5
‘As a bike rider you also have to be a pig, and be a pig to other people as well’
—Peter Becker
Ask those who rode and worked for the Deutsche Telekom cycling team in the 1995 season to share their first impressions of Jan Ullrich, and a surprising number will speak of cleats, not physical feats.
That is, the cleats nailed to the bottom of Ullrich’s cycling shoes.
The venue for Telekom’s traditional pre-season training camp was the Hotel San Diego in El Arenal, Mallorca – the Balearic island so beloved of Germans that in 1993 parliament members and Bild Zeitung semi-seriously suggested that the government in Bonn simply buy it. The story gave rise to a moniker that survives to this day: the Seventeenth Bundesland. Regardless, settings might change, some of the faces too, but among the inalterable truths of these January get-togethers was the first-year pros’ eagerness to impress.
In this season, Telekom were welcoming just one rookie: a red-headed, freckle-faced twenty-one-year-old from Rostock on the Baltic Sea, who also happened to be the amateur world champion in Oslo in 1993.
His second memorable feature – at least in the eyes of the more experienced teammates sizing him up in Mallorca – was an, ahem, relaxed attitude to equipment and particularly the shoe plates about which most pros are notoriously fastidious. Ullrich’s were battered, misshapen, and obviously several months old. When one of them duly broke on a training session early in the camp, Ullrich completed the ride with one foot perfectly anchored, the other slipping and sliding as though balancing on a bar of soap.
One of the team’s veteran riders, Udo Bölts, was aghast. Rolf Aldag would have been too, had he not already encountered Ullrich – and Ullrich’s cleats – in the elevator of the German team hotel at those Oslo worlds two years earlier. ‘Ach, maybe I should change these cleats,’ Ullrich had ventured, surveying the plastic wreckage barely clinging to the bottom of his Adidas shoes. Forty-eight hours later, Ullrich returned to the German team hotel wearing the world champion’s jersey and the same Adidas shoes, with the same death-trap cleats. ‘They were a millimetre from being unusable,’ Aldag remembers. ‘Just imagine if they had gone in that sprint. It probably would have changed his whole career. And that’s typical Jan: “Ja, if there’s no one who will do it for me, I realize, but I don’t really take it that seriously.” ’
Walter Godefroot had signed Ullrich on the strength of his cycling, not his bicycle or footwear maintenance, but Team Telekom’s manager also knew that no amount of talent was a guarantee of success in the pro ranks. Godefroot had once been a prodigy himself, winning the Belgian national championship at age twenty-one. A serial ‘victim’ of Eddy Merckx, he nonetheless retired with a fine palmarès bejewelled by victories in the Tour of Flanders, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Paris–Roubaix before becoming a directeur sportif. Late in 1991, finally, he was recruited by Deutsche Telekom to effectively take over the organization formerly known as Team Stuttgart.
Godefroot’s hunched, dogged style had inspired Belgian journalists to christen him ‘The Bulldog of Flanders’ as a racer. In his second life as a team manager, his gentle, softly rounded features and oblong spectacles were a fatherly mask behind which lived a hard, working-class man in the best Flemish tradition. His parents, both factory workers, had struggled to stay above the poverty line after the war, instilling in their son the value of hard graft. When he was thirteen and bussed off to Switzerland on a trip organized and subsidized by the Catholic Church, his mum told him, ‘This way you’ll at least get to go that far once in your life. We never will.’
Cycling had finally taken Godefroot all over the globe, but his belief system hadn’t wavered. The former Telekom rider Jörg Jaksche says riders who complained to Godefroot about illness could typically expect a response like the one he once received: ‘Ah, you’re ill, Mr Jaksche? So you have cancer, because that’s a real illness.’ Rolf Aldag got similarly short shrift when he announced that he didn’t want to ride the 1999 world championships, so angry was he at the International Cycling Union (UCI), the sport’s governing body, over their organization of the previous year’s event. ‘So, Mr Aldag, you don’t want to ride your bike any more? That can be arranged.’ Needless to say, Aldag soon reconsidered.
Another ex-Telekom rider, Brian Holm, remains deeply fond of Godefroot while admitting his man management wasn’t to everyone’s taste. ‘Walter was a hard fuck. No small talk, but correct. Walter was the kind of guy who only called to fire you, not to ask how your kids were doing. I remember a Danish journalist asking Walter about sports psychologists. Walter looked over his glasses at him and said, “Psychologist? They can have one if they like . . . but they’d better also look for a new team. I don’t need riders who need psychologists.” Psychologists? Fuck off. That was Walter’s attitude.’
Needless to say, then, Ullrich could expect Godefroot to be patient with him, but not to be mollycoddled. That had been clear when Godefroot learned that Ullrich would prepare for his first pro season with an altitude training camp in Mexico, and a curled bottom lip turned to a frown as he watched Ullrich struggle early in the year. As Rolf Aldag remembers in 2015, ‘If he’d gone to Mexico and got completely cooked, that was his fault and not theirs as far as the management was concerned.’ Another Telekom rider, Jens Heppner, had also been with Ullrich in Mexico. ‘And for quite a while Walter thought the whole altitude thing was bullshit,’ Heppner recalls.
After illness in February, Ullrich finally made his racing debut at the Setmana Catalana in March 1995. He finished stage one way down the field but at least mildly amused and consoled by the fact that the four-time Tour de France champion, Miguel Induráin, had crossed the line next to him. The next four days were a bracing introduction to the world over which Induráin had reigned for the last half-decade. Ullrich finished the race in eightieth position overall, exhausted and chastised.
It was nothing new for a rookie, even one as gifted as Ullrich, to find the transition hard. Telekom was also no featherbed for a first-year pro, its results that season proving so lacklustre that the team’s very future seemed in danger. Walter Godefroot had grown increasingly restless throughout the spring, not least because the Société du Tour de France appeared disinclined to even invite Telekom to the 1995 race. Godefroot’s paymasters had already indicated that this doomsday scenario would lead to them pulling their funding.
Ullrich’s form was low on the list of Godefroot’s most pressing matters but a concern nonetheless. Late in the spring, Godefroot decided to address it by dispatching one of his most reliable vassals, Rolf Aldag, to the Black Forest to train with Ullrich and hopefully impart some of his savoir faire. Another Telekom rider, Bert Dietz, would join them.
Aldag checked into the small guest house that he often used as a training base in the Schwarzwald, a few kilometres from chez Ullrich. At just gone nine the next day, Aldag’s phone rang.
‘Ja, it’s Jan. It’s raining here in Merdingen. What shall we do?’
Aldag peered out of his window. It was barely drizzling. Aldag replied that they meet and ride as planned, to which Ullrich mumbled his consent.
They finally trained for four or five hours, with Aldag and Dietz doing most of the pacemaking, and Ullrich all of the grumbling.
On the second morning, Aldag again laid out the itinerary – a classic rodeo of old Black Forest favourites like the Notscherei, Feldberg and the Schauinsland. Ullrich rode slightly better and complained a little less, though was still testing Aldag’s patience. At nearly every junction, Ullrich would turn to ask Aldag where they were heading next, left or right. Finally, as the threesome swooped down towards Freiburg, the distinctive terraced vineyards of the Kaiserstuhl mountain loomed on the skyline. ‘Ah,’ said Ullrich suddenly, ‘there’s the Kaiserstuhl! And Merdingen. I know where we are now.’
Aldag glared back.
‘I said to him, “What the hell are you doing? I mean, seriously? How long have you been living here now? A year? And you didn’t have a clue where we were at any point today?” He said he’d basically been racing at weekends, thinking that he just needed to recover at home. Then, when it got to Wednesday and Thursday and he felt OK again, he’d be worried about tiring himself out for the following weekend. So, really, he’d been in Merdingen that long and hardly ever done any real training. This was the first time he’d done proper riding on consecutive days.’
By the third day, the moans had suddenly stopped. On every climb, Dietz and Aldag were left gasping.
‘And on the fourth morning, we had been due to meet on the valley road out of Merdingen, but Jan was coming from the opposite direction and he just rode straight past us. We had to call him back. He asked why we weren’t going towards the climbs. I told him that it was a recovery day and that we were just going to do 100 kilometres through the Rhine Valley, then come home from the back side. He was kind of pissed off we weren’t going into the hills. Anyway, that day Dietz and I were like Jan had been on the first day. We were just hanging on the whole time. That’s when you realize what talent really looks like: it had taken him three days to build the form that we would in three weeks. There was just no way you could even compare to that.’
Jürgen Werner, another Telekom rider that season, says it was simple: ‘Jan thrived on being surrounded by mates, camaraderie. He’s a people person. He just didn’t enjoy training on his own.’ It was therefore logical that Ullrich had flourished in Berlin and Hamburg, living and training every day with club and teammates, but was finding the more self-sufficient lifestyle of the pro rider more difficult. Never before had he managed his own timetable, been his own taskmaster – and it showed. The extent to which he missed Peter Becker’s gruffly reassuring presence became apparent when, after Aldag, Becker travelled to Merdingen for another bootcamp. After only a few sessions, with Becker barking instructions from his car, Ullrich was once again floating up the climbs.
Nonetheless, at the Classique des Alpes, a now defunct one-day race mimicking a Tour de France mountain stage, he trailed in eight minutes behind the leaders and made more of a mark with his gauche sense of humour than his cycling. His roommate, Brian Holm, remembers Ullrich being tickled by the name of the start town, Chambéry, and its phonetic similarity to a band, The Cranberries, who had recently topped the charts in Germany and struck many chords there with ‘Zombie’, a song about divisions in Ireland. ‘And he sang that bloody song the whole time. In your heaaaad, in your heeeeeead . . . It was like a nightmare,’ Holm recalls.
In the Tour of Switzerland two weeks later, Ullrich produced his best display to date in a Telekom jersey, finishing third on stage four to Wil. It could, would have been even better had he demonstrated a little more nous in the breakaway group that contested the stage win. ‘He just wouldn’t know any of the riders and he completely focused on the wrong rider,’ Aldag remembers. ‘I think he asked around who was the fastest and someone said Lombardi. But Jan wouldn’t even know who that was. Even two years later he wouldn’t have known most guys in the peloton or what their strengths were. He just didn’t care.’
It was just as well that not every pro race was a test of tactical acumen. At the German time trial championship in Forst at the end of June, Ullrich simply pedalled harder and faster than any of his competitors – onto the top step of the podium and into the black-red-gold national champion’s jersey. In his post-race interviews, he talked about the hard yards he had done to prepare on the climbs of the Black Forest and completely neglected to mention Peter Becker. Becker was so affronted that he decided, from now on, Ullrich could take care of his own training.
If that burst the champagne bubbles, a different party was pooped even more egregiously three days later. After a road race in which Telekom riders filled the first seven positions, with Udo Bölts the victor and Ullrich fourth, the company’s CEO, Ron Sommer, interrupted the celebrations to warn Walter Godefroot that they would pull their sponsorship at the end of the year if the team didn’t succeed at the Tour de France. Just days earlier, Godefroot had been informed that he would only be allowed to take two thirds of a team to the Tour, having been judged unworthy of a full invitation. The remaining three riders in a hybrid Italo-Germanic line-up would come from the ZG outfit managed by the moustachioed ringmaster, Gianni Savio.
First-year pros rarely ride the Tour, and Godefroot had never remotely considered selecting Ullrich. He stayed out of sight and out of mind while his teammates in France rode for Telekom’s future and his. The pre-race ultimatum appeared to have the desired effect, as the sprinter Erik Zabel scored the first two stage wins of his Tour career. The Telekom execs were delighted – and promptly confirmed the team’s survival into 1996.
Back in Merdingen, Ullrich watched the Tour on TV, fizzing with energy and impatience. ‘So stupid – I was in the form of my life and had no way to show it,’ he said later. He was back in action at the Vuelta a Burgos stage-race in early August, finishing an impressive twelfth overall. He rode even better to come second in the Tour du Limousin a week later. There, Brian Holm saw his callow Classique des Alpes roommate, the bad karaoke singer of two months earlier, leading some of the world’s top riders a merry dance. ‘I remember watching him one day there, just sitting on the brake hoods before the bunch sprint, so relaxed, on these tiny little roads, twisting left and right, and just thinking he looked born to ride a bike.’
Ullrich and Telekom hoped that he could build on that foundation in what was to be his first major tour, the Vuelta a España in September. The race began in Zaragoza – and immediately turned into a nightmare, as what had been a nagging toothache a few hours earlier turned into a flaming abscess by the end of the prologue time trial. Ullrich endured what he later described as ‘torture’ throughout the race’s first week and never truly recovered, finally climbing off his bike in Andalusia on stage twelve.
And thus, midway through September, Jan Ullrich’s first season as a professional cyclist drew to a premature and inglorious end.
Jan Ullrich had given few interviews in his first months on the job as a professional cyclist – but those which did make it into print, onto the airwaves or a screen contained subtle insights into his growing pains. He had started the year full of confidence, telling one journalist, Klaus Blume, that he aimed to ride the Tour de France in 1996 and intended to try and win it within four or five years. The extent to which spring and summer had brought a reality check, though, was obvious from what Ullrich was telling Süddeutsche Zeitung on the eve of the Vuelta, in an article discussing his early season ‘depression’. ‘I was really down, and I’d never been through that before,’ Ullrich said. ‘As an amateur I could win even when I wasn’t fit. If you slack off for even just a week as a pro, you lose 50 per cent of your condition. As an amateur I was never that challenged.’
Godefroot had also been distinctly underwhelmed, despite boasting at the Tour that, in Erik Zabel and Ullrich, Telekom possessed two of the biggest talents in the cycling world. There were also no immediate signs that Ullrich was putting into practice what he had told the Süddeutsche Zeitung about taking greater care of his body in the future. In an autumn fitness test in Freiburg, his scores were worse than they had been at the same time the previous year.
Peter Becker’s end-of-term report was damning: ‘He hung like a bean.’ Becker was also still seething about Ullrich’s response to winning the national time trial championship in June, which had led to the breakdown of their relationship. ‘I heard him talk about his training and say that he’d done it all by himself. I thought, OK, fine, have it your way. Then I went to him and told him, “Ulli, many congratulations. You did great. That’s the last you’ll see of me. All the best.” At that point it was clear to me: the Ullrich chapter was over.’
It took Wolfgang Strohband’s intervention for the bridge to be rebuilt – more precisely, at his manager’s insistence, Ullrich travelling to Hamburg in the autumn and issuing Becker with a grovelling apology. Becker accepted and the two would resume their partnership ahead of the 1996 season. Years later, though, Becker would come to feel that Ullrich had learned and changed very little as a result of their fallout. His inability or refusal to shoulder certain responsibilities would continue to infuriate Becker – just as it sometimes had in Hamburg and Berlin. By way of an example, Becker tells me a story about a cracked handlebar stem that finally came apart at an under-23 race in Kiel in 1993 and landed Ullrich in hospital. Two of Ullrich’s teammates had had the same issues with the same stems in the week or two before – but Ullrich assured Becker that he’d swapped his before the race. ‘Ulli’s away in a group, but then the two other kids in the break come through the finish line and Ulli’s nowhere to be seen. Then, “Mr Becker, Ullrich has had a bad crash.” The stem had just broken off. So off to the hospital I go. This is just before the Sachsen Rundfahrt, which is a key race before the worlds. I go in and the doctors tell me I have to be gentle with him, but Jan says he feels fine. I say, “Ulli, you’re an idiot. I’ve left the others training on their own to come and see you. Because of your stupidity.” ’
Becker rocks back in his chair, shaking his head. It was simply maddening, he keeps telling me, to watch someone for whom he fulfilled an almost paternal role ‘make their life twice as hard as it should be’.
‘This way of overestimating himself that he has. This, “Ach no, it’s OK, I can do it . . .” ’
He sighs again.
‘I mean, the kid has such a good heart. With animals, you should see him. I remember a dog at a training camp one year, how he lifted it up and stroked it. That’s where you think that maybe he didn’t get the love he needed from a father, say. His heart needed that. In Hamburg, I was mum, dad and coach. There we talked about everything and I would also occasionally turn a blind eye if his room wasn’t tidy. Of course not forgetting that as a bike rider you also have to be a pig, and be a pig to other people as well. But on the other hand, making things so hard for yourself, being so blind to certain things . . . that was totally unnecessary in my opinion.’