7

The New Giant

‘In Andorra, the bell heralding the start of the Ullrich era rang. If he keeps his feet on the ground and chooses his entourage well, keeping the clowns and the weirdos away, he’ll go very far’

—Rudy Pevenage to L’Équipe, 18 July 1997

On a biting, electric-blue Saturday in January 2020, the Friedhof in Berlin’s Heerstraße befits the name that Germans give to all of their burial grounds – literally a ‘peace garden’. The low, dark marble grave of Germany’s first ever Tour de France stage winner and the first German to wear the yellow jersey, Kurt Stöpel, barely tugs at the attention, but then here Stöpel is in illustrious company. The Nazis blocked a planned extension of the graveyard in the 1930s on account of the numerous Jews buried within the grounds and the fact that the cemetery would be visible from the nearby Olympic stadium. Today it is dotted with the remains of celebrated authors, painters and other luminaries such as Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s one-time teacher and among the most influential mathematicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Kurt Stöpel took the yellow jersey on stage two of the 1932 Tour and went on to finish second overall, thereby planting a German flag near the top of the Tour’s general classification for the first time. He later became an admired statesman of the international peloton, a rider so distinguished and erudite that the Tour director Henri Desgrange nicknamed him ‘The Philosopher’. After the war, he authored a book about his experiences at the Tour, took a job at Berlin’s French Cultural Centre, then bought a taxi in which he chauffeured tourists around the sights of Berlin, giving history lessons in one of his five languages. His beloved wife died in 1995 and by all accounts it was a blow from which Kurt, by then in his late eighties, could not recover. On 11 June 1997, in the retirement home where he now seemed to be counting down his days, he reached for a bottle of cleaning fluid and took a swig. No one could say with certainty whether it was suicide, but his family did not rule it out.

At the time of his death, Stöpel’s second place overall in 1932 remained the best ever finish by a German in a Tour de France. Jan Ullrich had matched it in 1996 and, twelve months later, cycling cognoscenti were tipping him to become, at twenty-three, Germany’s first winner and the fourth youngest champion since the war. Eddy Merckx, winner of five Tours and 525 races in total in the 1960s and 1970s, had said in the build-up to the 1997 Tour that Ullrich could one day eclipse even his palmarès.

Peter Becker and the doctors at the University of Freiburg could vouch for Ullrich’s perfect preparation. Twenty years later, as soon as the subject of the 1997 Tour is broached, Becker marches off in the direction of some private archive, leaving me alone with my cup of coffee on the porch overlooking his back garden in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg. He returns a few minutes later clutching a graph that shows the results of Ullrich’s final pre-Tour ergometer test. The date at the top of the sheet says 2 July 1997. ‘As a coach, you dream about a graph like this,’ Becker says, tracing the line with his finger.

In an interview the previous December, Becker had publicly accused Telekom of ‘not moving with the times’ and being ‘methodically and medically stuck in the age of Father Jahn’. Jahn’s doctrines were designed to train a generation of Germans to repel a Napoleonic invasion at the start of the nineteenth century. The inference – or accusation – was clear: Ullrich had finally succeeded in 1996, and would in 1997, only because Becker was again at his side.

More important, Becker also acknowledged, was that in the six months before the Tour Ullrich had lost just five days of riding to illness, banking 23,800 kilometres since the previous December, including 10,600 in races. Heading into his last stage-race tune-up, the Tour of Switzerland in June, Ullrich had not yet won in 1997 but his results were following another one of those satisfyingly smooth, rising arcs. In Switzerland, that first victory also arrived, on stage three to Kandersteg. It would be followed ten days later by an even more ominous display: in the German national championship road race in the eastern suburbs of Bonn, Telekom riders filled six of the top seven positions, but Ullrich was in a class of his own, powering away from stablemates Rolf Aldag, Erik Zabel and Christian Henn on the final ascent of the decisive, cobbled climb to win by nearly a minute.

The new Kaiser looked unstoppable – and yet he also remained shackled both to the edicts of his team and to his own subservient instincts. Walter Godefroot had set out early in the year and kept repeating that the defending champion, Bjarne Riis, would again be the team’s leader at the Tour, and Ullrich his deputy. Riis echoed him, although the Dane also betrayed some anxiety at his pre-race press conference in Rouen, admitting he didn’t know how Ullrich felt ‘deep down’ about the established order in the team.

Publicly and privately, Ullrich continued to profess his loyalty, much to some teammates’ bemusement. After Ullrich’s second place in the prologue time trial behind Chris Boardman, Jens Heppner whispered to Udo Bölts that Riis would have no chance if Ullrich was ever set free.

An incident late on stage one to Forges-les-Eaux brought the question into even sharper focus. Riis was caught behind a pile-up in the closing kilometres and found himself momentarily isolated. Some teammates were aware of the crash but also saw Riis getting up, apparently untroubled, while others rode on, oblivious. A few minutes later, when Riis had still not reappeared in the bunch, Udo Bölts radioed the team car to ask for instructions, but Walter Godefroot was busy helping to untangle Riis. The only person left in the Telekom ‘cockpit’ was their VIP guest for the day, the politician Rudolf Scharping. Scharping considered himself a cycling aficionado, and that year was also penning daily Tour columns for Bild Zeitung – but Bölts could not sensibly defer to a middle-aged man whose idea of a bike-ride was 15 kilometres to the nearest Kaffeehaus. So he, Heppner and Georg Totschnig all focused on protecting Jan Ullrich.

‘Riis was furious,’ Walter Godefroot remembers. ‘That night, I told Rudy we needed to have a meeting. The riders were having their massages but I said, “No, right now, meeting.” I asked Heppner why he hadn’t waited, asked all of them, while knowing the answer: they have more faith in Jan and they like Jan more. Riders will always do more for a guy they like. After fifteen minutes everyone suddenly falls silent and it’s the end of the meeting. Then they all leave, I turn to Rudy and I say that was it for Bjarne: I knew he wouldn’t win a second Tour. His time was up.’

Under cross-examination by his team boss, Jens Heppner had kept his true feelings to himself. Now, he says, ‘It was obvious after Forges-les-Eaux that Bjarne couldn’t win. And Jan couldn’t have been more relaxed. There was only one guy on the team who could win the Tour.’

Unbeknownst to even most of his teammates, Riis had been in turmoil even before the incident, indeed before the Tour had started in Rouen. After winning the Tour the previous summer he had gone to the Olympics in Atlanta, where he had met and would soon fall in love with one of the Danish handball team’s star players, Anne Dorthe Tanderup. Riis was still married to another woman, but it was in Tanderup that he would confide in his long, daily phone calls from France, as his dream of a second Tour victory faded. He also suspected Rudy Pevenage of leading a whispering campaign to get Ullrich sworn in as Telekom’s leader. Riis and his friend Brian Holm had taken to calling Pevenage the ‘Cookie Monster’ when they discovered that he had been checking riders’ rooms for biscuits and other ‘unauthorized’ snacks at training camps. Holm had warned Riis that the ‘Cookie Monster’ would one day betray him. And Holm had been right, Riis now believed.

In the first Pyrenean stage to Loudenvielle, Riis couldn’t live with the pace set by the Festina team and their leader Richard Virenque on the ascent of the Col de Val Louron-Azet – and Ullrich promptly fastened himself to Virenque’s rear wheel, in the hope that Riis could recover. But he couldn’t and didn’t, finally conceding forty more seconds to the Virenque and Ullrich group and slumping to fourth place on general classification. That night, Walter Godefroot assured the press the Telekom hierarchy and strategy hadn’t changed: Riis remained the number one.

In a team meeting, Godefroot told his riders something else: Ullrich would no longer have to sacrifice himself for Riis.

At Gasthof Keller in Merdingen, the corks flew a full quarter of an hour before Ullrich crossed the line in Arcalís – when he rode under the five-kilometre banner in glorious, imperious, seemingly generation-defining solitude. Erich, the owner, had first met Ullrich in 1991, on one of the youngster’s first trips to train in the Black Forest. Now in his forties, Keller sat in the front row of the cinema he had created for the Tour in the main bar, in his Telekom racing jersey, leading a chorus of ‘Jan Ullrich, you’re the champ!’

Whenever Jan was home in Merdingen, Erich would jump aboard a scooter and off they would both ride, into the hills above Merdingen, with Ullrich’s front wheel and Erich’s back one millimetres apart. Freiburg’s 1,800 annual hours of sun and selection box of climbs made it a popular destination for leading German riders, and Keller had watched, driven or ridden with many of them on the same roads. But none could punish, purge and transform themselves like Ullrich in the run-up to a three-week race. A few days before setting off for the 1997 Tour, he and Gaby had dropped in on Keller to celebrate Ullrich’s German national title with a glass of red wine. After two sips, Ullrich had shaken his head, smiled at Keller and admitted that he was already half-cut.

Over the next few days of the Tour, the local elixir, a fizzy red called Merdinger Bühl, would continue to flow, and the afternoon crowd in Keller’s bar to swell as Ullrich’s position began to look impregnable. L’Équipe called him ‘The New Giant’ on the morning after Arcalís. One by one, newspapers from across the globe now offered their own superlatives. Writing in La Repubblica, Gianni Mura argued that, contrary to popular opinion, the outcome of the 1997 Tour was still laden with suspense. Yes, said Mura, one doubt persisted: ‘Will Ullrich just win the Tour or absolutely destroy the opposition?’

By the end of the stage twelve time trial around Saint-Étienne most were leaning towards the latter. Walter Godefroot had been joking when he told Ullrich to pass Richard Virenque, who had set off three minutes before him, on the Frenchman’s left-hand side, to spook him. Ullrich hadn’t understood the joke and also didn’t much care for mind games; overtake Virenque Ullrich did – but on his right. It took the time trial of Virenque’s life to finish second. That was also now his position on general classification, nearly six minutes down on Ullrich. Only five riders had completed the Saint-Étienne course within four minutes of Ullrich’s time. Not since Miguel Induráin’s towering ride in Luxembourg five years earlier had a Tour time trial seen such domination.

Unintentionally, Ullrich had done some of his best work in those interviews and team briefings early in the race, Rolf Aldag believes now. When others tried to exalt him, Ullrich had deflected compliments, praised rivals and teammates, abdicated all personal ambition. ‘That was the smartest thing he could have done,’ says Aldag. ‘Internally, we knew he was going to be the man, but he kept the pressure off by saying that Bjarne was the defending champion, and also not forcing anything or asking for anything special from us as teammates.’

With the Alps looming, Ullrich finally had no choice but to embrace the responsibilities of both race and team leader – and, unbeknownst to almost everyone outside the Telekom bubble, it quickly became a rocky ride. He added to his lead in the first alpine stage to Alpe d’Huez, finishing second behind Marco Pantani and extending his advantage over Virenque to more than six minutes. But, on their way off the mountain in the Telekom team car that evening, Walter Godefroot sneaked a glance at Ullrich in the passenger seat as fans started to press against the bumper and the windows, straining to glimpse the new Messiah. Godefroot thought Ullrich looked terrified.

Jens Heppner and Hagen Boßdorf could both also sense Ullrich’s relief when, every night, he finally retreated to the sanctuary of the team hotel, after the press conferences and the dope tests, the autographs and the photos. Boßdorf, a reporter for German TV network ARD, was acting as ghostwriter for a Tour diary that would later be published in Ullrich’s name. Sometimes it was eleven at night before they sat down for a few minutes to jot down Ullrich’s thoughts and observations from the day. Boßdorf could see fatigue starting to grip him. To this were added the fears which Ullrich could hide from world on the other side of the camera lenses and crash barriers, but not his roommate Heppner. ‘He was getting more and more stressed. He was terrified of crashing, above all. The talk in the media about him winning for the next ten years was also unsettling him. He knew that he couldn’t justify that as long as he hadn’t won even one Tour. That terrorized him, as did the attacks, which we and he had to respond to, as the race leader. He became scared of crashing, of getting ill . . . it was extreme.’

To German journalists, Ullrich’s anxiousness looked more like endearing giddiness, a naiveté that seemed to say more about his age than it did about any inherent vulnerability. Meanwhile, without a lingua franca or any real familiarity with his origin story, the foreign press had decided that here came another unflappable, monosyllabic tyrant in the same mould as Induráin, or the embodiment of a one-dimensional East German stereotype. Ullrich himself could offer precious little insight into either his personal history or how the hysteria was affecting him, apart from repeating that everything – the crowds, the attention, the accolades – was Wahnsinn, pure madness. At a media day at his home in Merdingen before the Tour, asked why he hadn’t wanted to attend the previous year’s German sports personality of the year awards, he had replied, ‘I simply don’t have the time to be a star.’

Now he didn’t have any say in the matter.

Virenque tried to test him on the last two alpine stages, winning at Courchevel, but crossing the line with Ullrich in his shadow. Riis was enduring a miserable Tour but had made good on his promise to repay the favours of the previous year, saving Ullrich on the Col de la Madeleine. The next day the maillot jaune looked more assured on the road to Morzine, never leaving Virenque’s back wheel on the steepest mountain pass of the Tour and the last climb in the Alps, the Col de Joux Plane.

With a cushion of nearly seven minutes, he looked home and dry – and not only because, from Morzine, the Tour was heading over the German border to Freiburg. But one of Ullrich’s fears had turned into a self-fulfilling prophesy: he was starting to fall ill. His mother and Peter Sager had both come from Rostock to see him after stage seventeen, starting in Freiburg and finishing in Colmar, and Gaby was also waiting at the finish line. But that evening Ullrich was in a hurry to get back to the team hotel to speak with Rudy Pevenage. He had been struggling to breathe on what had been a relatively straightforward day only skirting the Vosges mountains. He feared he could implode on the much harder next stage. Festina had surely noticed and were no doubt preparing to take one last, wild swing at Telekom, with Riis also complaining of stomach problems. Pevenage agreed that it was time to call in some favours.

Ullrich’s travails the following day – and the way Udo Bölts rescued him – have become a famous chapter in German cycling folklore. In particular, the message Bölts growled on the Col du Hundsruck when Ullrich pleaded with him to slow down – ‘Quäl dich, du sau!’, literally ‘Suffer, you pig!’ – turned into a national sporting aphorism, not to mention the title of Bölts’s autobiography. Festina had set about breaking Ullrich, and with 90 kilometres and the ascent of the Ballon to come, Virenque held a half-minute lead over the yellow jersey. The Frenchman was joined by two teammates and an assortment of the best riders in the race, while Ullrich had lost all of his Telekom domestiques except Bölts. A coup was taking shape until, one by one, Virenque’s breakaway companions declined to help him. Finally, after several kilometres of futile remonstrations, Virenque ordered his teammates Didier Rous and Pascal Hervé to ride away to the stage victory while the group’s momentum dissolved and Ullrich caught Virenque.

Still frothing, Virenque refused to answer Italian reporters’ questions at the finish line because ‘their riders’ were ‘wheel-suckers’. By which he meant Marco Pantani, who hadn’t helped him – and even, the Festina team manager revealed later, declined a sizeable cash offer to do so, not for tactical reasons but because he found Virenque insufferable. Moreover, one of Rudy Pevenage’s ‘courtesy calls’ the previous night had been to Fausto Pinarello, Telekom’s bike sponsor and also that of the Spanish Banesto team. Their riders had also been conspicuous by their unwillingness to help Virenque.

From Banesto’s point of view it would also turn into a worthwhile quid pro quo: the following day, according to Pevenage’s account years later, Ullrich ‘let’ the Banesto (and Pinarello) rider Abraham Olano win the final time trial.

Earlier in the Tour, during one of their nightly phone calls, Gaby had asked Ullrich if he had any idea what euphoria he was whipping up in Germany. He didn’t – and there was nothing Gaby could say to accurately convey, as she put it, ‘how crazy people are going’. The last time Ullrich had watched the Tour on TV, in 1995, the total race and its related broadcasts had accounted for just 131 hours of airtime on domestic networks in Germany. In 1997, that figure had risen to 530 hours. Having estimated in 1996 that their screen time equated to 23 million marks in advertising spend, in 1997 Telekom would calculate it was worth nearly four times that.

Until only a few months earlier, as Rolf Aldag puts it, Telekom had been ‘just a company you called up when you got overcharged on your phone bill’, a faceless utility provider that even the then CEO Ron Sommer admits was widely ‘hated’ by its customers and mocked on satirical TV shows. Now, suddenly, T-shirts, key rings and baseball caps emblazoned with the company logo were selling out in the ten T-Punkt shops Telekom had opened in major German cities. When Sommer was asked whether Telekom would renew and increase its commitment, he replied that they would be ‘stupid’ not to.

‘It was total euphoria,’ says Jürgen Kindervater, Telekom’s then Head of Communications. Where once Telekom’s association with a team of also-rans had been questioned even in the company’s boardroom, now Kindervater was suddenly being hailed as a genius. ‘Just imagine,’ he says, ‘the state broadcaster, ARD, moved its whole schedule around to accommodate a special fifteen-minute bulletin from the Tour that went out every night after the main evening news. That’d be absolutely inconceivable now.’

It also beggared belief that a twenty-three-year-old was about to win the Tour by the widest margin since Laurent Fignon in 1984 – nearly ten minutes. Virenque said that Ullrich’s wobble in the Vosges had convinced him the tables could be turned the following year, but prevailing wisdom suggested otherwise. It had, after all, been one of the more mountainous Tours of the past decade, with its time trial in the Massif Central and two stages in the Vosges in addition to the usual slog through the Pyrenees and Alps. An older, more mature Ullrich on a more orthodox route, with two flat time trials, would surely wreak even more destruction, à la Induráin in the first half of the nineties. Indeed, opponents, pundits and fans spent much of the last week debating not whether Ullrich would win this Tour but over how many editions he could layer an inevitable dynasty. For every Bernard Hinault predicting seven victories, there was an Eddy Merckx who had talked about ten even before the race left Rouen. Never since the first of ‘The Cannibal’s’ five Tour wins in 1969 had cycling and the Tour seemed so clearly to stand on the brink of redefinition at the hands, or legs, of one rider.

The final procession to Paris offered further evidence of one transformation that was already complete – Telekom’s. Walter Godefroot’s men in magenta had won the team classification, and Erik Zabel’s second place in the bunch gallop up the Champs-Élysées also brought him his second consecutive green jersey. With these accolades, four stage wins in total and Ullrich’s yellow jersey, they had amassed over 700,000 deutsche marks in prize money – another record.

‘All I’ve done is ride a bike for three weeks,’ Ullrich shrugged as the plaudits rained down. Messages from Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Germany’s ‘other’ head of state, its footballing Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer; gushing homages from Michael Schumacher and Katarina Witt. The prestige of the admirers confirmed Ullrich’s entry to the high society of German sport. Yet it was also the stoic nature of his endeavour, his modesty in interviews, the perceived quaintness of his sport, at least in the eyes of the uninitiated audience east of the Rhine, that had made such an impact. There were immediate comparisons with Boris Becker’s first Wimbledon victory and the ‘tennis fever’ it had created.

Germany’s newest darling resembled that early version of Becker in more than just hair colour, before the money and the models that eventually led one of Becker’s rivals, Ivan Lendl, to brand him ‘the limousine radical’. ‘He has suddenly woken interest in a competition that occasionally turns into a test of the soul, among a population whose 63 million bicycles are mainly used for Sunday leisure jaunts or trips to the bakery,’ wrote Michael Reinsch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, describing a sudden awakening almost identical in nature to the one the United Kingdom would experience with Bradley Wiggins’s Tour victory in 2012. ‘Ullrich’s suffering and his exploits and those of his rivals have restored some perspective to sport showbusiness. Other athletes don’t work for seven hours a day at the outer edge of their capacities, exhausted and faced with the constant risk of crashes and illness. And despite this, seven-figure salaries are as rare in cycling as they are routine in football, tennis, Formula 1 and boxing.’

Ullrich had begun the summer of 1997 virtually unknown to the wider German public and was to end it as the greatest sportsman they had ever seen. Those same Germans, or at least those who participated in a Der Spiegel survey in September, would say so. Recency bias no doubt played its part, and 1997 had been a controversial and in the end unsuccessful vintage for Schumacher and a disastrous one for the ageing Becker. Steffi Graf had not won a single Grand Slam tournament for the first season in a decade. Nonetheless, the German people spoke resoundingly: the Radmessias, the ‘cycling messiah’ from Rostock, claimed 16 per cent of the vote to Schumacher’s thirteen, Becker’s ten, Graf’s nine. Of the twenty-four most famous active German sports personalities, Ullrich was also credited with by far the highest ‘likability rating’. The piece quoted esteemed sociologists, including one who suggested that athletes, far more than writers, musicians and artists, ‘showcased the values of ancient humanity’. It scarcely mattered, said Der Spiegel tartly, if ‘personality-wise, they’re a zero out of ten, which seems to be the case with Ullrich.’

Riis had been Denmark’s first Tour winner a year earlier, and the scenes that followed served as an appetizer for what now awaited Ullrich in Germany. ‘I felt like the fucking president,’ says Brian Holm of the frenzy that he experienced at Riis’s side a year earlier. ‘It was far too early for Jan to win the Tour, if you ask me,’ Riis acquiesces now. ‘He wasn’t mature enough. He had no idea what was coming.’

Riis had been one of the first to embrace Ullrich when he crossed the finish line in Paris and, Ullrich said, fear melted into relief. ‘Unglaublich – unbelievable,’ Ullrich had gasped. ‘Unbelievable,’ Riis had replied.

The next day, a crowd of 30,000 people packed into the Marktplatz in Bonn and watched the 1996 Tour champion present his successor with the yellow jersey on the steps of the old town hall. Ullrich then boarded a private jet and flew to London for the presentation of a special edition Tag Heuer watch commemorating his victory. Two days later, he began a run of seventeen criterium or city-circuit races that sent him hightailing all around Europe, commanding five-figure appearance fees for each outing. One day in August, Jens Heppner hosted an autograph-signing session for Ullrich in the cheese shop Heppner owned with his wife in a usually tranquil village close to the Belgian border. Heppner told the local police to expect around 150 people, and they duly dispatched three officers to help out with marshalling and ‘crowd control’. The final attendance was nearly 5,000. Ullrich would end up having to take cover behind the Blauschimmel bries and the Camemberts as fans grabbed, pawed and prodded, shrieking with excitement. ‘It was total madness,’ Heppner remembers.

A few days later, he witnessed a similar scene at a criterium in Heerlen, Holland. That day he told journalist Klaus Blume he feared ‘that Jan will simply pack everything away and go home with Gaby’.

Ullrich’s manager, Wolfgang Strohband, says his own mobile telephone bill for July 1997 served as an accurate Richter scale for the commotion back in Germany. ‘3,000 deutsche marks . . . until Telekom sorted me out.’ A year earlier he had waited for offers to pour in after the Tour but few arrived, whereas now Strohband was engulfed by a ‘tsunami’, as he puts it. He discussed how best to surf it with friends, like the manager of the Hamburg-based Ukrainian boxers, the Klitschko brothers, and with football agents. ‘But I’d have to explain to them that cyclists would sometimes be training eight hours a day. They didn’t have time for autograph signings every day.’ Finally, Strohband settled on a limited cadre of top-tier sponsors, each of which would be graced with fifteen hours of Ullrich’s time per year. Deals were soon being struck with Adidas for apparel, Tag Heuer for watches, Schwartau for cereal bars, Nestlé for mineral water, Audi for cars and, most controversially when it was first reported years later, state broadcaster ARD, who would henceforth receive preferential access to the new national treasure. Adidas were believed to be shelling out half a million deutsche marks a year, whereas ARD had signed on for around 200,000. The combined value of the contracts would see Ullrich’s annual earnings soar into the millions. His 600,000-deutsche-mark deal with Telekom had one season left to run, but in December Telekom announced that it had been replaced with a four-year extension which was the longest and reportedly most lucrative arrangement in the professional peloton.

When we meet at his home in Hamburg in 2015, Strohband baulks at the suggestion that it all may have been too much for Ullrich – not the money, clearly, but what came with it. ‘I can’t believe that he was overwhelmed. The endorsement contracts included clauses about first-class travel and timetables to be respected, all so that Jan only had to concentrate on riding his bike.’

In the immediate wake of the Tour, with ‘Ullrich fever’ at its acme, there was also no noticeable downturn in his performances. On the contrary, in his first official race after the Tour, the Luk-Cup in Bühl, he attacked from an eight-man group on the final climb and triumphed alone. Then, at the championship of Zürich a week later, he did his best to manage expectations by reminding journalists that he had been ‘up to his ears since the Tour’ – and yet still finished second on maybe the hardest single-day race route in cycling. A week later, half a million people came primarily to see Ullrich at the HEW Cyclassics one-day race in his former adoptive home city, Hamburg. On terrain seemingly ill-suited to his abilities, Ullrich still outclassed and rode away from his opposition.

Soon Ullrich’s teammate, Erik Zabel, would be opining that Ullrich was doing cycling in Germany no favours, meaning that his popularity was overshadowing everything and everyone else. Some smelled jealousy in those comments, others genuine concern – and, regardless, it was worth considering whether Ullrich wasn’t inflicting a counterintuitive form of self-harm. For while doubts persisted over the breadth, sustainability and exact nature of whatever boom or mania Ullrich had unleashed, he had already lured new fans into a fundamental misapprehension: based on what they had seen in July and August, Ullrich had turned recent converts onto a sport in which the strongest, most talented, most feted rider would also generally be the man crossing the line first, usually having scattered his rivals across mountainsides and valleys. Would the neophytes remain captivated by, or even tolerate, those more humdrum but inevitable periods when his toil went unrewarded?

Later, Ullrich would indeed learn that every pedestal comes with a precipice – and even now there were occasional glimpses over the cliff edge. His post-Tour lap of honour and his season ended at the GP Breitling, a time trial in Karlsruhe ridden in pairs. When he and his partner Rolf Aldag finished third, Ullrich was booed. ‘They expect me to win every race,’ he lamented. He hoped that the fans would ‘develop their knowledge a little bit in future’.

They would indeed deepen their understanding over subsequent years, but, buttressed by partisan bias, their expectations for Ullrich were and would remain dauntingly high. Which wasn’t altogether surprising, says Giovanni Lombardi, one of his teammates at the 1997 Tour. ‘Sure, people said he was going to break this record and that record, win this many Tours, but that was only a reflection of what he’d done in the Tour, especially in Andorra. He’d made a fool of everyone in the mountains and again in the time trials. You also looked at the riders he’d beaten, and by how much: Virenque, what, nine minutes down, the rest nowhere . . . It was really hard to see how or why he wasn’t going to be kicking everyone’s head in for the next ten years.’

Initially, Ullrich’s Telekom teammates received many of the perks and few of the pressures associated with ‘Ulle-mania’, at least compared to him. The financial future of their team was suddenly assured, and recognition of their efforts didn’t end with the numbers on their payslips. ‘It was really crazy after that Tour,’ says Rolf Aldag. ‘We all went to Bonn, and you have the mayor, and we’re like rock stars. You need an Audi? You get an Audi. Free, of course. I think I do actually understand what it’s like for footballers because it did grow to that level for us. You know, going out to restaurants and not even needing your wallet because you know it’s on the house. You were just so respected. We have this prize on German television, the Bambi award, which is the biggest prize you can win – and they gave it to us for the best afternoon’s entertainment, so completely unrelated to cycling. I was sitting there with Harrison Ford and people like this . . . I think it was really, really over the top and it wasn’t normal. It was also against our nature because there’s no real culture for German cycling. We had Didi Thurau and Gregor Braun, Rudi Altig and Rolf Gölz, but we didn’t have races with a long history or tradition, where people would come just because it was cycling.’

For journeymen domestiques whose careers had until then been parables of service and abnegation, everything that glittered could be considered gold. Aldag believes that, conversely, it was all much harder for Ullrich partly because of the intensity of the spotlight and for reasons linked to his personality. It hadn’t previously mattered when, out of absentmindedness, he forgot to bring money with him on training rides, and Aldag or someone else had to shout him a drink when he insisted they stop at a cafe. Or that he didn’t know or really care how much air the mechanics put in his tyres. Now, though, the same endearing insouciance wouldn’t fly; he had to take responsibility and did so, says Aldag, in a way that sometimes proved counterproductive. ‘That whole thing of being a celebrity turned against him and made his life so much more difficult. He wasn’t a leader in general but once in a while he made very strong statements. “This is how we want to do it . . .” Not in 1996, but from 1997 he had a pretty clear opinion on things and you couldn’t change his mind. But the question is, how do you develop your opinion? I think later on that was the tricky part again, with the people around him. I’m not so sure that his own opinion always developed out of his own thoughts, but rather than from other people who talked him into something.’

Whatever challenges lay ahead, Jan Ullrich had known one thing when he climbed off his bike at the GP Breitling in September, thus ending his season: he was tired and needed a holiday. To which sun-kissed destination he and Gaby were to escape, Ullrich declined to reveal. He hoped reporters would understand that he had shared enough of his life and thoughts over the previous few weeks.

Unfortunately, the media did finally catch up with him, though not in the way that Ullrich had anticipated. He and Gaby were on their way to the airport, making their secret getaway to Turkey, when his phone rang and Wolfgang Strohband’s name flashed onto the display. There was bad news, Strohband its bearer: the French newspaper, L’Équipe, had published a story alleging that two major players in the 1996 Tour had also failed out-of-competition drug tests carried out by national testing agencies shortly before that race, and that the UCI had neglected to name or sanction either athlete. The claim seemed fanciful, vague . . . until the 1996 Olympic road race champion, Pascal Richard, said in an interview with the Swiss tabloid Blick that the mystery dopers were Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich.

Lacking any robust evidence, Richard’s accusation was relatively easy to discredit – and discredited Richard was by the UCI. ‘Pascal Richard is a stupid cyclist. Every year some idiot comes out of the woodwork,’ bristled the UCI president Hein Verbruggen. Soon Richard would also be writing Ullrich a letter of apology, explaining that he had been misquoted.

Ullrich didn’t look at a single German newspaper or indeed watch the news while he was in Turkey, and the storm had passed by the time he came home. Nonetheless, it had been a reminder that with his new status would come a new level of scrutiny. Which, some would have argued, was long overdue. It turned out that Ullrich could not have tested positive in the spring of 1996 because the national anti-doping body hadn’t been able to locate or test him until 11 August of that year. The agency’s former chairman told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Ullrich hadn’t exactly refused a test, since that would have resulted in a ban. But ‘the way it all happened wasn’t exactly all above board.’9

Another rumour was also swirling, albeit only in the echo chamber of the pro peloton: the night before his victory in Bühl in August 1997, there had been another vain attempt to trace Ullrich for a dope test at the hotel where Telekom were staying. Officially, the testers were told that he had been waylaid at a fan event hundreds of kilometres away; in reality, Ullrich had been hurriedly booked into accommodation a few kilometres from his team’s appointed billet.10

These were worrying developments – or could have been for German fans paying close attention. For it was still uncertain at this point whether fears aired after the Tour by Wolfgang Strohband and Erik Zabel, among others, would be realized – namely that, as Strohband said, ‘It’s a Jan Ullrich boom rather than a cycling boom.’ Throughout the months of July and August, Strohband had closely monitored membership numbers at his club, RG Hamburg. Fifteen new applications hardly suggested Bayern Munich would be quaking.

Some potential new supporters may already have been put off by what they had read in Der Spiegel two weeks before the Tour. A recently retired or, to be more accurate, banned journeyman pro named Jörg Paffrath had opened up to the magazine about what he said was the sordid reality of a jobbing cyclist, and certainly of his life before a positive test in 1996. Scarcely anyone, Paffrath said, could ‘ride the Tour de France on water and pasta’. Most, in his experience, were also fuelled by EPO, growth hormone and steroids.

Via their press department, Telekom had dismissed Paffrath’s claims as the bitter testimony of a second-rate dropout. A fortnight or so later, while Jan Ullrich was dominating the Tour, the head of sports medicine at the University of Freiburg and the overseer of Telekom’s medical programme, Joseph Keul, further reassured the German public: yes, EPO was used by cyclists, but the potential gains were minimal.

And, Keul said, there was certainly, certainly no one at Telekom taking the drug.

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