He was a boy from the Lütten Klein district of Rostock who could ride a bicycle very well. This has to do with the relationship between mass and force. Jan Ullrich came to coach Peter Sager at the age of nine. “He looked like a peeled rabbit. Just muscles and skin,” says Sager. Jan became youth champion of the GDR and went to a sports boarding school in East Berlin. “He wasn’t homesick,” says Peter Becker, his second coach. “His social character… He didn’t have any.” Ullrich was sixteen when the Wall fell. A friend from back then says he was called “Koofick” because he wanted to buy everything. From the 100 marks welcome money he bought sneakers. Four years later he became amateur world champion in Oslo. The slightly older American Lance Armstrong became the professional world champion.
“This guy was so good, he scared me,” says Armstrong today
Being Jan Ullrich, a five-part documentary by Ole Zeisler and Uli Fritz, tells of the rivalry and friendship of these disparate men, the uncontrolled natural talent and the obsessed worker. In 1996 Ullrich dominated the Tour de France, but had to let his captain Bjarne Riis win. Armstrong developed testicular cancer. The next year, as a spectator, he saw Ullrich driving away from everyone. You can see in this film again how he drove up the mountain in Andorra with the highest chain ratio, his face focused, and arrived alone at the finish. A few meters before the finish, he pulled up the zipper of his jersey. “This guy was so good, he scared me,” says Armstrong today. “Nobody’s beaten this guy for ten years.”
In 1998 Ullrich collapsed on the mountain, Marco Pantani won. It was the year of the first doping scandal. In 1999 Ullrich was injured, Armstrong won for the first time. In 2002, Ullrich was injured again, drove drunk, took two ecstasy tablets during rehab and tested positive. After Armstrong’s retirement, he was banned from the tour in 2006 for EPO doping. He was in the form of his life, he said. He never came back.
Ullrich was arrested in Mallorca, caused a car accident in Switzerland and hit a prostitute. He came to the Betty Ford Clinic. Armstrong admitted doping to Oprah Winfrey. He was stripped of all seven Tour de France titles.
Jan Ullrich stuck to it: He didn’t gain any advantage.
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