2
‘He was obsessed, just frighteningly ambitious’
—Peter Sager
The greatest road cyclist that Germany has ever seen was a mistake, the result of a miscalculation not unlike the ones of which he would be accused in adulthood.
Or, rather, to put it more delicately and in terms Ullrich himself has employed, it was a ‘happy accident’ when his mother fell pregnant in the spring of 1973.2 Marianne Ullrich (née Kaatz) had given birth to her first child, a baby boy named Stefan, a couple of years earlier. Both Stefan and Jan would grow up to somewhat resemble their father, Werner – Stefan with the same broad frame and brown hair, Jan inheriting his dad’s downturned hazel eyes, while his finer, neatly pointed nose came from his mother. Werner had once also been a promising sportsman, cherry-picked by a forerunner of the ESA (Einheitlichen Sichtungs und Auswahlsystem) talent-identification programme that would one day reveal Stefan’s aptitude for running, though not, as we’ll discover, Jan’s for cycling. Werner had chosen short-track speed-skating – or rather short-track speed-skating had been chosen for him. He won back-to-back junior East German championships in 1967 and 1968, and the following year was accepted into one of Berlin’s residential sports clubs, the Berliner Turn-Sport-Club, or TSC. There he found the competition more intense and success harder to come by. He raced for the last time in February 1969 and soon thereafter returned to Rostock and a job in a cement works.
Marianne Kaatz had no notable sporting pedigree, though excelled in aspects of life that Werner, patently, would find beyond him in fatherhood and adulthood. Perhaps that partly explained the attraction – Werner felt that Marianne could somehow complete or correct him. Not that it was hard to succumb to her charm, as many guests did on a nightly basis in the village inn, the Gasthof, in Biestow, as she sped around the dining room distributing the local Rostocker Helles in giant glass tankards, plates of Mecklenburger rib roast and smiles. She was still a teenager when they met and, not long later, they were exchanging vows. Stefan was born soon afterwards. By this point Marianne already knew that she had married neither a model husband nor a model father. He drank – lots – and also occasionally turned violent. For men with such tendencies, army life can be a salvation, or a place for unpleasant traits to incubate. For his compulsory military service, Werner was stationed in Rostock – a blessing given that Marianne and the new-born Stefan were living with Marianne’s parents in Biestow, just a few kilometres away. But even when he was on leave, Werner’s visits to the cramped, two-bedroom, five-mark-a-month* cottage were unpredictable both in timing and for his mood. Marianne certainly hadn’t banked on them adding to their ‘family’ when he suddenly reappeared in February 1973; but women in the DDR were advised to take a break from the contraceptive pill every two years and, well, the timing and destiny somehow conspired. Not quite nine months later, snow had come early to Germany’s far north, and Jan Ullrich’s arrival on the first Sunday of December also caught his parents somewhat by surprise. They would be rushed to hospital by Norbert Makowski, a neighbour, Marianne’s parents Fritz and Ingeborg having taken the family car to the Christmas market in Rostock. A couple of hours later, at 7.15 p.m., Marianne Kaatz finally laid eyes on her second child – an eight-pound boy with a thick moquette of black hair. She would call him Jan.
The struggles of the ensuing years, Ullrich’s ‘difficult childhood’, have become a tired and misleading trope even among German journalists, with popular generalizations about Rostock accounting for at least some of the inaccuracies. No one would dispute that there are richer, more elegant and less troubled German cities on both sides of the former divide. For many Germans, Rostock remains indissociable from one of the grimmest events in their post-reunification history – three days in August 1992 when a huge mob of neo-Nazis and other thugs laid siege to a dilapidated tower block housing hundreds of asylum seekers, pelting them, the building and the police with petrol bombs and stones. Even more shocking than the attack was that thousands of ‘normal’ Rostockers gathered to watch and in some cases applaud. An image of Rostock as the nation’s cradle of right-wing extremism and thuggery solidified, and unfortunately is still periodically reinforced. One Saturday in October 2015, I am in town to seek out some of the key people and places in Jan Ullrich’s early life story, while hundreds of others – only a few of them resembling a long-established, shaven-headed white supremacist identikit – are here for something else: the first major demonstration organized by the emerging right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party against the German government’s open migration policy. ‘We are the people!’ they shout – a suddenly fashionable bastardization of a famous motto from the 1989 Peaceful Revolution. ‘Nazis raus!’ a crowd of counter-protesters chorus back.
This depressing first impression notwithstanding, anyone who approaches Rostock for the first time expecting to find a grey, destitute Baltic Sea outpost of doom will be surprised. The city in fact has a proud maritime-mercantile past, its admission to the Hanseatic League in 1251 heralding an age of prosperity that lasted several centuries. It is also the home to the oldest university in Northern Europe and, unlike bigger East German cities, largely escaped Allied bombardment during the Second World War.
Even on a wet autumn morning, the lattice of pedestrianized streets that knits together the Stadtmitte offers a view of urban civility borrowed straight from a town planner’s sketchbook – one of sterile yet orderly, understated prosperity. I drive out through the suburbs and see linden trees brushing the thatched roofs of cute bungalows or the windows of brightly painted mansions. In Lütten Klein, the vast phalanx of high-rises and concrete blocks that would become home for the Ullrichs in the mid-1980s, geraniums spill from balconies above cobbled streets lined with family saloons. If just over 12 per cent of Lütten Klein residents are currently unemployed, and the national average is half that, the district wears its problems under a brave disguise.
Appearances and reality were perhaps similarly at odds in the first years of Jan Ullrich’s life. Or, rather, it seems that there were two distinct shades to Ullrich’s world – the light personified and radiated by Marianne and her parents Fritz and Ingeborg, and the darkness cast by the shadow of Werner’s worst side. Marianne had studied botany at a local college before Jan’s arrival, and the young mother’s days remained long and exhausting, beginning with a five a.m. alarm call, followed by a two-kilometre walk to Stefan’s kindergarten, then lectures and tutorials and, finally, evening shifts at the Gasthof in Biestow. Monday to Friday. From January to December. Jan’s arrival meant more sacrifices, not least because Werner remained a fitful presence, but Jan’s later recollections were overwhelmingly happy ones – of nature walks and fishing trips with his granddad Fritz, of Ingeborg’s baking, and how ‘wonderful’ it was to all be under one roof. As he said, ‘Who, after all, doesn’t like getting spoiled by their grandparents?’
They moved two or three kilometres south from Biestow when, having obtained her diploma, Marianne was taken on by the Papendorf agricultural cooperative, which also offered the family lodgings. Here, too, today, there is much that punctures the lie of Ullrich’s joyless Eastern Bloc childhood. The village nestles to the south of Rostock, a tranquil isle amid lapping waves of green meadows. The drab, stereotypically East German apartment block where the Ullrichs lived is not hard to find; the three-storey breeze-block oblong is comfortably the ugliest building in the village, but only because the rest of Papendorf is so easy on the eye. Paint an Alpine peak on the skyline and we could be in Switzerland. Prime position in the village, on a hilltop directly above the Ullrichs’ old apartment, is occupied by the house that Jan had built for his mother in 2003.
The home in which Jan Ullrich spent years five to thirteen was more modest, though amply suited to the lifestyle of a pre-teen and the older brother who combined the roles of partner in adventure and misadventure, idol and protector. Another sibling, Thomas, was born when Jan was four, Marianne and Werner’s third child. From the window of their shared bedroom on the third floor, Jan and Stefan could look out over the communal garden and garages where they spent their happiest hours. A strip of gravel running parallel to the lawn was also where Jan rode a bicycle for the first time. He was five and a half – some fifteen years younger than the hallowed two-wheeler, a gearless kid’s bike belonging to Stefan. Jan clung grimly to the handlebars while Werner gripped the back of the saddle and pushed his son forward. ‘You’re riding, you’re riding!’ Werner cried. Jan looked back, perhaps hoping to see the pride in his father’s eyes . . . but instead crashed into a dustbin.
Ullrich noted later that it was one of his final experiences with his father – a sort of tragicomic metaphor, with a significant postscript.
Werner Ullrich stayed around just long enough, a few more months, to leave his son with another indelible souvenir – a scar just above the hairline, inflicted when Jan was six for some unspecified sleight or misdemeanour. In later years, the mark would still be visible when Jan cropped his hair short. Stefan had suffered worse and more frequent beatings, often when he was trying to protect Marianne. She would later explain to her sons that it had been ‘a relief’ when Werner finally agreed to move out of Papendorf, out of their life, and into a new house a few kilometres away. She told the journalist Andreas Burkert in 2003, ‘We all suffered at his hands’, without wishing to go into specifics. For a few months, Werner still sometimes came for the kids at weekends. The first Christmas, he left presents outside the front door. He was evidently given to selective acts of kindness or contrition. Like the time, just after Jan’s fourth birthday, when he cross-country skied into Rostock on New Year’s Eve and returned with an armful of fireworks for them to ring in 1978 in style. Soon, though, it had been so long since his last visit that Jan assumed they would never see him again – and was almost right.
Many years later, Jan Ullrich would say that he never missed having a father because he never truly felt as though he had one. He retained only a collection of hazy memories – and even they had to be suppressed or redacted. ‘I wanted to have fond memories of my dad. Later I perhaps blocked out the fact that he drank too much, lost control – including of himself – and that he could be brutal with us as well as with our mother . . . I’m still amazed at how undramatic it seemed to me that our father had completely disappeared from our lives.’
Who knows, the heartache may have been greater had Werner’s place not soon been taken by other men – part guardians, part role models.
Fritz, his granddad, was the first. Soon there would be another.
There is a little-known or acknowledged fact about Jan Ullrich and cycling that brings a sentimental smile to the face of his first ever coach, Peter Sager, even today.
‘Had our paths not crossed,’ Sager says, ‘he would have been a runner. It was pure chance that he ended up being a cyclist.’
Such happenstance was not supposed to factor in the German Democratic Republic’s grand sporting design. Sager still extols the merits of, almost pines for, the ESA talent-identification system that had been rolled out in 1973, the year of Ullrich’s birth, and accelerated the DDR’s land grab in international sporting competitions. West Germany had first recognized the DDR as an independent state in 1972, and that year’s Olympics, in Munich no less, gave new impetus to the DDR’s propagandist ambitions through sport. In Munich, competing for the first time under their own flag, they trounced and embarrassed the Klassenfeind, or ‘class enemy’, amassing sixty-six medals to West Germany’s forty. The introduction the following year of the ESA was designed to widen the gulf, in parallel to an escalation in what became the world’s most infamous state doping programme.
In September 1980, Jan Ullrich was one of nearly 300,000 East German six- and seven-year-olds walking through the gates of a primary school for the first time. At some point over the next year, most but not all of that number would be put through the first phase of ESA screening – height and weight measurements and coordination tests designed to root out candidates for success in gymnastics and swimming, the two Olympic sports in which teenagers regularly contended for medals.
Ullrich, the smallest in his class, had wriggled through a hole in that particular net. At some point in their third school year, most DDR children were submitted to the next phase of trials – a more rigorous battery of tests including a one-kilometre time trial on a closed road for which the qualifying time was two minutes. But in Ullrich’s case, Peter Sager had got there first. Not thanks to some visionary protocol developed by DDR boffins but, as Sager tells me now, ‘purely by fluke’.
‘We had a winter cross-country running race coming up and, as a coach, you obviously have a certain amount of ambition and you want to win. But I had no one in the nine-year-olds’ race, so I asked around, “Has anyone got a brother or a relative of some sort they could bring along?” Then Jan’s older brother, Stefan, pipes up that he’s got a brother. The race was on the Sunday in what we called the “new town” in Rostock. Jan was nine, had no training and won not only in his category but also the year above. It was a eureka moment for me. I told myself I had to coach this kid. Two or three weeks later, I’d got a bike ready for him and I took it to his house. “From today,” I said, “you’re a member of Dynamo Rostock West.” That was the start of it all. From age nine to fifteen, I suppose he got the whole ABC of cycling from me.’
Sager is reminiscing in the front room of his house, a two-floor apartment reflecting the character of its humble, methodical owner on a quiet street a few blocks south of Rostock’s town centre. Now in his seventies, he has the neighbourly air of a village carpenter or hardware-man, his round face bordered by two last strips of hair, his soft eyes the window into a kindly soul. His wife, Carola, brings us coffee and biscuits. For years, Jan Ullrich was one of the family here, often staying the night before races. To Carola and her husband, the received wisdom about Ullrich’s ‘difficult childhood’ could sound like a personal affront. Carola maintains it is simply inaccurate. ‘All of these stories about him growing up in poverty . . . it’s nonsense. TV crews would come and film the worst parts of Rostock, then show Jan standing on the top step of the podium. They’d say, “Jan Ullrich went from this to this”, as though it was some kind of rags to riches tale.’
Peter Sager’s route into cycling had itself been a mazy journey made of chance encounters and blind turns. Born and raised in Wismar, a Rostock in miniature 50 kilometres west down the same Baltic Sea coastline towards Hamburg, Sager’s first bike races were against the school bus taking his classmates to lessons in nearby Bobitz. He later trained as a shipbuilder before enrolling in the army. There he had to give up cycling due to heart problems but substituted it with judo, quickly becoming the champion of his battalion. As Sager says, though, ‘the passion for cycling never went away’. He would eventually quit judo due to problems making his fighting weight, and attempt to rekindle his old love by buying a bike. He began coaching in Wismar, then moved to Rostock, where he joined the police. The motherlode of elite sport in the DDR, the Dynamo association existed under the aegis of the civilian police and the notorious Stasi, whose chief, Erich Mielke, was also Dynamo’s president. In Rostock, having been urged to complete his formal training as a coach, Peter Sager would soon be one of the men responsible for finding and nurturing the young cyclists capable of graduating first to Dynamo’s main star academy in Berlin – and later to glory for the DDR on the world stage.
Like his older brother Stefan, little Jan Ullrich could clearly run, but that was no guarantee of a glittering future on two wheels. Sager also didn’t know at this point that he and Ullrich had something in common: aboard their bikes, Stefan and Jan had for months been racing their school bus to and from Grosse-Stove, just as Sager had between Bobitz and Wismar decades earlier.
‘At the beginning, finding the talent is much more important than training it,’ Sager notes now. ‘As a coach I always tried to look for kids who had those fast-twitch muscle fibres, which you’re born with or you’re not. You can train endurance, but that speed is in the genes.’ In 1986, Sager persuaded the city council to convert what was initially supposed to be a training facility for speed skaters on the west edge of Rostock into a 250-metre concrete bike track that would soon become the coach’s lab, his factory, his canvas. ‘Track work became the cornerstone of everything, and speed work in particular. It stands the slower kids in good stead and the ones with faster muscle fibres get even quicker.’
On 8 April 1984, under Sager’s protective gaze, Jan Ullrich would take part in his first ever bicycle race. The venue was the Stephan-Jantzen-Ring in the Schmarl district of Rostock – a tarmac halo around a huge encampment of prefab concrete tower blocks that still stand today. The distance was 8.4 kilometres, or seven laps of the ‘Ring’. The winner was Jan Ullrich.
Like other facets of the DDR sports system, how ‘Nachwuchsportler’ or ‘development athletes’ were coached – and how much – has long been a source of fascination in the West. At age eleven, in his second season with Sager, Ullrich trained three times a week and raced at weekends, clocking up around 2,500 kilometres over the year. A favourite road ride took them south-west to Satow, over one of the few, unimposing hills in the region. The mileage increased considerably in Ullrich’s third year with Sager and, by his final season at Dynamo Rostock, the near-daily road rides had lengthened from 30 to 70 kilometres and Ullrich’s annual distance to well over 5,000 kilometres.
At the time, Dynamo Rostock West was one of around 1,500 designated training centres accommodating over 60,000 aspiring DDR athletes across all sports, at the base layer of the DDR sporting pyramid. Ullrich’s training group numbered twelve in the first year, eight in the second and four in the third and final year. After that, for Peter Sager to have fulfilled his mandate, at least one of his riders would have to qualify or, as the DDR functionaries termed it, be ‘delegated’ to Dynamo Berlin’s residential Kinder und Jugendsportschule (KJS), or academy. Sager insists that Dynamo’s affiliation with the police and, by extension, the Stasi never posed any problems. ‘I only ever had issues if I didn’t get anybody delegated . . .’
With both Ullrich and a fellow scourge of Rostock junior races, André Korff, in Sager’s class of 1984, he had no cause for concern. ‘Jan was obsessed, frighteningly ambitious,’ Sager says. He remembers pleading with Marianne to let Jan train when, once, as punishment for not doing his homework, she had barred him from riding his bike; Jan trampled up and down their linoleum kitchen floor in Stefan’s running spikes in protest, compounding the original sin. ‘He was a simple lad, who of course got up to mischief now and again,’ Sager says. ‘Sometimes you had to raise your voice. But when it came to cycling he never messed around. At school, yes – he might have skived off once or twice, not paid attention or tried to cheat in a test. That all comes with the territory. He wasn’t a model pupil, wasn’t especially sweet or kind. He messed around as much as any other kid. But that’s also where you come into your own as a coach – keeping him on the straight and narrow.’
Sager says that Ullrich’s competitive fire positively smouldered – whether he was riding a bike, kicking a football or doing press-ups in the gym. Initially around two thirds of his training was general athletic and gymnastic work – a cornerstone of the East German method but even more fundamental to Sager’s curriculum, ‘whether it was pull-ups, standing long jumps, jumping over obstacles or running through a metre of snow from the track to the New Town’. Sager had coached many kids who had graduated to Dynamo Berlin and gone on to compete nationally and internationally, but few had – as he puts it – ‘been given so much by Mother Nature’.
The story sounds almost quaint, artless in Sager’s anecdotal retelling, but of course the world would one day gasp in amazement and in some cases horror at what the eggheads of DDR sport had been hiding behind the Iron Curtain. There was a doping system of monstrous proportions, but also a breathtaking panoply of high-tech devices developed by the Research Institute for Physical Culture and Sport in Leipzig. They included the famous swimming flume invented in 1971 – a form of underwater treadmill for swimmers used by serial Olympic champions like Kornelia Ender and Barbara Krause. But the view lower down, among the grassroots of DDR sport, wasn’t quite so impressive, particularly as the economy and with it an entire ideology creaked towards its eventual collapse in the mid-1980s. The Politburo’s neglect of mass-participation sport had been a long-standing source of discontent stretching right back to the late 1950s, but increasingly every strata of DDR sport beneath the potentially medal-winning elite started to feel the squeeze. Peter Sager’s office was located in an old coal cellar underneath Rostock’s ice-hockey stadium, and in the adjoining room Sager had created the decidedly lo-fi ‘sweatshop’ where Ullrich, Korff and their Dynamo clubmates thrashed away on ergometers in winter. Sager had built the machines himself using dynamos rescued from a clapped-out old bus. Outside, on the track, while wrist-mounted heart-rate monitors were becoming all the rage, Sager simply placed his thumb on the inside of his rider’s forearm, took a six-second pulse and multiplied by ten. By 1988, the DDR’s sports ministry would be estimating that 30,000 racing bikes were needed to satisfy national demand, yet failing to ensure even a third of that rolled off production lines.
Of course, no one and nothing, not even a regime as determined to weaponize sporting success as the DDR, could buy the class Sager saw when Ullrich went to work in the saddle. ‘It’s just great when you see someone who looks at one with the bike like that,’ Sager purrs. ‘Some of them hang off the bike like a limp dishcloth. I also attached a lot of importance to aesthetics, which is basically the same as efficiency on the bike. I’d be following them in the car five days a week, just watching them from behind, barking instructions, or just adjustments, over a megaphone. If they start with bad habits when they’re kids, you’ll never get it out of them.’
By the end of 1986, Jan had turned thirteen and the Ullrichs had moved from Papendorf back to Rostock – into one of the 10,000 apartments that made up one of the DDR’s largest high-rise housing developments, Lütten Klein. The views from their window were no longer of lush meadows rippling towards the North Sea but the dreary folds of a grey cityscape. There was at least more space in the flat for Jan and his younger brother Thomas, with Stefan now having been ‘delegated’ to Dynamo Berlin’s athletics club. The Ullrichs were also climbing the social ladder, as much as that was possible under the DDR’s conception of communism; Marianne’s new job with the city council had brought her salary into line with the national average at the time – 1,100 marks a month.
Peace Race route maps ripped from Junge Welt and the Neue Berliner Illustrierte now hung on the wall in Jan’s bedroom. Created in 1948 to help smooth relations between the Central European constituents of the Soviet Bloc, the two-week tour of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the DDR had become the biggest annual sporting event west of the Elbe – the communists’ equivalent of the Tour de France, only with larger crowds and a keener sense of symbolism. Its stars – Uwe Raab, Uwe Ampler and the 1986 winner Olaf Ludwig – enjoyed God-like status in the DDR.
The first few months of 1987 would be vital for Ullrich’s hopes of one day emulating those heroes. In the spring, he and André Korff were to face their judgement day – the trials to determine which young cyclists would be ‘delegated’ to a residential KJS, in their case, if selected, Dynamo Berlin. They had caused a sensation a few months earlier by leading Dynamo Rostock West to victory in the district championship four-man team time trial, then entering the under-17s event on a whim and finishing third. Peter Sager shows me a photograph of an even prouder moment from Ullrich’s final months at Dynamo Rostock West; in it, we see three rows of young boys in identical cycling kit, interrupted only by a quartet in white jerseys adorned with the black, red and gold flag of East Germany and, printed on their chest, the year ‘1987’. Sager notes that Ullrich, Korff and their teammates Stefan Dassow and Jörg Papenfuß had just won the schoolboy 2,000-metre team pursuit national championship in Leipzig. Ullrich stands alongside the much taller Korff, looking distractedly to his left and towards Sager, whose smile in the picture resembles the one he wears now, the memory carrying him. ‘National champions,’ he says softly.
In order to secure their place in Berlin, Ullrich and Korff’s by then enviable collection of trophies, medals, records and admirers would not suffice. ‘Several factors came into play: first of all, sporting criteria; then medical; academic; and, back then, also political,’ Sager explains. He recalls having to submit a report vouching for the thirteen-year-old Korff’s ideological and political suitability, after family ties in the West had shown up in background checks. Dynamo officials would finally lower the red flag and allow Korff to take part in the trials, but, Sager concedes, ‘That was not a very nice aspect of the whole thing, although we didn’t fully realize it – it was just the way it was.’
The trials themselves consisted of a broad range of graded tests, many of them assessing general athletic and gymnastic, rather than cycling, performance. To help prepare his Dynamo Rostock West ensemble, in February Peter Sager had loaded his riders into his Barkas combi-van and headed to Wismar for a preparatory boot camp. Bike-riding was limited to track work or time on the rollers – and it was after one such session that Ullrich did something that will never feature in any almanac but has its own page in Peter Sager’s personal anthology. ‘They came off the rollers and I said, “Right, who can do a track stand?” Track stands are something every kid has to learn if he’s going to race on the track, but most of them just topple over. So, if they could do it, I gave them a bar of chocolate. And that was that; I went off to cook their dinner, then, a while later, one of the kids suddenly bursts in: “Herr Sager, Jan’s still standing . . .” It must have been half an hour. And he got a whole big box of chocolates for that. It was just that ability to handle the bike, which the examiners also looked at later in the KJS trials. And Jan hadn’t trained it at all; it was pure talent.’
In his 2004 autobiography, it should be noted, Ullrich offered a different version of the same events: he claimed the track stand had lasted for one hour, thirteen minutes.
No one disputed that the kid was born to ride, although that genetic predisposition nearly turned into too much of a good thing later that same spring. In a medical check-up shortly before KJS selection weekend, a doctor in Rostock had noticed what he believed was an irregularity in Ullrich’s heartbeat. Further tests were soon performed in Wismar by Gerd Dührkop, also doctor to then 400-metre world record holder Marita Koch. ‘It could all have ended there,’ says Sager. But Dührkop’s conclusion was that Ullrich simply had an unusually large heart and slow pulse – also two indicia of his exceptional aerobic abilities.3
Just how remarkable those gifts were became evident at the KJS trials in Berlin. Much like a decathlon, these consisted of multiple events, each of which had been assigned their own performance-based points scale. Scores were also weighted for relative physical development, with thirteen-year-old Ullrich attributed a ‘biological age’ of just eleven. The most gruelling and in some ways most revealing discipline, the 3,000-metre run, was saved until last – and here Ullrich stunned everyone. ‘The upper limit to score any points was thirteen minutes, thirty seconds,’ Peter Sager explains. ‘Well, I stood there with my clipboard and Jan was the only kid in the whole trials to run nine minutes something. You see that and it takes a while to process. He won the whole trial because of that run, was the best in the whole of East Germany. He didn’t win it because of the cycling, but because of the 3,000 metres. The athletics coaches saw it and said to me, “Are you stupid? The kid has to be a runner, not a cyclist.”’
Korff also made the cut, finishing third overall; Peter Sager’s Wunderkinder were heading to Berlin – or rather would be back there, permanently, from the start of the school term the following September. Sadly for Ullrich, his older brother was heading in the opposite direction, out of Dynamo and back to Rostock – because the ‘training conditions were better there’, according to Jan. Over the next couple of years, Stefan would collect multiple DDR national junior titles in middle-distance events, only for knee injuries to drag him abruptly from the DDR medal factory’s assembly line. Peter Sager believed cycling could have turned into a viable plan B, and was ready to make the older Ullrich his pet project in the autumn of 1989. ‘He’d come to watch some track training sessions and had a few goes himself. He was also pretty handy. I’d got a bike ready for him . . . and then the Berlin Wall came down. He got on a bus, went off to somewhere in Spain, met a girl and that was it for his athletic career.’
Sager shrugs. Anyone like him, who has been training kids for nearly half a century, has seen many more stories of unfulfilled potential than fairy tales. This applies even to the Ullrich family. ‘The youngest, Thomas, was the most talented of the lot. Crazy,’ he says. ‘But that’s just how it goes. Thomas got injured . . . and it’s in the head as well. As a coach you can have some influence, but ultimately it comes down to the athlete: “Do I take the right path or don’t I?” ’
Almost a decade to the day after Jan Ullrich’s last races in the wine-red colours of Dynamo Rostock West, Peter Sager would watch him ride onto the Champs-Élysées in Paris wearing the maillot jaune of Tour de France champion elect. At four the next morning, Ullrich was presenting Sager with the signed jersey that still hangs in Sager’s porch and falling into his first coach’s arms in a corridor of the Concorde-Lafayette hotel. ‘Oh yes, that was emotional, but I must say that with André it was even more intense,’ Sager says. André is André Greipel, the eleven-time Tour stage-winning sprinter who became Sager’s next alumnus excelsus, after Ullrich, and with whom Sager maintains an even closer relationship. That day in 1997, Sager joked to the German television commentator Herbert Watterott that it was only down to him that Ullrich had become a cyclist and not a runner. Similarly, Sager once had to plead with Greipel not to ditch cycling in favour of football.
Asked to account for how, in an East German port city with an average annual temperature of 8 degrees Celsius and no prior tradition of producing leading cyclists, Sager alone has either discovered or weaned eight who went on to compete in the Tour de France, including Ullrich, he responds with typical self-effacement. ‘As a coach, you can’t work like someone sitting behind a desk or a work bench. That just doesn’t fly . . . Some of what we did in the DDR was prescribed or dictated to us, and then we could put our own stamp on it. There was no better training programme than what we had in the DDR. I knew exactly how much speed work I needed to do, exactly how much endurance, how much I needed to do on skills and how much general athletics. The real art in the coaching was to get the message across. But as far as the programmes themselves went, there was nothing better. The training plans we followed are still being used in the UK, France, Italy and Australia.’
There is a recurring lament among former East German coaches, many of whom were ‘exported’ and enjoyed success all over the world after reunification. The DDR’s sporting miracle, the paradox of a nation of 17 million that amassed 519 Olympic medals between 1968 and 1988 while West Germany’s 60 million could muster only 253, is nowadays more often than not reduced to its bare chemical formulae, as though drugs were the system’s only ammunition. This narrative ignores the extent to which that apparatus relied on massive funding, a talent-identification programme of unprecedented scale, political indoctrination, material incentives and, to a certain extent, fear of Stasi surveillance and reprisals. And also, in many cases, on scientific rigour, a canny eye and good coaching.
Peter Sager doesn’t need reminding, in late 2015, that the many dimensions of the Jan Ullrich story have been conflated in exactly the same way. For detractors, Ullrich too is now synonymous with only one thing; they have neither the time nor inclination to parse causes and effects, heroes and villains, what Ullrich learned in the East and developed in the West. For some, Ullrich even became a locus of prejudice against the East in general, like drugs in DDR sport. As Mike Dennis and Jonathan Grix observe in Sport Under Communism: ‘Post-unification condemnation of drug abuse as an intrinsic part of a dehumanizing and exploitative sports system, while not unjustified, is frequently turned into a stick with which to beat and demonize the DDR socio-political system as a whole.’4
The topic is an understandably bitter one for Peter Sager. How can it not be, when, as he says, ‘the kids spent more time with me than they spent at home’? ‘We were always away somewhere: five times a week then races at the weekend, when they also slept at my house or at one of my relatives’ places.
‘You can only really say with hindsight that things happened [in the DDR] that weren’t exactly above board,’ he goes on. ‘Personally I didn’t even know what doping was. In the junior categories there simply wasn’t any of that. Or I knew nothing about it. I only read about it later – in books about Hamilton or Armstrong. Then suddenly the blindfold fell from my eyes. I just didn’t think it was possible. Just crazy, what happened with Jan’s generation . . .’
Sager’s voice fades to a whisper, his gaze drifts to the middle of the room. He belongs to a generation of East Germans who have become accustomed to second-guessing memories they made in a land reduced to a caricature – a ‘museum country’ of quirky artefacts, brown furniture, bad weather and evil government. For the last three decades these once ordinary folk have been asked to rewrite or at least re-edit whole life stories, while knowing that no amount of conscious revisionism can alter certain realities – truths then and truths now.
For Peter Sager, one such keystone is that many years ago he ‘discovered’ a cyclist named Jan Ullrich.
Or, as he says now, ‘The greatest I had – and there’s no one else in the frame.’