Germany: Road bike tours Rostock and Baltic Sea - Rostock: Jan Ullrich and André Greipel send their regards

You can't go three kilometres on the roads around Rostock without thinking of two of the greats of international cycling: Did Jan Ullrich perhaps take a pee break in this avenue by that very tree? Did André Greipel perhaps lose a town sign sprint here? As teenagers, the two of them scrubbed countless kilometres around Rostock, often together with their coach Peter Sager. The 72-year-old, whom we meet in Rostock, says of the training area on his doorstep: "It's just a dream to ride a racing bike here." Knowing full well that it was sometimes quite a nightmare for his boys. Back then, Sager gave them a real good shove: on the cycling track on Damerower Weg, but also outside around the Kühlung mountain range. The hills, up to 130 metres high, were formed during the last ice age, when advancing glaciers piled up rock material in front of them. Geologists refer to this as an uplift moraine.

The Rostock "racers", as Sager calls them, were beaten up there by their trainer if they didn't climb up fast enough. They even used to organise their mountain championships at the highest point of the cooling system, says Sager: "But that was more of a joke than a hill climb." We didn't find the climb particularly funny, probably because we were trying to set a similar pace to Jan Ullrich. And because we were also slowed down by a pretty stiff breeze blowing in our faces. "You always have to expect that with us," André Greipel told us later. The world-class sprinter regularly keeps in touch with his homeland. The people are so down-to-earth - "fish heads," says Greipel, "a bit stubborn, but sensible people." Greipel prefers to ride in the western part of the cooling region. "You can really let off steam there and even see as far as Denmark when the weather is nice," he enthuses. When we arrive at the top of the lighthouse in Bastorf, you can't see anything at all of Denmark, but one of the many ocean liners that start or dock in Warnemünde glides past on the Baltic Sea.

The article about Rostock in the footsteps of Jan Ullrich and André Greipel as well as the GPS data for these tours can be downloaded below:

- Tour 1: Winter tour (85 kilometres, 450 metres in altitude, max. 6 % gradient)
- Tour 2: To the Bodden (110 kilometres, 500 metres in altitude, max. 3 % gradient)

Downloads:
download
download