It's been a while since Jan Ullrich In 2018, perhaps, around the time of his all-too-public crash in Mallorca, when he stumbled from pre-trial detention in Spain to rehab in Hesse and on to rehab, and the media, from Bild to Stern, feasted on the catastrophe that the life of one of the greatest German sporting heroes of all time had become. The media attention at the time was, of course, unintentional, and the result was a total loss for the Jan Ullrich brand or what was left of it.
The latest offensive was intended to be the opposite: an orchestrated comeback, choreographed by former government spokesman Bela Anda and designed to reposition Ullrich for both a personal and professional future. The Jan Ullrich 2.0 launch event was planned well in advance. For five years, Ullrich had been carefully kept out of the public eye. He did not even take part in the extensive public commemoration of his Tour victory on the occasion of the 25th anniversary last year. A multi-part ARD documentary and two book biographies had to do without the protagonist.
Comeback in public: Only selected media for Jan Ullrich
This November, the time had come. Amazon Prime launched a four-part documentary in the style of those celebrity and athlete documentaries on the relevant streaming platforms, which contractually guarantee maximum control over their own story. The series was flanked by carefully placed exclusive interviews with hand-picked quality media, from "Zeit-Magazin" to the talk show "3 nach 9", in which Ullrich sat next to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and chatted about his way back to life.
The entire campaign was marketed as a life confession. At last, Jan Ullrich would give the German public what they have been demanding of him for 17 years now: a full Confession of his sins as a competitive athlete as a condition for people to take him to their hearts again. At least one thing was clear from all this: Jan Ullrich has learnt to seek advice from competent people. That is no small thing. Ullrich admits in the documentary that he would have been spared many things in his life with the right advice. Possibly even his tragic crash and the loss of precious years of his life to drugs and alcohol, which he now deeply regrets.
This crash, as he also makes clear in the documentary and the accompanying interviews, is directly linked to his decision not to come clean after his forced career end in 2006. He admits that he was overwhelmed by the situation. "Suddenly you're only talking to lawyers," he says, making it clear that his head was spinning. As after his Tour de France victory in 1997, he suddenly found himself in spheres and contexts that he couldn't cope with. It all coincided with the fact that overnight he was torn out of the environment that had supported him all his life.
Overview of the individual episodes of the Amazon documentary series
Reasons for confidentiality
Ullrich articulates with remarkable clarity what it meant to lose his job and purpose in life overnight, as well as his social environment. "I was hung out the door like a stinking sock," he says in the two-hour interview with podcaster Matze Hielscher, who succeeded more than any other interviewer in drawing Ullrich out of his shell. He has never been so relaxed and open. In Matze's interview, he explains in a vivid and understandable way why he ultimately decided to remain silent. The answer that he didn't want to be a traitor, which earned him criticism in many comments, is not only comprehensible with Matze, but also arouses understanding and compassion.
In 2006, Ullrich found himself in the same position as many of his companions, from Armstrong, Pantani and Virenque to Floyd Landis. It was impossible to confess without exposing the whole system and dragging it into the abyss. Jörg Jaksche had the courage at the time, and from then on he was persona non grata in cycling. Anyone who, like Ullrich, still secretly harboured the hope of returning to the company that had been his family all his life, found it impossible to confess. The alternative was to take everything upon himself and die a martyr's death for the cycling business. But Ullrich wasn't prepared to do that either: "I couldn't be held responsible for an entire system that existed long before me."
Nevertheless, he did not escape this fate in the end. Jan Ullrich's tragedy is that he lost everything, although he wanted to protect himself and the cycling circus. As a convicted doper, cycling played him out - with or without a confession. And in the German public eye, he became a symbolic figure for a dilapidated system, despite or perhaps because of his silence. All of this led him into a deep sense of isolation. He describes to Matze a heaviness that settled over his life. It was a heaviness that he was able to forget from time to time, but which reliably returned again and again and plunged him into depression and drugs.
Jan Ullrich: One like you and me
When his family finally broke away from him as a support, this heaviness almost crushed him for good. Of course, he explains, he always considered going public from time to time. But he had lost the strength to do so. These open words inevitably arouse compassion. When Ullrich admits, for example, that his socialisation prevented him from seeking help, millions of people, especially men, who have struggled with a mental crisis can certainly understand. "I was strong. I had won the Tour de France," Ullrich told Matze. It was only his breakdown in 2018 that made him realise that life is not a bike race and that some things cannot be solved with hardship.
It is not a ground-breaking realisation, but one that was difficult for Jan Ullrich to achieve. By talking openly about it, the 50-year-old brings us out of the remote realms of stardom and back into the human realm. It is also this closeness to us, to the audience, that Jan Ullrich is able to create in the interviews that has made his re-socialisation a success.
The way he talks freely and authentically about his crises and struggles on Matze or Giovanni di Lorenzo in "3 nach 9", for example, makes him once again who he was for the audience in 1997. Someone like you and me, with similar hardships and problems, even if he has moved into regions both in sport and in his mental abysses that most of us will never reach. The fact that he still sometimes struggles for words and just misses the mark only makes him more likeable and approachable.
New life for the hunted
The confession as such, which was sold as a pretext for coming out, pales into insignificance. We already knew that Ullrich doped, like most riders of his generation, and hearing it from his mouth doesn't add much. Especially as Ullrich still hasn't uncovered the people behind the doping or the structures within the team. That is not his job, he says repeatedly. Nevertheless, the path is now clear for him to a new life in the public eye. The doors are open to him again, the relaunch has reconciled Jan Ullrich with Germany and the world. The only scepticism that remains is whether he is really ready to be back in the limelight, where he has been badly burnt several times in his life.
There are many moments in the documentary that hint that he still has a long way to go in overcoming his psychological problems, such as when he talks about the complicated relationship with his father that still haunts him. Now we can only hope that his new, competent counsellor will guide him through the next steps in such a way that his delicate new equilibrium is not damaged in the process.
Epilogue
For this reviewer, Ullrich's opening up was particularly moving. For years I had wished for Ullrich's realisation that the abrupt end to his career and the sudden loss of his livelihood that came with it were the main reasons for his deep crisis. As a former competitive athlete, I have always been able to empathise with this massive break in his biography, which is precisely why Jan Ullrich's tragedy captivated me so deeply. So deeply, in fact, that after 2018 I decided to write a book about it. The fact that Ullrich is now dealing with it openly gives hope not only for him personally, but also that the topic of the difficult transition to life after sport will now receive even wider attention.
Book tip on the subject of Jan Ullrich
Sebastian Moll once followed Ullrich's career as a cycling journalist and looked for milestones and connections in his biography that could explain why the gifted athlete found it so difficult to come to terms with his success and find a fulfilled, contented life after his active time. Moll does a few things differently to other sports biographers in his observations, and this makes his book stand out. He treats Ullrich with both empathy and critical distance, he does not pass judgement but describes and seeks explanations. For the latter, he looks beyond the boundaries of cycling, allows other competitive athletes and scientists from various disciplines to have their say, and highlights ethical and sociological aspects of sport. He also highlights the responsibility of the media, fans and the sporting public, whose behaviour contributes in no small part to the fact that competitive athletes very often have to struggle with psychological problems during and after their careers. Moll's examination of Jan Ullrich's career is an appreciative one, and it is not least this quality that makes this knowledgeable and detailed book well worth reading, even after Ullrich's most recent opening.
