Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was – Book Extract

The release of the multi-part documentary 'Der Gejagte' or 'The Hunted' on Amazon Prime in Germany, Switzerland and Austria ahead of Jan Ullrich's 50th birthday this week marked a turning point in the 1997 Tour de France champion's life.

In interviews before the film premiere - just as he does in the documentary itself - Ullrich admitted, unequivocally, that he had doped for almost the entirety of his pro career, which ended in disgrace on the eve of the 2006 Tour de France, in the midst of the Operación Puerto investigation.

Since that date, Ullrich had baffled and frustrated fans and media by refusing to come clean, while also seeming to disappear into a self-destructive vortex. His existential crisis culminated in two arrests and various stints in detox and rehab clinics in 2018 - but would ultimately also force him to finally confront his past and his demons.

In this extract from his 2022 biography of Ullrich, 'Jan Ullrich - The Best There Never Was', Daniel Friebe touches on a much wider theme in his book - how Ullrich had imprisoned himself in silence, but also the reasons why, and what he perhaps needed to do to break the impasse.

Happily, in the last few days, that is indeed what has happened. It is also the best gift Ullrich could have given himself for his landmark birthday.

The Extract

In the past three years a lot else has certainly happened, both within Ullrich’s world and its wider orbit. Early in 2020, while almost total silence reigned about Ullrich’s location and health beyond that he was ‘in the Black Forest and doing better’, Rudy Pevenage published his own autobiography and revealed further lurid details about the Ullrich years – despite telling me in 2015 that he would never commit his memories to print. Pevenage invited old pals to a launch evening near his home – and Eufemiano Fuentes sent a typically chortling, roguish video message to congratulate his old chum ‘Rudicio’. The clip was projected onto a screen and provoked gasps and laughter in the audience. Ullrich also sent a message, though Pevenage later admitted that Ullrich wasn’t exactly thrilled with the book’s revelations. Johan Bruyneel, too, was unimpressed with what he saw as Pevenage’s belated stab at self-justification. In a follow-up interview with the Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws, Pevenage claimed that T-Mobile were mere ‘amateurs’ in all matters doping compared to Armstrong and US Postal. He said that US Postal and the UCI conspired together to protect Armstrong, the sport’s golden goose, and that T-Mobile had ‘no other choice’ but to cheat. Bruyneel’s caustic retort on social media – ‘Rudy, it’s all Lance’s and my fault! WE made you do it . . . ’ – was widely echoed.

Pevenage’s case wasn’t helped when Fuentes appeared on camera again a few months later, this time on the Spanish interview series Lo de Évole. That cameo was also vintage Fuentes, artfully sprinkled with winks, boasts and scurrilous half-admissions about his work with footballers and tennis players. Also typical of Fuentes is that, within hours of the broadcast, Real Madrid were threatening to sue him.

The more things change, the more they stay the same – as much as perspectives on the calcified prehistory of lives already lived can shift and acquire texture. People themselves can also evolve. Another production, Marina Zenovich’s four-hour documentary for ESPN, LANCE, aired in the spring of 2020. It showed an Armstrong four years on from our game of golf early in 2015, four years more healed, four years more reconciled to the past, anchored in the present, arrowed towards his future. Which is not to say necessarily four years more redeemed or widely forgiven. ‘I needed a nuclear meltdown and I got it,’ he reflected at one point in the film. Perhaps most curious was how he was still taking the chance to take part in a process, even just in the conversation, unlike Ullrich. A few months later another feature-length documentary hit the screens, this time in Germany from the broadcaster NDR, its title Deutschland: (K)ein Sommermärchen, or Germany: (No) Summer Fairy Tale, its focus not a rehabilitation but a moment frozen in time: Ullrich’s Tour win in ’97. The talking heads included a few of the former teammates, gurus and critics interviewed for this book. ‘I don’t know how much anyone is still interested in hearing a Jan Ullrich confession,’ was the journalist Andreas Burkert’s closing thought – and indeed the whole film and its wistful indulgences seemed to sag with a distant, mostly unspoken but palpable regret. Images of Ullrich riding onto the Champs-Élysées were soundtracked by The National’s ‘Fake Empire’, a song about denying uncomfortable realities. In his seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how individuals who are traumatized ‘continue to organize their life as if the trauma were still going on – unchanged and immutable – as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.’ Not long ago this diagnosis applied to the German public and its cycling scene vis-à-vis Ullrich. Nowadays it seemed to apply more to Jan Ullrich vis-à-vis them.

Former teammates Rolf Aldag and Udo Bölts both featured in the film and as always could draw on whatever words they needed to contextualize personal narratives. But, as mere domestiques, they also had a lot less to lose by owning and now retelling their truths. I wonder whether Ullrich doesn’t feel about his career the way the author Maxim Leo feels about his youth in the DDR, as already discussed in Chapter 3*. Just as East Germans don’t get to wax romantic about the mundane pleasures of ordinary childhoods, lest they be accused of Ostalgie, so Ullrich may never summon the energy or language to persuade his countrymen that it wasn’t all bad. To turn Leo’s example into metaphor, that it didn’t always rain in cycling in the 1990s. That drugs didn’t make the emotions any less real. That talent existed. That his lungs still burned, his legs stung. That, in spite of all those days when he was being criticized or didn’t want to train, it still felt like the time of his life and of theirs.

Ullrich couldn’t bring himself to be interviewed for this book, either. That is one of the reasons why I have travelled to Merdingen in the first week of March 2022 – the idea that, if I can’t have his voice, I can at least briefly frame myself in the context that he currently calls home. Parallel to this impulse is something that may also have been in the back of the NDR documentary-makers’ minds in 2020: a desire to unspool the tape, rewind this story back to the mid-1990s and its happy beginning while we wait, lust, pray for a sunnier postscript. The delusion that by leaning in, embodying the original story, we might cajole Ullrich to break his paralysis, somehow thaw his trauma response.

It would be a stretch to say that the same unconscious desire was what made Jan Ullrich return here in 2018. One of his oldest friends, Mike Baldinger, certainly wasn’t aware of any such grand design. He mainly observed Ullrich’s 2018 demolition derby from afar – that is, from here in Merdingen, just a phone call away but out of the front line – until his phone rang at around five in the evening one Sunday in October 2018, after Ullrich’s detox in Miami. Baldinger stood surrounded by bricks and sacks of cement on a building site for the family’s construction company. He didn’t recognize the Spanish number but knew the voice at the other end. ‘I’m in Basel. I’m in a bit of a desperate situation. Can you come and get me?’

An hour or two later Ullrich was climbing into Baldinger’s car with only ‘two suitcases, a pair of sunglasses and a phone with no credit on it’. Baldinger instinctively set off towards Merdingen and only later asked Ullrich where he wanted to go. Ullrich replied that he had no idea.

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*From Chapter 3: A few days before the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling, the Guardian features a series of interviews with German writers. Maxim Leo, the former editor of the Berliner Zeitung and author of a famous memoir of family life in the East, says that the Germans aren’t interested in figuring anything out at all: Westerners just want to know that they were on the right side of history and that Ossis area) exactly as the Wessis imagine and b) grateful. As a result, according to Leo, ‘East Germans stopped explaining themselves ages ago. Sometimes they still point out hesitantly that it didn’t rain all the time even in the DDR, that even under a dictatorship people were able to fall in love. That a genuinely normal life was possible even in a non- normal country. But then people in the West start wailing that the dictatorship is being played down, the DDR is being nostalgically transformed. So East Germans fall silent again, because what’s the point?’

Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was by Daniel Friebe (Pan Macmillan) is available now in paperback, ebook and audio. For all editions and links to retailers, click here.

Tour de France

• Dates 29 Jun - 21 Jul
• Race Length 3,492 kms
• Race Category Elite Men