Cycling:William Fotheringham
THE young German Jan Ullrich has shown such power and assurance in the Pyrenean stages of the Tour de France that he is unlikely to be threatened by his Danish team-mate, last year’s winner Bjarne Riis.
Ullrich’s rise has been spectacularly fast. Last year he won the final time-trial stage and finished second to Riis despite having been considered too green even to start; his form as the Tour approached was such that he could not be left out, however, and he proved to be Riis’s strongest assistant in the mountains in spite of a crash which left him covered in bandages and dripping blood.
It was the most dramatic debut any 22-year- old had made since another German, Dietrich “Didi” Thurau, led for much of the 1977 race, winning five stages and finishing fifth. Thurau faded fast, and Ullrich is too young to remember those exploits; his first memory of the Tour during his boyhood in the East German town of Rostock dates back to LeMond and Hinault in 1986.
Ullrich won his first race at the age of nine and was recruited into the East German production line three years later when Peter Becker, who devised the country’s cycle coaching system, took him to the Dynamo Berlin centre of excellence.
Becker still trains Ullrich, and recalls: “I saw him racing when he was just 12. He was small, about 1,58m but he had incredible fighting spirit. He wanted to win at all costs.” He enthuses about his protege’s stamina, which was much in evidence on Tuesday during the longest mountain stage when he shot up the final climb with such ease that he might have been pottering on the flat.
Ullrich was the amateur world champion at 19. A year later he took the bronze medal behind Chris Boardman in the 1994 world time-trial championship in Sicily. He was introduced gently to the world of professional racing after joining the Deutsche Telekom team when Becker ran out of money to run his cycling centre.
Appropriately for a product of East Germany, Ullrich is a good team man, expert at producing the party line. He told three separate press conferences last Tuesday that he had not received orders from his team manager to ride his own race rather than Riis’s, but clearly that was not so.
His lack of ease when facing the media is similar to that shown by Miguel Indurain when he won his first Tour, but Ullrich seems even more reticent, almost mistrustful. And he is disconcertingly young in a race which has not been won by a 23- year-old since Laurent Fignon in 1984 and which, after Riis succeeded Indurain at 32, looked set to remain the domain of the mature cyclist.
Only the greats wear yellow at this age: Anquetil and Hinault were only 23 when they pulled on the maillot jaune for the first time, Merckx was 24. There was something of each of these icons in Ullrich’s grace as he romped up to the Andorran ski resort of Arcalis last Tuesday.
Becker laments the collapse of the Berlin Wall because it meant the passing of the East German coaching system which Ullrich describes as “the best for athletes who wanted to do sport. It made me what I am.” When the East Germans had to remain amateur and could not ride the Tour, there was always speculation about how they might fare against the best in the West.
Now the debate centres on whether the athlete factory’s final product will dominate the Tour for the foreseeable future.