4
‘I have a saying in my head: talents are often lazy’
—Wolfgang Strohband
From the moment Wolfgang Strohband opens the front door on a November morning in 2015, he personifies the hanseatische Art that journalists who dealt with him in Ullrich’s peak years have told me to expect – an air of straight-backed, old-fashioned propriety for which businessmen of the Hanseatic cities of northern Germany – Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen – have been well known and respected down the ages.
Everything in Strohband’s home – from the parquet floor to the brass ornaments and photo frames on every surface – sparkles even in the gloom cast through the windows by the downpour outside. Strohband has suggested we talk at the small, square table in the centre of his dining room. In a few minutes, his slight, pleasantly fastidious wife, Inge, will arrive with coffee in the Strohbands’ best china cups, and a plate of carefully arranged biscuits.
‘I never understood why every journalist used to call me “the used car salesman”. I was a BMW dealer, first and foremost. It used to drive my Inge crazy when she read that: “Ullrich’s manager, the second-hand car dealer . . .” ’
Wolfgang Strohband is smiling. He moves and speaks with a briskness and energy that bely his seventy-six years and does not seem like the kind to harbour grudges. Strohband also got used to being misunderstood and misrepresented, not to mention heavily criticized, in more than two decades of acting as Jan Ullrich’s manager, financial advisor, friend and surrogate parent. Of all of the cod diagnoses of Ullrich’s problems, maybe the most common was that he was ‘badly advised’. Strohband has heard it so many times that nowadays the slur barely grazes his ego. ‘They were good years. I also don’t think I did too badly, setting Jan up for the future,’ he surmises.
In many ways, the story of how Jan Ullrich came to Hamburg and to Strohband was a perfect post-Wende feel-good story – a tale of new opportunity, blessed happenstance and, yes, unification that until a few months earlier could not have come to pass. Strohband would be the latest in a curious lineage of paternal figures in the young Ullrich’s life: after his grandfather, then Peter Sager and Peter Becker, another protective male influence to fill the void that Werner Ullrich had left. Strohband had been a member of the RG Hamburg cycling club since the mid-1950s, a once promising junior rider who eventually made his way in the world by selling four-wheeled vehicles rather than racing upon two. At the beginning of the 1990s, he had taken it upon himself to arrange a special present for the club’s upcoming centenary: a team to compete in Germany’s premier domestic competition, the Bundesliga. Strohband had also already found a prestigious sponsor in Panasonic, the Japanese electronics manufacturer which a few years earlier had whimsically begun making bikes because the son of the president dreamed of becoming a racing cyclist.
Strohband had money, a team name and identity, and just needed to source his riders and, perhaps even more important, someone to train and manage them. By this point, a few months on from reunification, coaches from the old DDR sports clubs had become one of the former East’s few sought-after commodities, and Strohband coveted one for what he was planning in Hamburg. He made enquiries, was given some names, one of which was Peter Becker’s. The pair then met in July 1991 at the German national 100-kilometre time trial championships in Forst, close to the Polish border, where Strohband gave Becker his pitch: he already had four riders in Hamburg and he wanted six more from what remained of Dynamo Berlin’s juniors plus, if he was willing, Becker. Strohband would arrange a house on the outskirts of the city and apprenticeships similar to the ones his riders already had in Berlin. Becker only had to talk his wife into what turned out to be, in his words, four years of ‘interrupted weekend romance’. He also had to persuade his riders and their families. Five eventually signed up for the adventure – Becker’s son Erik, Michael Giebelmann, Ralf Grabsch, André Korff and Jan Ullrich. Early in January 1992, they travelled in a two-car convoy from Berlin towards a new home and future three hours away.
Only when they arrived in Hamburg did Wolfgang Strohband awkwardly reveal the first teething problem: the house, the team’s future HQ, wasn’t ready. Becker was unimpressed – and horrified when Strohband announced that, as a stopgap, they would be guests at a hotel belonging to one of Strohband’s old cycling buddies . . . located on the Reeperbahn. Unquestionably Hamburg’s most notorious street, probably Germany’s and perhaps also Europe’s, the Reeperbahn has long earned its nickname, ‘die sündigste Meile’ – ‘the most sinful mile’ – with its unrelenting commitment to neon-lit debauchery, mainly in the form of brothels and sex shops. ‘It was absolutely great for the boys, a bit embarrassing for me,’ Strohband chuckles.
Peter Becker, meanwhile, was more concerned that the idyllic training roads that Strohband had raved about seemed as inaccessible as the choked carriageways in and out of Berlin. ‘Getting through the city was an absolute catastrophe,’ Becker tells me.
He was similarly appalled by the dining options. They included McDonald’s – ‘that papier-mâché food, my God’ – and assorted other kebab houses and snack bars. Ullrich claimed in his autobiography years later that Becker introduced them to the local nightlife by organizing a visit to a strip bar. ‘That story was totally invented,’ Becker assures me. But he confirms that Ullrich did succumb to one vice – gambling. One day, while they waited for their takeaway pizzas at a regular haunt overlooking the Alster river, Ullrich fed a two-mark coin into one of the slot machines by the counter, and seconds later Becker heard a symphony of cascading coins. ‘The lucky bugger – 465 deutsche marks, he won.’ Ullrich gave Korff and Giebelmann 20 deutsche marks each while the rest was bundled into carrier bags and, sometime after that, into Ullrich’s savings account.
Becker’s boys were still officially homeless when, in mid-February, he drove them to the Costa Blanca for a training camp, having received assurances from Strohband that their new bolthole would be ready upon their return. It was – but only thanks to the round-the-clock efforts of the RG Hamburg members and their families. It was also taking Strohband longer than expected to organize the apprenticeships that were also part of his initial promise. Ullrich and Korff were shown around a BMW plant and offered positions there, only for the invitation to be withdrawn when Strohband and Peter Becker made it clear that their riders needed afternoons off to train. Finally, Strohband turned to another old cycling buddy and found them positions in a metalwork factory. Shifts started at seven in the morning and the work was not exactly varied. Ullrich described it later: ‘Just filing, filing, filing, all day long. I would rather have ridden 500 kilometres.’ What he called his ‘final attempt to learn a proper trade’ ended up lasting a few months, until the autumn of 1992. With their parents’ blessing, Ullrich and Korff convinced Wolfgang Strohband that metallurgy’s loss would be their team’s gain, and the pair finally became full-time cyclists.
‘I didn’t even know which kids Peter Becker was bringing to Hamburg. Had no idea who Korff or Ullrich were. Becker told me that Ullrich was the best, but Korff had the most talent,’ Strohband admits now. He, like others, was astonished by how quickly the Ossis settled into racing in their new environs. After a bruising debut in Hannover in March, ending with a furious pep talk from Peter Becker – ‘The others are making fun of us!’ – the victories soon began to multiply. On one weekend, Ullrich won a criterium near Hannover on the Friday, a race in the Harz mountains on the Saturday, then the Rund um den Kleinen Kiel on Sunday.
In general, in those first few months, Ullrich struck Strohband as a typical eighteen-year-old, as unremarkable off the bike as he was exceptional on it. ‘He would come back from training and you’d find his kit lying on the floor as though it had just fallen off him, and it’d still be there hours later.’ Ullrich occasionally wore an LA Kings baseball cap identical to the ones sported by the members of the controversial American hip-hop group N.W.A., but scarcely anything in his behaviour hinted at a rebellious streak, either explicit or suppressed. When not at the factory, or out on his bike, he would pass the time on Strohband’s forecourt, ‘just listening to the conversations I had with customers, how we sold the cars.’
What Strohband calls Ullrich’s ‘ambition with caveats’ was channelled almost exclusively through the pedal stroke that, at the end of that first season, thanks to a pair of podium finishes on the qualifying weekend, helped earn the team promotion to the Bundesliga’s first division.
‘He was ambitious up to a point,’ says Strohband. ‘I have a saying in my head: talents are often lazy. They have the abilities but don’t use them. For those kids everything was brand new. They were hungry for knowledge and were interested in everything. But Jan was someone who took the bike Giebelmann had prepared for him, sat on it, squeezed the brakes once and rode off. He didn’t really bother about a lot of other things. He knew plenty about how to ride a bike, but to say that he was someone who had order and control in his life would have been inaccurate . . . Maybe it was a question of comfort. He came from the dorm in Berlin and you have to assume that he had some degree of independence. But he also must have been quite comfortable. He was very often very lucky with a lot of things in his life – you’d have to say that.’
Wolfgang Strohband had been so delighted with the émigrés’ first season in the blue, yellow and red stripes of the Panasonic jerseys that he offered Ullrich, Korff and Grabsch interest-free credit on the purchase of three second-hand cars – in Ullrich’s case a VW Golf. Ullrich celebrated his nineteenth birthday on 2 December by taking his new wheels all the way from Hamburg to his mum’s house in Rostock. Shortly thereafter came the first driving misdemeanour in what would become quite a collection over the next twenty years – a speeding ticket that earned him a month-long ban.
Becker’s brigade would prepare for the 1993 season as their coach’s teams often had, on skis and snowshoes. From the pistes of the Austrian Alps they then headed to a training camp on the Costa Blanca. They would need to raise their game in the Bundesliga’s top tier and did so emphatically. Ullrich scored podium finishes in races in Gütersloh and Dortmund, then tied up the Bundesliga overall individual title on a scorching summer weekend in Rheinland-Pfalz wine country, hammering to victory nearly three minutes ahead of the chasing peloton in Rhodt.
It was in the German national team jersey, though, that his performances in 1993 most caught the eye. In July, at the Bohemia Tour in the Czech Republic, he dazzled on every terrain, winning the decisive final-day time trial and the overall classification, the mountains prize and the honour of most aggressive rider. Such a virtuoso display would ordinarily have guaranteed a place in the German team for the 1993 amateur world championships in Oslo – had the national coach, Peter Weibel, not already ruled Ullrich out on the grounds that he was too young. It was not the first time that Weibel and Peter Becker had disagreed, and, finally, after heated negotiations, Weibel told Becker that Ullrich could attend a pre-worlds altitude training camp in Colorado – so long as he could get himself a ticket and be at the airport in Frankfurt for noon the following day. One call from Wolfgang Strohband to his travel agent and the next afternoon Ullrich was on the plane. Within days of arriving in Colorado, shoo-ins for the worlds team like Dirk Baldinger and Uwe Peschel could barely hold his wheel. ‘If we’re not careful, the little kid’s gonna be world champion,’ one of them said as a joke one day.
On their return to Germany, they all started the Regio-Tour, a week-long stage-race hopping back and forth across the Swiss and French borders. Ullrich’s victory there banished whatever last doubts Weibel had about picking him for Norway – and yet within hours his selection was potentially placed in jeopardy by an event that Ullrich later described as the most upsetting of his young life. He had last seen his father flee at age seven and left home himself at thirteen, after which Jan had successfully anchored his identity to friends, teammates, a coach, two once-alien cities, Hamburg and Berlin, and above all to a sport which would soon become his job. But had anyone asked Jan Ullrich in 1993 to name his most powerful source of inspiration, the rock upon which he had built his sense of self, its past, present and future as a man and athlete, he would have had no hesitation in naming his maternal grandfather Fritz – who, he now learned, had suddenly passed away. Ullrich was shattered. At Weibel’s urging, he immediately returned to Rostock, where he would attend a funeral for the first time. That Weibel had also sent him away with the news that he was selected for Oslo brought little solace. Not even when Marianne told him through tears how proud his grandfather would have been to watch him in Norway.
Ullrich would indeed feel over the next few days that his granddad was somehow observing, protecting him, bending fate in his favour. On the night before the race, Weibel confirmed which of the ten riders in the German squad would make up the six-man starting line-up for the amateur race* – and Ullrich’s name was among them. Weibel also didn’t believe in ‘leaders’; Ullrich, like his teammates, would get his chance.
When it came to allocating room-mates in Norway, pairing Ullrich with Lutz Lehmann had been an obvious choice. Born in East Berlin in the early 1960s, Lehmann had been on a similar, DDR state-sponsored path to the one Ullrich would later tread before encountering a significant obstacle in the mid-1980s, when the Stasi discovered he had relatives in the West. Lehmann committed the mortal sin of requesting special permission for him and his then wife to join them. Not only was the application denied, Lehmann was thrown in jail in Berlin and could only ‘buy’ himself free a year later.
Nearly a decade on, he was the oldest member of the German team and therefore an ideal mentor to the pup of the litter. The pair had battled frequently and exchanged pleasantries in Bundesliga races, but in Colorado first, and then Norway, Lehmann had got to know a ‘funny, laidback kid’ who was also a ‘force of nature’ on the bike. Lehmann likes to tell the story of the Rund um Wiesbaden in March 1994, where he and Ullrich went wheel to wheel on the finishing straight but were both ultimately outsprinted by another rider, Jens Zemke. ‘We were there waiting for the presentation, chatting, and I was saying to the other guys that I’d lacked a bit of freshness because I’d had a heavy training week and done 800 kilometres. Jan replies to this, dead serious, by saying that he wasn’t on top of his game either because, well, he’d only ridden eighty kilometres. Eighty.’
Now, with the weather set fair, only on the last of ten laps of Oslo’s southern suburbs did a natural selection occur. After a vain breakaway bid by the Belgian Axel Merckx, son of Eddy, a group of five finally, definitively pulled away on the final ascent of the Ekeberg climb, with Ullrich among them. The Italian team leader, Alessandro Bertolini, was also there, as were the Latvians, Kaspars Ozers and Arvis Piziks, and a Czech whom Ullrich had recognized even without glancing at the race numbers scrawled on a piece of tape on his handlebar stem – Lubor Tesař, whom Ullrich had narrowly beaten at the Bohemia Tour a few weeks before the worlds.
Peter Becker and Wolfgang Strohband had travelled to Norway with a few friends and cycling connections in their own improvised Jan Ullrich fan club. At the airport in Hamburg, Strohband responded to his wife’s well wishes by joking that Ullrich winning was the last thing they needed, for ‘then Jan would get really expensive’ – Panasonic having not yet renewed their team sponsorship for the following year. Now, with the five escapees holding their lead, Strohband’s prophecy was in danger of being realized.
The quintet sped into the final kilometre, out of reach of the chasing pack. Ullrich assumed that Tesař, who had competed in the previous year’s Olympics on the track, would be the fastest finisher, and so stuck to his wheel. Which was where Ullrich stayed until, with 150 metres to go, Tesař surged and veered towards the barriers on the left side of the road, while Ullrich carried straight on into the open airspace. Seconds later he was raising his arms. Still three months shy of his twentieth birthday, he was the youngest world amateur champion since Eddy Merckx in 1964. Although riding for a unified Germany, Ullrich was also the sixth rider born and raised in the DDR to wear the rainbow jersey in the amateur category. The doyen of East German cycling, Täve Schur, had been the first in 1958.
Some of Ullrich’s antecedents had faded or fizzled after world amateur titles, but esteemed observers believed that in Oslo they had witnessed the birth of a star. At home, comparisons were made with the last German to truly excel in the Tour de France, Didi Thurau. Peter Weibel, the German team coach, countered that Ullrich was a better climber than Thurau and that he might one day finish in the top ten of a three-week tour. Weibel died in 2019, which makes Lutz Lehmann reluctant to criticize; nonetheless, he says, it jarred to hear Weibel rhapsodize about a rider whom a few weeks earlier he had not wanted to select.
If anyone was sheepish when the German team celebrated that evening, it was Ullrich. The party would eventually spill out of the team hotel and into the streets of central Oslo, but it was only when they returned to their hotel in the early hours that Ullrich seemed to be really savouring his achievement, as he announced to Lehmann in their room that he would sleep in the rainbow jersey. The next day the whole team flew back to Frankfurt – except Ullrich, who was due in Hamburg for a TV interview. They all caught only glimpses of the men’s professional road race ridden in desperate conditions, and won by a rider only two years Ullrich’s senior: the American Lance Armstrong.
Wolfgang Strohband spent what remained of the weekend discussing Ullrich’s future with, among others, the decorated former German rider, Rudi Altig, and Eddy Merckx. Altig was of the view that Ullrich should turn professional immediately. The manager of the Telekom team, Walter Godefroot, disagreed, telling Strohband that Ullrich should make the step up in 1995 . . . with Godefroot’s Telekom team. This was also the timetable that Peter Becker had proposed, Becker believing that Ullrich would benefit from a season of racing with a target – in the form of those rainbow stripes – on his back and chest.
Strohband also now expected the Panasonic name to again adorn Ullrich’s jersey in 1994. Upon his return to Germany, the electronics company appeared to reaffirm their commitment by inviting Strohband, Ullrich and Becker to a small celebration at the company offices. A twenty-minute highlight video of Ullrich’s world-title winning ride was beamed by an overhead projector. ‘When it ended, the head of advertising asked me what brand of bike Jan had ridden on. I couldn’t catch my breath,’ Strohband says. ‘They had no idea their own company was even making bikes.’
On 31 August, Strohband travelled to Berlin for another meeting with Panasonic. That evening Ullrich was also in Berlin, taking part in the City Night exhibition race on the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s most iconic boulevard and a byword for revelry and excess since the ‘Golden Twenties’ of the Weimar Republic.
All Jan Ullrich intended to do on the Ku’damm on the last night of August 1993 was race his bike. But, as he rolled towards the start line, he heard a voice calling his name. He turned, and it took him a second or two to place facial features he had not seen for over ten years, which had changed but not beyond recognition: his father’s. He rode over to the barrier and tentatively asked Werner Ullrich how he was, how he’d been. His dad didn’t reply but Ullrich could see tears starting to well. ‘Wow, Jan, it’s nice to see you,’ Werner said finally. The race was about to start, so Werner hurriedly scribbled his telephone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to his son. Ullrich shoved the note into his back pocket. ‘Good luck!’ his dad shouted as Ullrich rolled into the phalanx of riders waiting under the start banner.
Ullrich finally crossed the line a couple of hours later in third place. The heavens had opened and, by the end of its racing premiere, his rainbow jersey was drenched. The note in the back pocket was also reduced to soggy mush, the writing on it illegible. Ullrich had not given much thought to whether he would or would not call his dad. Now, anyway, the choice had been removed.
By his own later admission, Ullrich did not dwell unduly on the episode, and, over the ensuing days, weeks and months, the encounter seemed not to have affected or troubled him. Meanwhile, to Wolfgang Strohband’s bafflement, Panasonic confirmed that they were withdrawing their backing (Müsing bikes would replace them) while other offers for a piece of Ullrich flooded in. One agent approached Strohband claiming that the Italian professional team, Polti, would pay a huge sum if Ullrich turned pro with them in 1994. ‘The offer was so big that you thought you couldn’t stand in his way,’ Strohband says. In the end, though, he didn’t even discuss the option with Ullrich, feeling, like Peter Becker, that he needed another year racing as an amateur. ‘Jan riding abroad wouldn’t have worked,’ says Strohband now. ‘He had to be developed slowly, not thrown into a pressure cooker.’
Whatever pitfalls, triumphs and adversities lay ahead for Jan Ullrich, he was not the only ambitious young sports nut making his way in Hamburg in 1994. That year, a journalism undergraduate from the city’s university, Michael Ostermann, was doing a work placement with Die Welt newspaper when an editor asked for a volunteer to cover an event at which a local cycling team, RG Hamburg, was to present its new world champion. Ostermann duly went along, met Ullrich and filed the few lines that may or may not have made the paper the next day. Peter Becker was also in attendance and, Ostermann recalls, offered significantly better copy than the reticent main attraction. ‘Becker couldn’t have been more different from Ullrich,’ Ostermann says. ‘Peter was very outspoken and, well, let’s say Jan was very happy to let others do his talking . . .’
This first impression was confirmed on the handful of other occasions Ostermann was sent on the same beat in 1994. He remembers one particular trip to the thatch-roofed, red-brick house near the airport where Ullrich and his teammates had been billeted for two years as particularly revealing, not because Ullrich was a loquacious interviewee. ‘I can remember sitting there in the kitchen and really struggling to get him to talk,’ Ostermann remembers. ‘There was one question I asked him about a German amateur who had just crashed and been paralysed at the Baby Giro. He’d ended up in a wheelchair. This had happened right before the interview and Jan knew him from the national team. So I asked Jan how he felt about this and whether it would affect him in future. And the only thing Jan said was, “If you brake, you lose.” I probed a little more, and eventually he explained that, if he thought about it, he wouldn’t be able to race any more. But really he couldn’t articulate it properly, so ended up using this cliché that all German cyclists use: “Wer bremst, verliert.” It sounded insensitive but really it was typical of Jan when he’s feeling insecure. He would just lapse into clichés.’
Ostermann would be writing about Ullrich for years thereafter – and recognizing the same traits he had noticed on those first meetings in Hamburg. Ullrich was invariably friendly, often endearingly down to earth, yet neither articulate nor confident enough to embroider interviews with rhetorical flourishes. Other riders would address journalists on first-name terms, even when they were only vaguely acquainted, while in future Ullrich would see and speak to the same reporters dozens of times a year, every year, yet never step across that threshold of familiarity.
Peter Becker, a gifted or at least very willing communicator, came to feel with time that Ullrich’s shyness was something that plagued him. It also baffled Becker, until one day Ullrich’s mum told him a story. Once, when Jan was in kindergarten, she had given him the 20 marks they owed in fees to pass on to the teacher. ‘Only instead of doing that, he hummed and hawed until the teacher looked his way, then he shoved the 20 marks into the snow and ran away . . . And exactly that – not making himself go towards other people – restricts him,’ Becker says. ‘But it also means that, with his pretty limited vocabulary, he doesn’t come across well. Sometimes he has to put himself out there, though, and he feels awful doing it.’
In a country like Germany, and a city like Hamburg, there would be limited exposure for an amateur world champion cyclist, however eloquently he communicated. In one rare interview with a local paper, Ullrich even complained about a lack of recognition, that ‘this city only seems interested in football, tennis and golf’. Nevertheless, in Ullrich, the town patently had an adoptive son well on his way to joining the global elite. In 1994, for the second season running, he would top the individual standings in the year-long cycling Bundesliga, underlining his credentials as the strongest under-23 rider in the land. He might also have successfully defended his amateur world road race title in Sicily had it not been for questionable decisions in the German team car. Two days later, he competed in the first ever world time trial championship – effectively as an amateur racing against professionals. Chris Boardman ran out winner, but Ullrich possibly caused an even bigger sensation than in Oslo by taking the bronze medal.
As the season drew to an end, so too did Ullrich’s amateur career, and with it also his three years in Hamburg. He signed off in October with a final victory for Team Müsing in Frankfurt; within a few weeks he’d be heading down the Rhine Valley to a new home in the Black Forest. The pine-cloaked mountains surrounding Freiburg were laced with some of the best training roads in Germany and also blessed with the sunniest climate in the land, making the area a magnet for German pro riders and top amateurs. Ullrich had become a regular visitor thanks to his friendship with a local rider and his German national teammate, Dirk Baldinger, in whose home Ullrich would also spend his first few weeks in the south.
‘Baldes’ had beaten Ullrich to the German national amateur title in the summer of 1994 and, in November, a few weeks before Ullrich’s move, was holding a party to celebrate. At one point in the evening, Ullrich saw his friend sitting at a table, surrounded by predominantly female old schoolmates, and decided to join them. A bumbled introduction – specifically something about ‘all these pretty girls’ – barely cracked let alone broke the ice, except with one of the women, a tall brunette who smiled and complimented Ullrich on a ‘great first line’. She then invited him to take the seat next to her. Ullrich already knew that her name was Gaby and that she had gone to school with Baldinger. She told Jan that she’d seen him racing on TV, wearing a helmet that covered his hair. She was disappointed now to discover that the dark, flamboyant locks that she’d imagined were in real life rather shorter, less expansive and . . . a vivid shade of orange. Ullrich apologized. She said it didn’t matter. She giggled.
When, later, they each described that first encounter to friends, both would say that they had simply ‘clicked’. Ullrich was charmed by her peculiar south-western accent, with its flurries of ‘sh’ sounds and jovial, homely lilt. She seemed laidback, self-deprecating. Her parents owned a winery in nearby Merdingen, an idyllic cluster of half-timbered homes for 2,500 mostly lifelong inhabitants that in 1989 was voted Germany’s prettiest village. From there it was also a short drive to the army barracks where she worked in the admin department. That was lucky, Ullrich had told her, because over the next few weeks he’d be doing his compulsory military service in the special athletes’ division in nearby Todtnau. In no time they were agreeing to meet again, and, in fact, the very next afternoon Ullrich stood on the front step of the farmhouse where Gaby, her parents and grandparents lived, holding a bunch of flowers. They drove into the centre of Freiburg, drank hot chocolate, and talked for hours. That evening, when Ullrich dropped her off, they kissed under the stars and didn’t want to let go. Before he went to bed, Ullrich would be on the phone, telling her how he was going to exaggerate the symptoms of a cold so he’d be signed off sick the next day and could see her again. Which is exactly what he did.
Years later, to Bunte magazine’s probing about his taste in women, he replied that ‘of course’ Julia Roberts had a ‘dream body’ and Claudia Schiffer also ‘isn’t bad’. Gaby, though, would be his first true love. Hence, in December 1994, a mere month after their first meeting, he asked and then begged her to spend Christmas in Rostock with him and his mum. Finally, she agreed, and they set off on a nostalgia tour of the cities that had moulded him – Hamburg, Berlin and finally Rostock. For Christmas, Gaby gave him a silver earring which from that point on he never took from his left earlobe. The following March, they’d be moving into a thatched-roof cottage in the Burgunderweg, a few paces from the Gasthof Keller. The hub of village life, the inn was also run by a man who would soon set up Ullrich’s first official fan club.
Wolfgang Strohband has barely, if ever, spoken to journalists since Jan Ullrich’s retirement. He finally ‘succumbed’ to my request, enticed by the offer of reliving ‘the Hamburg years’ of what turned into a long partnership with Ullrich. ‘The best years’, Strohband still calls them, unfolding a warm, wistful smile.
There are many, in fact innumerable stories, some of which remained in the vault even when he and Ullrich were flying high. Like the one about a good customer at Strohband’s car dealership who happened to be a performer on the Reeperbahn, and who agreed to provide the ‘entertainment’ for an RG Hamburg end-of-year bash in return for Strohband dropping the price on her next BMW. The soirée ended up being one of the most memorable in the club’s century or so of history, and definitely the only one featuring a striptease that, Strohband is at pains to stress, was ‘all pretty tasteful’. Ullrich and the other boys from Berlin, certainly, ‘thought it was absolutely great’.
Overall, in three years, Ullrich had doubtless grown up as both a man and athlete, although Strohband recognized vulnerabilities that would cause issues later on. He was a ‘lovely, straightforward kid’ who, even as a global superstar in his twenties and thirties, would visit the Strohbands at home and collapse into their sofa, like a student returning for the holidays.
‘I had the feeling that his childhood hadn’t been easy,’ Strohband says. ‘As a comparison: Jan and Korff are both from Rostock, were both discovered and developed as cyclists by Peter Sager, who was a really great coach . . . but their lives were quite different. Jan – problems with his dad, the mum who brought him up on her own, but then had to let him go. Whereas André had a really stable family life. It wasn’t easy for Jan, with just his mum there, and his brother, but he came through it. Then went to Berlin and made his way . . .
‘He just has the problem that he trusts people too easily. He’s too gullible. He always thinks everything’s just great – even today,’ Strohband concludes.
Throughout the morning, rain has pummelled the window, bringing to mind a proverb about the city to which I had been introduced by a friend who grew up there: ‘Nowhere does the grey sky shine more beautifully than in Hamburg.’
From what Wolfgang Strohband has told me, this city could teach Jan Ullrich nothing he didn’t already know about a single-minded, perhaps self-destructive determination to see silver linings.