Former cycling star pours out his heart in Zurich: “I was in heaven, in hell and now I have ended up on earth”

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Friday evening 5:53 pm, Langstrasse Zurich, drizzle, 4 degrees. The first party night of the weekend has started. Young people walk in good spirits through Switzerland’s most famous starting point. Immediately next door, on the corner of Lagerstrasse, a former cycling hero enters the foyer of the Frame cinema in the former cultural temple Kosmos in Zurich: Jan Ullrich (49).

Blue blazer, white T-shirt, blue pants, white sneakers. Ullrich seems neat, open and even happy. “I lived in Switzerland for a long time and have many friends here,” he says and shakes many hands. Many from the cycling world are present: Martin Elmiger (45), Michael Schär (37), Silvan Dillier (33) and others. Football legend Günter Netzer (79) also does not miss the opportunity to see two of the four parts of the new documentary series ‘Jan Ullrich – The Hunted’ on screen – which can be seen on Amazon Prime from Tuesday.

After half an hour, Breitling boss Georges Kern shouts good-humoredly: “Everyone, walk slowly towards room six!” Later he will interview his friend on stage. There are moving images and brutal openness beforehand. Ullrich’s career from super talent to winner of the Tour de France in 1997 is shown, as well as his fall into the doping swamp.

Finally, he talks about his biggest crisis after his career; it almost cost him his life. «I was in heaven, celebrated everywhere. But I fell deep and became addicted to alcohol and drugs. It was hell,” he says. And how is he feeling today, just a few days before his 50th birthday? “I ended up back on earth, right in the middle,” he tells SonntagsBlick. And adds: “I’m glad the documentary is called ‘Jan Ullrich – The Hunted’ and not ‘The Fifth Anniversary of Jan Ullrich’s Death’. Because I almost died.”

“At some point every barrel is full”: Ullrich admits everything

For years, Ullrich was unwilling to be honest in public. Today he pours out his heart and admits what many suspected and some of his fans did not want to admit until recently: “I did dope.” He said it seventeen years after his resignation in 2006. How could he live with this lie for so long, while many of his then competitors had long been known?

He is a very good displacer, Ullrich says. Or rather, it was him. “Every barrel is full at some point,” he says. Judgement. On August 11, 2018, the Bild newspaper headlined: “Jan Ullrich in psychoclinic”. The former cycling genius had lost almost everything at the time: reputation, wife, friends – but above all respect for himself. “I felt really miserable. I was doing copious amounts of cocaine and drinking whiskey like water. It was a matter of life and death.”

Ullrich talks about those moments in the summer of 2018 when he got drunk in his finca in Mallorca. When he was so high that he attacked guests on the property of his neighbor, actor Til Schweiger (59), the police arrested him. Ullrich later described it in ‘Bild’: ‘The cell was smeared with feces. It was cold down there in the basement. If you had to, you had to pee between the bars.”

One disaster after another

It was Ullrich’s lowest point. What does that mean? Burnouts, depression, car accidents, accusations of abuse – he’s been through a lot. In June 2018, his then wife Sara left him with their three sons. “He stopped sleeping, rebelled and I was afraid for our safety. That in his madness something could happen to one of us. “Jan was a completely different person in terms of behavior,” she recently explained in the Bild newspaper.

Ullrich: “From year to year there were small catastrophes, always a bomb went off – until it crashed completely.” Everything was a result of his refusal to open up about his doping history. “That kept haunting me.” He was unwilling to confess – “on the one hand because I didn’t want to embarrass my old friends. On the other hand, my lawyers advised against it because there was criminal proceedings against me. However, he is the only one responsible for the whole thing. “I tried to pull the drawstring, but I couldn’t find it.”

Doping? “The usual practice”

Ullrich speaks clearly, listens carefully to questions and nods again and again. He seems approachable and therefore different than was often the case during his active career, in which he was labeled as a super talent, but also as a machine bred in the GDR system. It is completely different from the day before his greatest triumph, the Tour victory in 1997. At the time he was asked whether the media hype bothered him. He said: “A little bit, because I’m not used to something like that. But if you wear the yellow jersey, you have to live with it. I admit that sometimes I’d rather be in bed or by the pool than attend press conferences. Ullrich won the tour at the age of 23, the first and only German to date. “Giant Ullrich – he drives them all to the ground,” was one headline.

Only: how did he take everyone down? Even with doping. Ullrich turned professional in 1995 and realized a year later that he wouldn’t win anything without erythropoietin, or EPO for short. The miracle drug was injected into the drivers’ field at the time as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It improved endurance performance and reduced recovery time – most importantly, it was undetectable at the time. “In the late 1990s, it would have been almost impossible to win without Epo,” says former Swiss professional cyclist Rolf Järmann (57). Unlike Ullrich, he himself confessed to doping shortly after the end of his career. Injecting Epo was “common practice,” says Järmann.

That’s exactly what Ullrich says, even though he doesn’t want to lump all teammates and opponents together. “I ended up in a system that was already there. Doping was made so palatable and so indispensable to me that I decided to do it. My career would be over if I hadn’t done it.” When asked what it would have been like without doping, he makes a radical comparison: “It would be like going to a gunfight, only armed with a knife.”

“You can’t make a racehorse out of a donkey.”

The Spaniard Eufemiano Fuentes knows all too well what Ullrich is talking about. He was his doctor and provided countless cycling stars with doping in the 1990s and 1990s – including in the form of his own blood. In the Amazon documentary he says about Ullrich’s beginnings: “They asked me about the miracle formula to make a champion. But: we can’t make a racehorse out of a donkey.”

The comparison is flawed. Because: Ullrich, who grew up in a prefabricated building in Rostock, was extremely talented. The way he lifted his body over the steps while in the saddle was a sight to behold. And in the time trial he rode phenomenally, in accordance with the East German cycling school. However, the rapid rise was slowed. Ullrich found his masters on tour. First with Marco Pantani (1970-2004), the Pirata who could no longer cope after his career and boiled himself to death. Later it was Lance Armstrong (52, USA) whom Ullrich could not get past: the Texan won the Tour from 1999-2005. All seven of his victories were revoked following his doping confession to talk show host Oprah Winfrey – Armstrong has since been regarded as the embodiment of cycling fraud.

Armstrong: opponent and above all friend

Armstrong also has his say in the documentary. Justifiably. After all, he was not only Ullrich’s greatest rival, but also his savior. When Ullrich was on the brink of collapse in 2018, he received a call from a friend of Ullrich. “A lot of people love him and want to help him, but he only has enough respect for you,” he says. The result? Armstrong boarded a plane and visited his old rival. ‘I didn’t know what to expect. But I love this man. It broke my heart that he felt so bad.”

The man who defeated cancer before his big victories says this in a double interview in Zeit. Ullrich says, “Lance actually managed to motivate me to go through the withdrawal. There were tears.” Later, after a relapse shortly before Christmas Eve in Mexico, Armstrong is back. “I said to him: it’s Christmas. I’m flying back home to my children, and you have to go to your children. If you ask me, that’s the most important thing. If you lose that, you lose everything.”

“Thanks for your visit!”

Ullrich stood up again. Today he is convinced he has turned the corner – albeit at the last minute. Only now is he willing to talk about it. “Twenty years later you realize what mistakes you made. Today I am healthy and have both feet in life. I have forgiven myself, have a passion for life again and can look in the mirror in the morning,” he says. His autobiography will be published next year, shortly before the Tour de France.

When Ullrich says goodbye, life on Langstrasse has long been buzzing. He himself is tired from the long day, looks forward to his house in Merdingen in the Black Forest and says: “Hello, thank you for coming.” Then he disappears into the dark night – and hopefully into a calmer future.

Source : Blick