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Jan Ullrich freed himself from his life’s lie with the sentence “I doped”. You have to acknowledge that. But the 1997 tour winner does not contribute to clarifying the doping system.
Jan Ullrich did it: he finally managed to utter this one sentence: “Yes, I doped.” It took him many years to utter this one, actually so simple sentence. This is a liberation, especially for him personally.
The life lie that Ullrich has been telling since his exclusion from the Tour de France 2006, was partly responsible for his descent into drug and alcohol excesses, which brought him to the brink of death several times.
Not a word about the doping system at Team Telekom
If telling the truth helps to stabilize the ground on which he will continue his life, then one can only congratulate him on that. Because facing your self-deception and confessing your own guilt requires courage and strength. Anyone who has been through a similar process knows this. And doing this as a former folk hero in the public spotlight certainly doesn’t make it any easier.
Ullrich now “confesses” to this public what they already knew or could have known. And again he remains vague. Former nurse Jef D’Hont made it public in 2007 that doping was systematic at Team Telekom. But who introduced him to the topic, how the doping system worked within the team, what role the Freiburg doctors played in it and what the sponsor Telekom knew about all of this? Ullrich remains silent about this.
That he had the services of the blood adulterator from 2003 Eufemiano Fuentes Ullrich himself had already admitted in 2013, albeit half-heartedly. Post-tests of the frozen doping samples from that time revealed that his blood was laced with EPO during the 1998 Tour de France, which he finished second behind the doped Italian Marco Pantani.
The doping companions are back
Ullrich has now stated in Munich that he started doping in 1996. The year in which he surprised the cycling world on his Tour de France debut by finishing second behind his team captain Bjarne Riis amazed. A year later, Ullrich himself won the most important cycling race in the world and ensured that Germany fell victim to cycling, which was heavily contaminated with doping at the time.
In 2007, Riis was one of the Telekom team drivers who admitted in a veritable wave of confessions that they had injected the blood accelerator EPO. Ullrich’s companions Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel also admitted doping at the time. They all then found a lucrative living in cycling again – as team bosses, sporting directors or consultants.
And while Ullrich remained silent and fell further into his personal downward spiral, even one of his rivals, the Frenchman, was allowed to do so Richard Virenque (another super doper of the 1990s), returned after a tearful confession and still happily writes autographs to this day when the tour passes through France. Ullrich, on the other hand, was Grand Department in Düsseldorf 2017 as persona non grata.
Ullrich remains a tragic figure
Ullrich has now made it clear that he is after the sentence “I doped” wants a return to cycling – the only world in which he can find his way. The chances for that are not bad. Because he stuck to a golden rule when making his “confession”: he only spoke about himself. He did not name the structures behind his fraud. Because then he would be considered a polluter. And they are still ostracized in the supposedly purified cycling sport.
So Ullrich remains a tragic figure: once too weak to resist cycling’s doping system because he wanted to win at all costs and there was no other way. Then too weak to admit the years of fraud because there were probably also legal shackles. And now he’s still not strong enough to really come clean because he wants to belong again.