Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was

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August 29th 1993; and whilst I’m aware of and impressed by a young Lance stunning us all by winning the Elite Worlds on a horrible day in Oslo, the German guy who won the amateur race didn’t register with me. But by the ‘94 Worlds when said young German fellow took Worlds individual time trial bronze, behind ‘chronoman supreme,’ Chris Boardman I remember thinking; ‘Jan Ullrich, now there’s a name to watch.’

Whereas, as the piece above shows, having been part of the DDR Sport System is enough to start speaking about doping. Lance, though, feels something really big for Jan too. Talking to Friebe, he recounts how Ullrich came to the Team Discovery victory party in Paris at the end of the 2005 Tour, an unheard-of way for the vanquished to behold the victor. As he’s saying this, Armstrong breaks down and cries, sobbing, apparently, going deep into his own connectedness to his rival, an incomprehensible break from his alpha character. Friebe is there for this raw moment about the link between two people, both elite cycling champions, both deeply wounded in some way — by fame? by shame? by absent, unloving fathers? — and yeah, the resulting on-bike psychology could not be more different. Lance channeled his pain into becoming an unstoppable force, while Jan’s pain turned him into a jumble of contradictions and self-sabotaging behavior. But in the aftermath they discover how alike they are after all. If they end up later in life sharing an apartment together in Paris, overlooking the Champs-Élysées and just going through their daily routines, knowing that they share a bond nobody else can understand... I’m not sure that’s off the table. I am going to start here because Friebe quotes one rider after another saying stuff about Ullrich that expresses what we might have written off as quirks 25 years ago but now view as mental health issues, a common thread running through all of his problems. You can watch them yuk it up at the 2021 Worlds with Bruyneel and Hincapie. It seems like light fun, but mere weeks later Armstrong was summoned to Cancun, Mexico to be by Ullrich’s side at a hospital where Der Jan had been taken following some sort of relapse into drugs and/or alcohol. The friendship endures, but so does the darkness from which it was born. The 1997 Tour win is symbolic for a country trying to reunite, easterners could see one of their own winning, westerners can celebrate their gain as the first – and only – German Tour winner, it was an act of unification itself. Yet this put him on a pedestal and the move from cheer to adulation, and the risks this brings are well set out in this book. Things fall apart slowly.

But there he was, in the cultural maelstrom of reunification the forward face of the new nation. Even the most confident, self-assured Easterner would have struggled to walk straight onto that stage, at that time, and defy all the stereotypes, belittling, and dehumanizing that came with the politics of that era. Ullrich was nowhere near such a person. Photo by Thomas Starke/Bongarts/Getty Images From the outset Friebe makes clear he’s not out to condemn or to judge Ullrich, his search more for the truth and maybe even some reconciliation, to understand why in Germany today Ullrich is still viewed with some sympathy or else pity, or how so many promising things went so horribly wrong. Of course all of this was played out in the midst of some of the biggest drug infringements in the Tour’s history, to the point that the Tour was no longer functioning as a sporting event. No one who rode in this period escaped suspicion and/or prosecution and history has revealed both Ullrich and Armstrong as drug cheats. Friebe’s own ghost-written Cavendish autobiographies. There the achievement was to give an authentic voice - sometimes it really sounded like a Cav interview recounting a sprint finish. Here it’s more complex: a revealing and sympathetic portrait of a man who does not articulate well, and did not speak to the author at all.

To be published on the tenth anniversary of his retirement, Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was is an exploration of what went wrong. It is not a sporting disaster story, for Ullrich was one of the pre-eminent riders of his epoch and a German national treasure for almost a decade. Rather, it will provide a textured account of how unbearable expectation, mental and physical fragility, the legacies of a troubled childhood, a morally gangrened sport and one individual - Lance Armstrong - conspired to reroute his destiny as well as that of cycling. Never again after 1997 would cycling fans react to that level of performance with untainted awe. I guess I’d need to read it but frankly from what inrng reports the focus on DDR doping and so on looks laughable at best, especially when speaking of a prominent Telekom athlete. And yet, he was never again to regain those heights. Though perfectly respectable, his career was already in decline as he stood on the winner's podium. When he retired amid allegations of doping, his reputation lay in tatters. Audible. The problem with this book is that Ulrich is the archetypical one dimensional sportsman. Everyone agrees he’s a nice guy but he has zero personality, no interests, not even cycling, no drive, motivation, curiosity, empathy, self awareness or it appears intelligence. Led from pillar to post, he fell into doping because everyone else was doing it and one can’t help feel sympathy for someone who appears unsuited for almost any adult life, let alone the pressures of professional sport at an extremely turbulent time. He very much comes across as the victim of circumstances and his own inability to cope.

Customer reviews

Daniel Friebe, as a host of the Cycling Podcast, is one of the most interesting spoken-word commentators on cycling and this lives up to that. Comparisons are with some of the best cycle sport books: Strengths: Colorfully written portrait of the rider through the eyes of the people who know him best, at least from the cycling world. Never the less the book does have interest, life in the DDR and the reunification are aspects which are little known. Ironically the book springs to like whenever Armstrong appears, his drive and the power of his personality, both positive and negative are far more engaging and to give him his due he appears to genuinely like Ulrich and has stood by him, literally in some cases. Tyler Hamilton’s drugs confession: the Fuentes passage has all the drama of the tell-all autobiographies, and familiar grappling with moral complexities.

From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: I won’t further comment on “The contrast in attitudes towards DDR doping days and pro cycling’s leaden years is striking” because I went some length on it below. The only disappointment is I was left empty by the fact that Jan declined to be interviewed, which really just mirrors the disappointment I repeatedly felt when discovering the number of times Jan could have chosen a different path, and the emptiness I feel that he seems to still be turning the cranks with a dropped chain. For its final day in the Pyrenees – the last mountain stage in what some pundits were calling the most thrilling edition in memory – the Tour would be blessed with a grandiose setting on its journey from Bagnères-de-Bigorre to Luz-Ardiden.But realistically neither Ullrich or Pantani ( another rider who followed a similar fall from grace as Ullrich, ending in graver circumstances) could compete with the Armstrong phenomena whom, either on the bike or off of it, was always going to be the preferred cash cow of the TDF. Who could blame the organisers with the financial clout and resources of the USA and his celebrity status after surviving cancer. Instead of rattling off a string of Tour victories, Ullrich was derailed by a long list of personal demons and ran straight into Lance Armstrong. In a podcast episode Friebe mentions that Lance Armstrong looms large in this book and and prior to reading this was a concern, especially if the publishers wanted him to be crowbarred into the story because of his celebrity. It’s handled reassuringly well, it’s not Ullrich via a Texan prism. He’s one of several to talk about his time and there’s plenty from others like Rudy Pevenage, Jörg Jaksche or Rölf Aldag too but given the rivalry for years, featuring Armstrong makes sense. Ullrich himself isn’t interviewed but that might not be any loss, one of the reasons for his troubles with the media over the years stems from him just not being that articulate in set-piece interviews. Daniel Friebe takes us from the legacy of East Germany’s drugs programme to the pinnacle of pro cycling and asks: what price can you give sporting immortality?