cycling firmament. Just last autumn, Jan got Mike to text a major figure at the Tour de France organizers ASO to request an invitation to the 2022 route presentation. Nothing came back – not even a message to explain why it was, well, awkward. But Ullrich went to Paris anyway; via Instagram, he had asked the reigning champion Tadej Pogačar to meet for a coffee. And Pogačar obliged.
It’s a similar story when Baldinger looks to the long term – at how they might solve the question posed by a German newspaper in 2013: what does Jan Ullrich intend to do with the rest of his life? In the summer of 2021, Mike, his namesake Dirk Baldinger and Ullrich unveiled at least part of a plan: a proposal to open a museum-cum-bike-cafe on land just a few paces from where we’re sitting in the Baldingers’ unit on the western edge of Merdingen. But faced with the mayor’s decidedly lukewarm reception, the Baldingers are now in discussions with other locations in the area. ‘The mayor was basically questioning whether there was any touristic value to it, saying stuff about Jan’s doping and whether it sent the right message to kids . . . I think about the life that Jan’s had, with all the highs and lows, which we also want to show. I think he’s earned it, and there’s so much interest – from collectors who would give us memorabilia to exhibit, to people who would want to visit. He’s had a hell of a story. There are world-famous footballers whose lives and experiences are nothing in comparison.’
While Baldinger and I have been speaking, the sun has dipped below the Kaiserstuhl and adjacent smaller hills, bathing the village in an icy, lilac twilight that floods in through the window. Soon it’ll be time for me to leave for a first assignment of the 2022 cycling season at Paris–Nice – and to get there, coincidentally, I’ll be making the same journey that Jan Ullrich was due to complete in July 2006, from Strasbourg to Paris.
As Mike and I prepare to exchange farewells, he apologizes again that Jan couldn’t be here to tell me the story of the last three years in his own words. Over the past month, he explains, he has tried to surround Ullrich with peace and serenity in the hope that will be reflected in his friend’s mental and emotional bearing. ‘It’s all been calm and under control over the last couple of weeks,’ he notes. Two or three times during our conversation, he has traced the wildly undulating trajectory of the last few years on the tabletop with his index finger. ‘These extreme highs and lows. This “all or nothing” credo that he’s also turned into a kind of motto. It has to stop . . .’
Before I head back to Freiburg to catch my train, he says there’s one last thing that he nearly forgot: he wants a picture of me, and him, to ‘send to Lance’.
Three days later, Mike sends a similar photo to my phone. In it, he wears the same fulsome smile, only now it is not me who stands to his left but, holding a thumb up to the camera, Jan Ullrich. A T-shirt hangs loosely from Ullrich’s shoulders, the whites of his eyes sparkle and his grin is broad. He looks significantly younger than his forty-eight years.
It is a picture, if not of happiness, then at least one of hope.
Acknowledgements
The process of researching and writing this book began an almost unfathomably long time ago – seven years of transition, abject loss of confidence, an equal amount of bloody-mindedness and also great patience on the part of those who continued to believe it was a worthwhile odyssey. But the real seed was planted even further back, on an afternoon in Tuscany in July 1997, when my dear, cycling-agnostic father and I sat in our holiday accommodation and watched Jan Ullrich provide the image immortalized on the cover of this book by winning in Andorra. Indeed, if this journey took me all across the world, using all of the skills demanded by such a daunting challenge, it is entirely thanks to the opportunities afforded to me by my parents, out of which a passion and stuttering career eventually grew. To them, I will never be able to fully express my gratitude.
Similarly, the continued support and love of my other immediate family, particularly in these difficult last two years, cannot be quantified or repaid in words. Nonetheless, to Maria, Rob, The Sheriff and Verón, I will say it again here: thank you.
Word by word, day by day, Katie Green constantly encouraged and consoled and witnessed what it eventually took to see the project through. Without her it may still have happened – she knows my stubbornness – but her love and forbearance have filled life away from the laptop with hope, silver linings, laughter and joy. Sweetheart, you have amazed me.
In Berlin, over several years, Kati Bohnet also saw doubts, total dejection, confusion and tears but remained the stoic, compassionate domestique and directrice extra-sportive that I needed, exactly when she was needed, for this book and beyond. Für alles, Kati, meinen allerherzlichsten Dank.
Dozens of friends and colleagues contributed in vital ways, with practical help, advice or inspiration. I would particularly like to thank Felix Mattis, Michael Ostermann and Fran Reyes for their assistance with some of my early interviews for the book. Rob Hatch, as well as being a supremely gifted commentator and much better friend than I deserved, also provided key input back when I was still trying to turn my Spitaliano into Spanish. Many others read passages, passed on contact details or cuttings, or obliged with other favours: Ali Izhar Ahmed, Federico Meda, Brian Nygaard, Jeremy Whittle, Simone Benevelli, Jan Pieter de Vlieger, Leon de Kort, Herbie Sykes, Julien Pinot, Ken Sommer, Andreas Schulz, Claire Bricogne, Herbie Sykes, Kenny Pryde, Mark Cavendish, Guy Vermeiren, Ciro Scognamiglio, Saehra Kübel-Heising, Gregor Brown, Luca Gialanella, Daniel Brickwedde, Ole Zeisler, Pete Nattrass, Peter Cossins, Morton Okbo, Lionel Birnie, Andy Hood, Whit Yost, Scott Leaky, Stephen Farrand, Sam Dansie, Hugo Coorevits and the staff at the Biblioteca Pública Municipal de Sóller.
The subjects discussed here were so sensitive – and the person at the centre of narrative so assailed yet also beloved – that it was often difficult to persuade interviewees to go on the record. Nonetheless, next to the many who declined for understandable reasons, the following recognized the value of putting their stories into words, in some cases over several hours or days: Andreas Burkert, Ángel Casero, Bjarne Riis, Bob Stapleton, Brian Holm, Chris Hauke, Christian Prudhomme, Christian Vande Velde, Christophe Bassons, Daniele Nardello, Dario Pieri, David Millar, Erich Keller, Falk Nier, Fausto Pinarello, Félix García Casas, Filippo Simeoni, Frankie Andreu, Giovanni Lombardi, Giuseppe Guerini, Greg LeMond, Hagen Boßdorf, Hajo Seppelt, Hartmut Scherzer, Jacques Hanegraaf, Jan Schaffrath, Jens Heppner, Jeroen Swart, Johan Bruyneel, John Sessa, John Wordin, Jörg Jaksche, Jürgen Kindervater, Jürgen Werner, Katrin Kanitz, Lance Armstrong, Letizia Paoli, Linus Gerdemann, Luigi Cecchini, Lutz Lehmann, Marcel Wüst, Mario Kummer, Mark Scheppert, Michael Ostermann, Michael Rasmussen, Mike Baldinger, Patrice Clerc, Peter Becker, Peter Sager, Rafa Honigstein, Raphael Schweda, Rolf Aldag, Ron Sommer, Rudy Pevenage, Sandro Donati, Sylvia Schenk, Thomas Dekker, Tyler Hamilton, Udo Sprenger, Walter Godefroot, Werner Franke, Wolfgang Strohband.
I must also thank Jan Ullrich, who, although preferring not to speak in an interview with me himself, gave his blessing for several important figures to add their perspectives.
Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the inhuman patience and faith of my first editor at Pan Macmillan, Robin Harvie, who has been succeeded by a similarly staunch ally in Matthew Cole. Also at Pan Macmillan, Samantha Fletcher and Lyndon Branfield were unfailingly helpful in the dying metres of this epic stage-race(!), as was copy-editor Fraser Crichton.
Nearly last on this roll-call but always the first to reassure – or, when absolutely strictly necessary, commiserate over a delicious meal or bottle of Gigondas – is my long-suffering agent David Luxton. Joking and negronis aside, David and his colleague Rebecca Winfield empathized with, defended and indulged me throughout, in a way that was deeply touching and hugely appreciated.
Whatever joy or relief accompanied the final days of this project was sadly curtailed by the sudden passing in March 2022 of my friend and colleague, Richard Moore. At one of my lower ebbs, Richard kindly read half-baked chapters and tried desperately to breathe conviction into what was by then an empty vessel. I wish I’d asked for more help, because he was always there if I did – as generous as he was talented, selfless and magnanimous even when he didn’t fully understand why I seemed to make such an elaborate, multi-course, taster menu meal of things. Most of all, Rich, I was looking forward to seeing you happy that I got there in the end, like the true mate you had always been.