Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was

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It’s “the same USADA” (not exactly *the same* of course), covering up doped Olympic medallists or catching Lance. It’s an irony of sort that they were founded the same year when Keul was elected President of the German Association of Sports Physician.

If you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, having bought the hardback you can feel the heft, it runs well beyond 400 pages with notes and an index and the font isn’t big either. 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.In 1997, Jan Ullrich announced himself to the world by obliterating his rivals in the first mountain stage of the Tour de France. You won’t look at a chocolate Toblerone bar again but after this anecdote Friebe is quick to add “there were elements of pantomime, like this, but also moments when the sport seemed not so much to have mislaid its moral compass as lost contact with Earth’s magnetic field”. As I said previously the author went to great lengths to not just make the book a lazy finger pointing job at the old East. I think that if there’s a contrast in attitudes of sort to reflect about is how singling out DDR allows us to “forget” all the time what USADA was doing, or CONI and so on and on.

Barely a mention about the role of “Western” universities, medical national institutions, Olympic committees etc. Sure, and proud, but in case I could choose I’d always pick as a political model Rojava or Chiapas over DDR or the USSR Germany has Doping Opfer Hilfe, literally “Doping Victim Help” and it’s run almost on similar ways to those who might have been given wrongful medical treatment.Whether through early problems like weight gain or the deep personal problems of recent years, at times there’s a temptation as a reader to place Ullrich onto an imaginary psychologist’s couch and diagnose his issues through the pages, especially as the intensity of the book seems to grow with recent events where Ullrich goes from trying to win a bicycle race to coping with life. He was soon also voted Germany’s most popular sportsperson of all time, and his rivalry with Lance Armstrong defined the most controversial years of the Tour de France. 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. And let me be clear: I consider it fairer to treat people as “we” do with Basso than as it happened with Ullrich. Let’s leave the Keul and Southern (Federal) Germany universities surprise to the readers of the book, then.