Review: Jan Ullrich - The Best there Never Was

 I saw Jan Ullrich on the used book shelf at the library for $3, and at that price I bought it and took it home and read it.

The book is written in what I consider an odd fashion, with the author going over Jan's career coming out of East Germany's training system and then joining Deutsche Telekom as a budding pro. His successes and failures (which are well documented) were at this point in the book attributed to his upbringing and personality (the guy loved food and when he was in his off season was famous for wiping out the contents of his friends' refrigerators).

Then you get into the later half of the book before the author brings up what was common in that era of cycling, which was doping with EPO. There's no question that Jan Ullrich was an enormously talented rider (his teammates described him going from getting dropped to beating them over 3 days during a training camp), and that everyone else in that era doped with EPO because there were no tests for it and the UCI simply set a hematocrit level that was acceptable, essentially giving everyone a license to dope up to the 50% mark. What I didn't know was that when the test was finally developed you could go back to urine samples taken from those years and it would definitely prove that Ullrich had EPO markers in his urine.

I have a controversial opinion about doping, which is that it should be allowed as long as the doctors and researchers involved documented and published what it did. The sport would change from being hero worship about bike riders to something like Formula F-1, where the true heroes are the engineers and mechanics rather than the drivers. I could definitely get behind a sport where the doctors and physiologists are the heroes getting paid multiple millions of dollars in salary and getting a share of the prize money. The contribution to medical science would be significant, and people would give up on hero-worshiping athletes simply for being genetically gifted. Of course, doping does distort the field --- the prize would go towards people whose bodies respond better to doping. On the other hand, none of the sporting events I've ever bothered to watch seem particularly big on "natural" human behavior anyway.

Anyway, this part of the book was badly written, I think partly because Dan Friebe probably assumes any reader of the book is a big fan of Ullrich and would know all the sordid details of his life already. I certainly didn't, so kept wondering why some irrelevant details kept coming up until the reveal of the doping scandal that ended Ullrich's career. The story all seemed pretty sad up to that point but then once you realized everyone in the Peloton was doping you found yourself wondering what was the point.

What was interesting to me was that Friebe indicated in the book that Germany became a big cycling country only after Ullrich won the Tour de France and Deutsche Telekom (later T-Mobile) became a world famous cycling team. I'd always thought that Germany was huge on cycling because I saw so many Germans on bike tours, but of course soccer was always more popular. In any case, apparently because of this Jan Ullrich got way more attention in Germany than even Lance Armstrong did in the USA during the period, which probably affected his mental health as well.

Anyway, the story of lost potential in the book comes across, as well as a note that while Ullrich never lived up to his potential, mental fortitude and discipline must have genetic components as well (and obviously many people will tell you we're all moist robots without free wheel), so overall Ullrich probably never had a chance despite his prodigious physical talent.