8
‘Basically you gain weight in the winter if you eat too much. It’s not rocket science’
—Brian Holm
Rudy Pevenage knew they had a problem when he looked inside the fridge. One Jan Ullrich Tour de France victory was behind them and the next was surely a year away, but what Pevenage had seen over the previous few hours gave him pause. Ullrich had come to Pevenage’s house for a meal but after his second helping, then his third, it had begun to feel more like a looting. As Pevenage said later, ‘It’s scary, the way he eats . . . After a big lunch, he carried on eating all afternoon until he’d cleaned out my fridge. It was a few days after the Tour and I let it go because he was thin enough to haunt houses. But I realized then that his appetite is stronger than he is. Jan loves food as much as cycling.’
Ullrich’s mother, Marianne Kaatz, half blamed herself. Jan was five days old when she stood by and watched his older brother, Stefan, shove a chocolate snowman into his tiny mouth. Jan later joked his sweet tooth probably grew its first roots then and there. Later, when Jan was a teenager, Peter Sager had motivated his young charges with an incentive scheme he called ‘Chocolate for victories’. And, as the best in the class, Ullrich filled his chops.
Regardless of how and where the ‘problem’ had originated, in Jan Ullrich’s first months as a reigning Tour champion, it remained largely unacknowledged until deep into the winter. His holiday to Turkey in October had mainly been an opportunity to ‘laze around’ in the sun. On his return, he looked decidedly cherubic visiting a cycling club in Löhne in late October and at the Bambi gala in Cologne later that evening. But at the Bambi event, Ullrich was also, for the first time in weeks and months, far from the most famous face in the room. Neither the Spice Girls nor Harrison Ford stopped to say hello – and they certainly didn’t tell him he had put on weight.
A training camp in Lanzarote followed and there Ullrich had no qualms about removing his shirt to reveal the soft contours of a fading six-pack during a game of beach volleyball. The contrast between his skeletal July iteration and present silhouette was again noticeable when a montage of his best moments from the Tour played on the big screen at the ARD German sports personality of the year awards in Ludwigsberg at the beginning of December – and the Süddeutsche Zeitung referred to his ‘little pot belly’ in a report the next day. The key number of that night was not the ten kilos Ullrich said he would lose in time for the Tour but his 3,225-point margin over the second-placed athlete in the poll of 1,313 German sports journalists. Clearly Wolfgang Strohband had been right a few weeks earlier when he had told the press that only Boris Becker’s first Wimbledon victory had resonated anything like as loudly among German sporting milestones – never mind that it bore all the hallmarks of a fickle infatuation.
To anyone squinting disapprovingly at his waistline over the next few weeks, Ullrich replied matter-of-factly that it was always the same at this time of year. In the winter preceding his first pro season he had ‘absolutely stuffed his face’, according to Peter Becker. To correct the mistake, it had taken a special intervention from Becker – ‘150-kilometre rides through the Black Forest with Peter on only water, no bread, that nearly finished him,’ as Wolfgang Strohband tells me.
The next two years had been better, but then Ullrich had been allowed to quietly hibernate at home. Now, he trundled from one prize ceremony to the next, grazing on canapés and red wine. ‘He likes food, we all know that,’ says Rolf Aldag, ‘but he also just likes to sit with people – not necessarily be on stage in front of people, in the spotlight, but he likes to be honoured for what he’s done. Then what do you do if you have seven invitations for seven nights in a week to go for dinner? Do you go and have a salad, say, “That fillet steak’s nice but I’m not going to eat it”? Somehow he became a celebrity, everyone wanted a piece of him, and everyone gave him something. Of course, if you like a bottle of good red wine and people send you three bottles a week – “Here’s a good bottle to say congratulations for the Tour. You can drink it in front of the open fire . . .” – you’re going to open it. Plus he was living on a vineyard . . .
‘So, knowing him,’ Aldag continues, ‘would he go grocery shopping, or take the trouble to go to a vineyard? No, it wasn’t important enough for him. But if he had it at home, he would drink it. As opposed to when he was living in Hamburg and no one was going shopping for him. Then he was super lean. He probably just came back from training rides and had a bowl of muesli.’
Another Telekom rider, Jens Heppner, had gone with Ullrich on a skiing trip to Austria before Christmas. This was also where Heppner realized that Ullrich’s were not just the usual end-of-season indulgences. ‘He ate to excess, drank to excess, hardly slept and we stayed too long: ten days, when four would have been enough,’ Heppner remembers. ‘Then we went straight from there to a team meeting which lasted four days and where, again, there was no training and we ate and drank a lot.’
After meetings in the autumn and certainly by the time they reconvened for their annual training camp in Mallorca in January, Ullrich’s weight was the talk of the team. Now Brian Holm understood what Ullrich had meant when he had confided in the Dane a few months earlier. ‘I could remember him talking to me about his weight, saying he’d go on a diet for three days, then he’d be sitting there watching television and suddenly not be able to resist any more. He’d take his car – an Opel Calibra, I think – and just drive to the petrol station to load up on junk food. He said he’d eat and eat and eat, then feel guilty afterwards – which of course I’d done as well a few times.’
In Mallorca, there was no more hiding. The German media had descended, and Ullrich and Telekom were faced with a choice of whether to respond with white lies, excuses or humour. Ullrich’s claim that the surplus amounted to no more than five kilos belonged in the first category, his blaming two bouts of illness before Christmas arguably in the second. As for jokes, even Erik Zabel tried to lighten the mood by quipping to the assembled reporters that, once upon a time, the Telekom directeurs sportifs would have removed Ullrich’s suitcase from his room and told him to come back when he looked like a bike rider.
Brian Holm can well imagine Walter Godefroot’s reaction at the time being even blunter. ‘Walter wouldn’t even try to control Jan’s eating. He was like, “You either listen or fuck off.” ’
In truth, Godefroot was mainly irked at having been kept in the dark. He knew that Ullrich had overindulged and perhaps undertrained, but not to the tune of nearly 20 kilos – more than three times what would be deemed a normal post-season slide. That is indeed the scarcely believable figure that Peter Becker remembers – correcting me when I suggest that, having finished the 1997 Tour weighing 68 or 69 kilos, Ullrich had ballooned to 85 by early 1998. ‘More than 85!’ Becker bellows. ‘More like 90!’
The tipping point came, says Godefroot, with a belated call from the Telekom doctors in Freiburg.
‘Ultimately he’s a bit bone idle,’ Godefroot says. ‘He’s not bad when he only has to do his job and there are no distractions, but everyone always says yes to Jan. Either no one tells me or they tell me after everyone else. So, anyway, when he’d put on 20 kilos, then I finally get the message: Walter, you have to speak to Jan. He had an appointment in Freiburg to do a test. He says he can come at nine o’ clock the next day. But he doesn’t come. When I find out, I say to Lothar or Schmid [Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid, Telekom’s doctors], “This isn’t possible. Are you just fans?” When I’ve got an appointment in hospital, I’m fifteen minutes early so the doctor doesn’t have to wait for me. But no one says anything. Becker, who usually had a big mouth, just turns away and says nothing. So Jan does whatever he wants.’
That ‘whatever’ would soon spawn countless more or less apocryphal tales. The most legendary (though also widely corroborated) went that Ullrich loved nothing more than to snack on Nutella – that is, not spread it on toast, but put a whole jar in the microwave and drink the resulting DIY ‘hot chocolate’ through a straw.
He started his 1998 season as planned at the Challenge Mallorca in early February, but results and performances over the weeks that followed were disastrous. His best finish in five Spanish stage-races before the end of April was seventy-eighth. He abandoned Tirreno–Adriatico in the first hour of the first stage, having arrived in Italy with a chest infection. But it was Ullrich’s waist that L’Équipe said was ‘as hotly discussed as Naomi Campbell’s’. An article in the same paper also suggested that Ullrich’s condition was unworthy of a Tour winner, to which Ullrich retorted tartly that they had used a picture that was several weeks old, which was also hardly worthy of a newspaper of L’Équipe’s prestige.
Regardless, the team leader’s illnesses, withdrawals and race programme rejigs soon became a source of frustration to more than just Telekom’s management. Giovanni Lombardi spent whole days of the Vuelta a Aragon by Ullrich’s side, way off the back of the peloton, but says ‘it was impossible to get angry with him because, as a guy, he was pure gold.’ Others sometimes felt differently. ‘It was frustrating at times,’ says Rolf Aldag, ‘because he’d be getting dropped on the first climb of those races – Basque Country, Valencia – and we’d have to stay with him, going a lot slower than we wanted. Instead of building our form we were being brought down to his level. Walter would be sending me to stay and train with Jan and I’d know that wasn’t what I particularly needed. On the other hand, I said to myself that tenth place in the Tour would earn me 2,000 euros, or maybe 5,000 euros, so almost nothing, and for that I’d have to spit blood for three weeks. Jan was the only rider we had who was capable of winning the Tour or even of finishing second or third, and so it made total sense.’
Even so, Aldag concedes, in early 1998 in particular Ullrich tested the patience of even his most devoted teammates. ‘You’re like, “Get your shit together, Jan.” Or, to the management, “Look, you know he’s not going to be ready, so stop entering these races or force him to be ready. But don’t dump this shit on us.” ’
In Mallorca in January, Peter Becker had watched in dismay as Ullrich shovelled helping after helping onto his plate at the hotel buffet. Aldag also remembers Ullrich’s prodigious breakfasts becoming as much of a feature of Telekom’s Mallorca camps as hill repeats in the Tramuntana mountains. ‘He would eat so much muesli that you thought he had to throw up. There’s no way that stays inside him. If we go riding, in an hour and a half . . . no one can handle that. You wouldn’t be able to breathe. It was that sticky muesli that you soak for a whole day and you can build a house with it. You really wouldn’t want to be in the toilet after him.’
But if Ullrich’s appetite could leave mouths agape then so, in spring, could his ability to suppress or override it. Aldag recalls training camps when his evening meals would consist of a few leaves of lettuce. ‘He’d do his six hours of riding, then have his salad. And the next day muesli again. Doing that, with that workload, you’d just die. You’d never have any energy . . . but Jan just got better and better. Which was proof that, whatever he did, he was just so talented. You couldn’t compare him to anyone.’
Finally, at a certain point in the spring, Ullrich did begin to turn the oil tanker around – as he began to shed some of his cargo. His Tour victory the previous summer had spurred Telekom to set up a development squad in Ullrich’s name, with Peter Becker as its coach. The project was partly viewed by Walter Godefroot as a way to stop Becker meddling in the affairs of the main team, but, with Ullrich’s Tour defence just weeks away, Becker was dispatched to the Black Forest to attempt to salvage the seemingly unsalvageable. Over three weeks in May, Ullrich wowed his old coach with feats of endurance that were in many ways far more impressive than anything he had done the previous July. Whether the approach was healthy or sensible was another matter. ‘Imagine having to lose 15 or 20 kilos between the start of the spring classics and the Tour,’ Becker says. ‘How can you hope to do that? You’ve got to fit in sessions behind the car, time in the mountains, interval training . . .’
Becker shakes his head, half in awe, half in exasperation.
‘He got away with it but it could have gone very wrong. With his joints, for example, given how heavy he was. But somehow the kid found a way.’
Respectable displays in the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon, Classique des Alpes, Tour of Switzerland, Route du Sud and, finally, his traditional pre-Tour fitness test in Freiburg confirmed that Ullrich was ready for the Tour – or at least within five kilos of his 1997 weight, and nearly as powerful. The football World Cup in France had further helped him by pushing the Grand Départ back by a week, almost to the middle of July. In fact, the race wouldn’t arrive on French soil until the third stage, for the Grand Départ was to set out from Dublin, Ireland. At Telekom’s pre-race press conference, Ullrich lied that he had never been worried about his condition. He supposed ten riders could potentially win the Tour, one of whom was his teammate Bjarne Riis. The bookmakers, meanwhile, had Ullrich as their overwhelming, even-odds favourite. Richard Virenque was his scarcely credible closest challenger, out at 8–1.
Scarcely credible was certainly right about Virenque. The big news on the eve of the race came not from Telekom or even Ireland but a customs posting on the Franco–Belgian border. There, a masseur working for Virenque’s Festina team, Wily Voet, had been arrested following a search of the Fiat he was driving to the start of the Tour. The vehicle contained over 400 doses of banned drugs, including 235 vials of EPO. For years, experts had speculated about – and in some cases produced solid evidence for – a hidden but encroaching plague in professional cycling: EPO’s magical, blood-oxygenating properties could supposedly turn sprinters into climbers, donkeys into racehorses, team doctors into sorcerers. The hormone was also undetectable in routine urine tests, meaning it was impossible to gauge just how many riders were using it. Now, Festina and Virenque would be allowed to start the Tour while Voet languished in jail, but their protests of innocence – particularly the claim that the drugs were for someone else – sounded like a lie with short legs. They also raised a disturbing question: if the dimensions of Voet’s stash suggested that all or at least most of the Festina riders were his patients-cum-pin cushions, what did that imply about the other riders in the field?
While doubts about the veracity of what fans and journalists would be watching took their time to solidify, most could at least agree that a successful Ullrich title defence appeared the most likely outcome for the 1998 Tour. With Voet deciding to tell the truth after three days in police custody, Virenque and his Festina teammate and fellow podium aspirant Alex Zülle started the race in Dublin but were surely unlikely to finish it. Meanwhile, the Italian climber Marco Pantani doddered around the prologue time trial course to last place. Pantani had won the Giro d’Italia in June and spent the next fortnight eating pizza and hitting the discos near his home on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He manifested no real intention of riding the Tour – until one day when he was training with the veteran domestique Roberto Conti in the hills overlooking Rimini, they stopped at a water fountain, and Conti turned to his mate and suggested they ‘go to France to beat Ullrich’. Pantani hesitated for a moment then finally said yes to the going to France part. As for beating Ullrich, well, they would have to see.
Ullrich’s sixth place in the prologue, five seconds behind winner Chris Boardman, said little either way about his form. A dreary procession of flat stages taking the peloton south through Ireland and down the north-west corner of France offered similarly little insight – and produced no significant time-gaps between the main contenders. Nevertheless, Ullrich’s prospects looked good after his crushing display in the time trial to Gare de Corrèze on stage seven to reclaim the yellow jersey he had last worn in Paris the previous year. He led the general classification by over a minute, a position that the Tour organizers had strengthened further by finally expelling Festina, their team manager having at last admitted the drugs in Willy Voet’s car were destined for his riders. Ullrich’s path to victory looked unencumbered, despite the as yet unacknowledged danger lurking, or languishing, in forty-third place, over five minutes down – Marco Pantani. The sylph-like Italian duly skipped away on the first day in the Pyrenees to gain half a minute, then seized on an Ullrich puncture to win the following afternoon at Plateau de Beille and claw back nearly two minutes more. He now trailed Ullrich by only three minutes with the Alps looming.
As Libération’s correspondent wrote later, stage fifteen of the 1998 Tour had truly begun in the middle of the night before, when darkness fell upon the mighty alpine summits encircling Grenoble and wind and rain had lashed the windows in the hotels where the riders were trying to sleep. The forecast had made grim reading, but nothing like what greeted Jan Ullrich when he woke. The most daunting climb on the day’s parcours was also the highest of the Tour, the 2,645-metre Col du Galibier. The Galibier is to the French Alps what the Tourmalet is to the Pyrenees – the grandest, most venerable climb in the range and one of the Tour’s topographical crown jewels. The former’s infamy was cemented on the race’s maiden ascent in 1910, when Octave Lapize snarled at the race organizers Henri Desgrange and Alphonse Steines that they were ‘murderers’. A year later, for the human rights abuse that was the Galibier’s Tour premiere, riders called Desgrange and Steines ‘bandits’.
Pantani knew before they even started rolling where he would strike. The Galibier’s north–south traverse gains height slowly, stealthily, emerging from Valloire and into a vast groove in which the village nestles, as though hiding under the turned-up collar of a vast, rocky overcoat. The road steepens as it begins to corkscrew at Plan Lachat, and it was here that Pantani had decided to make his move – into a fog of icy rain so dense that within seconds he had vanished. The summit was still five and a half kilometres away, Les Deux Alpes and the finish-line nearly fifty. Telekom had talked that morning about staying patient, and about the wretched conditions calling for even cooler heads. When Pantani surged, Ullrich’s legs told him to go while his head said to stay – and so he didn’t move. Soon, while the Italian skittered up the last hairpins before the pass and the air turned thinner, Ullrich was panting. By the time the dim outline of his yellow jersey appeared through the murk at the summit, two minutes forty seconds had passed since the shivering fans had seen Pantani.
By this point, Walter Godefroot in the first team car and Rudy Pevenage in the second were fretting. Two weeks earlier, the race hadn’t yet left Ireland and Pantani could have been cut adrift, guillotined out of the general classification, when he was dropped in crosswinds on stage three to Cork. Only the then yellow jersey Chris Boardman’s crash and the ensuing ceasefire a few minutes later had saved him. There would be various other occasions over the next few days when Pantani could be seen barely holding on. As Pevenage says ruefully, ‘We should have got rid of Pantani in that first week. He’d lost a minute in the prologue, which to us was a sign that he wouldn’t be a factor. Then in the first week, he was getting dropped on the flat and we just didn’t twist the knife.’
The implications of that mistake now began to reveal themselves – and were compounded by another error. ‘Bjarne had said in the morning that the Galibier was too far from the finish, so we shouldn’t try to cover any attacks there: he or Udo Bölts would do it if necessary,’ Pevenage explains. ‘So we get halfway up the Galibier, Pantani attacks, and Jan doesn’t follow. Why? Because Bjarne said in the morning he shouldn’t panic. Jan’s told me many times since then that he could easily have followed.’
Bölts and Riis had in fact already been dropped before Pantani launched himself. Soon they were reunited with Ullrich, only because, almost at the exact moment when Pantani’s lead on the road surpassed his deficit on the general classification, making him the maillot jaune virtuel, Ullrich punctured. As he had done after flatting at the foot of the Plateau de Beille climb in the Pyrenees a few days earlier, Ullrich got back on his bike and immediately began thrashing at the pedals, draining his lungs of oxygen. Meanwhile, Pantani had caught and passed the remnants of earlier breakaways and crossed the line alone, his arms outstretched, his expression almost mournful – like a religious figurine tackily rushed out to commemorate the atrocity that he had just inflicted. Back down the mountain Ullrich was flanked by Bölts and Riis, advancing at a funereal pace. The cheekbones that had resurfaced sometime in June lay suddenly buried beneath two thick folds of skin, each of them plotting deep, diminishing curves that finished close to Ullrich’s ears.
The stopwatch when he crossed the line said that he had lost eight minutes, fifty-seven seconds to Pantani. On the general classification, the Italian was now nearly six minutes ahead of Ullrich, who had also been overtaken by Bobby Julich and Fernando Escartín.
How could anyone explain such a collapse? How could Ullrich? One or two old scribes had looked quizzically up from their laptops when, in his press conference the previous afternoon, Ullrich had insisted on thanking his teammates ‘whether I win the Tour or not’. That had sounded oddly pessimistic at the time. Now he allowed his soigneur to swaddle him in towels and blankets, sought shelter in his team’s camping car and left others to speculate. Meanwhile, Udo Bölts thought back to the morning, when he had watched Ullrich cut the sleeves off the yellow rain cape supplied by the race organizers. On the Galibier later, Bölts also noticed that Ullrich had run out of the maltodextrin drink that would ordinarily be his last source of fuel on a stage like this. Bölts asked whether he needed anything and Ullrich said no; he had been doing longer rides, with less sustenance, for weeks in the run-up to the Tour.
Hagen Boßdorf had returned to the Tour as one of a nearly fifty-strong delegation from German national channels ARD and ZDF – and the anchor of ARD’s nightly fifteen-minute dispatch from France. As the ghostwriter of Ullrich’s tour diary the previous year, Boßdorf had generally found the job of teasing out Ullrich’s most pertinent musings rewarding but tough going. Now, Telekom’s press officer instructed Boßdorf – quite firmly – that of course Jan would not be available for an interview from the team hotel that night. Whereupon Boßdorf called Ullrich directly – and, to Boßdorf’s pleasant surprise, Ullrich obliged.
‘It was the best interview he ever gave,’ Boßdorf says. ‘He was so honest about everything that had gone wrong, everything that he’d done wrong – and that’s what people loved about him at that time. For once his guard was completely down.’
In the Süddeutsche Zeitung the next day, the journalist Peter Burghardt pointed out that Ullrich’s debacle had occurred on 27 July, the one-year anniversary of his enthronement on the Champs-Élysées. Burghardt also wondered whether losing the Tour and some of the aura he’d carried for the last twelve months hadn’t also brought some kind of relief for Ullrich. ‘Recently he’s seemed edgy, anxious, annoyed. As though hunted,’ Burghardt wrote. ‘The 27th of July must have liberated him somehow. It looked as though he’d lost not only a yellow shirt in Haute Savoie but the lead vest he’d been wearing.’
If Ullrich’s reaction had indeed endeared him to the German public, it also impressed his teammates. Over dinner, he apologized to them for failing to capitalize on their hard work. Bölts wrote in his autobiography that, on that evening, Ullrich ‘moved up three levels in my estimation’.11
Ullrich could pinpoint some of his mistakes immediately. Others revealed themselves later, and were almost too numerous to list when he came to write another book with Boßdorf a few years later: the short-lived, panicked pursuit of Michael Boogerd and Christophe Rinero three kilometres before Pantani’s attack, which had unhinged Riis and Bölts; how unusually hungry he had been early in the stage – a sure warning that his reserves were depleted; not asking for a rain jacket until halfway down the Galibier, unlike Pantani who had stopped at the top of the climb to pull his on; concentrating so hard on the descent that he forgot to eat and suffered the dreaded fringale or ‘hunger knock’ – a particularly undigestible irony given what had happened in the winter and spring. On which note, yes, Ullrich did also admit, his extreme efforts to lose weight both before and during the Tour had played their part.
It was doubly frustrating for Walter Godefroot and Rudy Pevenage that, within a couple of hours of hobbling into the team hotel, he looked reinvigorated. It had taken a hot bath, three bowls of muesli, six bananas and a call to his mother to say, literally, ‘I’m alive’. ‘He had recovered completely,’ Pevenage says. ‘If the weather had been “normal” that day, there’s no doubt he would have won the Tour.’ The next day, Ullrich rubber-stamped that hypothesis with a mighty attack on the Col de la Madeleine, which only Pantani was able to follow. The pair would sprint for the stage win in Albertville, with Ullrich taking his second bouquet of the Tour.
Four days later, on the penultimate stage, Pantani faced the hardly daunting task of defending that six-minute advantage in a 55-kilometre time trial. He cruised home while Ullrich took his third stage win of the race – one more than he had managed a year earlier.
Despite Ullrich’s second place, Telekom would still welcome him and the rest of ‘Germany’s team’ home with a party at the company headquarters in Bonn the day after the Tour. They would also take out full-page advertisements in all of the main German broadsheets to congratulate their riders on something perhaps even more important than any stage win or other accolade. ‘Well done, clean performance, boys!’ – said the missive, firmly planting Telekom’s magenta flag on the Tour’s moral high ground, its ethical Galibier. Pantani had ended the Tour not only as the race winner but in the improbable role of its ‘saviour’, to use the exact terminology employed by race director Jean-Marie Leblanc. Alas, nine months later Pantani would fail a blood test on the penultimate day of the 1999 Giro d’Italia, indicating that he had used EPO. This would prompt Ullrich to tell the journalist Andreas Burkert that he felt ‘almost like the true champion of the 1998 Tour’.
How might his future have panned out had he actually won for a second time, if his Les Deux Alpes nightmare could have been expunged or re-edited? That question was and remains much more difficult to answer than the business of identifying where and how, in the summer of 1998, Jan Ullrich’s career path had pivoted irrevocably. Jens Heppner says now that of course, in truth, the shift began around the time when Ullrich was eating Rudy Pevenage out of house and home in the late summer of 1997. During this period – a victory lap lasting several weeks and alternating lucrative exhibition races, the more serious ones on Ullrich’s regular race programme, autograph signings and TV appearances – Heppner was frequently at Ullrich’s side and witnessed his young teammate’s struggle to ride, rather than be engulfed by, a tidal wave of newfound popularity and scrutiny. And even earlier than that, in the last week of the 1997 Tour, Heppner had got a sense of Ullrich’s likely coping capacities. ‘I think that probably said a lot about how he was going to deal with the stress of it all,’ Heppner agrees. ‘He was under pressure there and, suddenly, he couldn’t free his head and he got nervous.
‘After the 1997 Tour we did a dozen or so criterium races in Holland and Jan stayed at mine,’ Heppner goes on. ‘We organized the fan event at my cheese shop in Aachen and it was pandemonium. I thought they were going to start smashing the windows . . . And that all bothered Jan. He didn’t feel free any more. It was a massive change for him. You’d be with him in a cafe, he’d have cake in his mouth and people would be coming up to the table, asking for autographs. I’d have to tell them to at least let him finish eating. And that it caused him an enormous amount of stress. He needed his peace and quiet. For three weeks straight his face had been front and centre on people’s TVs. We tried to shield him as much as possible but there was only so much you could do. At the criteriums he’d always be tucked in behind me when we walked and rode around, but you couldn’t hide him completely. Then we’d be at my house in the forest, upstairs, we’d look out the window and see journalists waiting there. I’d have to tell them to go away. He liked his own space, being alone – and yet he couldn’t deal with the whole commotion on his own either. Everything was done for him – whether it was cooking or washing. He was like a kid.’
All of which begs the question of whether the pressure may have become even more intense, and Ullrich’s difficulties even more acute, if Les Deux Alpes hadn’t happened and he had chalked up Tour win two in 1998. Heppner says not and that, instead, Ullrich’s faltering build-up to the 1998 Tour set in motion a vicious cycle of mistrust, worry and rebellion that soon became a toxic spiral. ‘He liked eating, really liked eating, sweet things and everything else, but he didn’t have the same issues with weight before he turned pro. Back then he just used to eat when he was hungry, but a normal amount. Then he came to Telekom and suddenly Godefroot and the doctors or masseurs were watching and on his back, saying he shouldn’t be eating cake and this and that. Whenever he wasn’t allowed to do something, it became a problem. I think when he was on his own he just kept eating out of a kind of anxiety about what he wouldn’t be allowed to do at races or training camps. All the damage was done at home: he ate a lot and trained a little. To compound that, he’s someone who naturally puts on weight quickly when he’s not doing much. He could put on six or seven kilos in the blink of an eye. But I think the biggest problem was people trying to “ban” him from eating the stuff he liked. He couldn’t cope with that. It was the same with stress: whenever he was told that he had to do something, he got agitated and nothing worked any more.’
It was a sign of unenlightened times that Ullrich’s weight would become the subject of widespread mirth, cruel taunts and, for Ullrich, greater anguish than his mockers imagined. Equally, while he was perhaps the most prominent rider to grapple with the same issue, he was certainly not the first in a sport where body image was rarely broached but where the arbitration between power and weight could sentence a career. It did precisely that to Dario Pieri, a Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders runner-up who ultimately retired early in 2006, at age thirty, after years of struggling to stay lean. ‘A bike rider doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, so what’s left as an outlet?’ Pieri asks. ‘You’re also used to eating lots every day, because you’re burning so many calories. All it takes is for you to eat a bit more and train a bit less and it gets out of control. The stress of doing it every year also just builds and builds. You get to the point where the will to make those sacrifices just dissolves.’
Brian Holm broadly, bluntly agrees: ‘I think [Jan’s] problem was his appetite. That simple. You really need to be disciplined . . . and, yeah, well, Jan was a hungry boy.’
Whether Ullrich’s was ‘comfort’ or ‘emotional’ eating – the ‘pressure valve’ that another teammate, Giovanni Lombardi, describes – there was no denying that the 1998 Tour had been a stressful one for him and indeed for professional cycling. A Grande Boucle which started with Willy Voet’s arrest had degenerated into a ‘Tour de Farce’ or ‘Race of Disgrace’, as the journalists had dubbed it by the end.
Jean-Marie Leblanc, the race director, was just relieved that they had made it to Paris – although in his mind it had resembled a journey to a different city: ‘The Tour was our road to Damascus,’ Leblanc said. Meaning that over the previous three weeks cycling had finally steered itself out of iniquity, into a new age of enlightenment and towards redemption.