JAN "ULLIRICH THE BEST THERE NEVER WAS

Cycling Plus reviews Daniel Friebe's biography of Jan Ullrich, Germany's only Tour de France winner 25 years ago

- John Whitney

While Tadej Pogačar's seemingly unstoppable rise may have been checked by Jonas Vingegaard at this summer's Tour de France, the Slovenian had perhaps already done enough in his short career to be the living embodiment of the equation for cycling domination referenced many times in Daniel Friebe's Jan Ullrich biography: that if you took the physiology of Jan Ullrich and the psychology of Erik Zabel, or Lance Armstrong, or any other iron-willed rider of that generation, you'd have a 10-time Tour de France winner on your hands.

Zabel, who like Ullrich, grew up in communist East Germany, was a team-mate of Ullrich's on the German Telekom team for almost the entirety of Ullrich's career and his six-year winning streak of the Tour de France's green jersey was a sequence as metronomic and reliable as Ullrich's career was turbulent and unpredictable.

Turbulent and unpredictable, that is, in his form, weight, behaviour, self-esteem and motivation. Because when it mattered - annually, at the Tour de France - Ullrich was remarkably consistent in his results, a fact that Friebe is at pains to point out in his introduction and one that is often overlooked in the Ullrich story in favour of the over-eating caricature. He may have missed the race through injury twice, but including his debut in 1996 it took until the 2004 race for him to finish outside the top two (a win in 1997, and five second places). Without Armstrong, he'd have been a winner many times over.