Ullrich Is Hailed and Pilloried as Sportsman and Opportunist

By SAMUEL ABT (from a NY Times article, 12 October 2003. Hope it's ok.)

PARIS, Oct. 11 — The strong, silent type whose public utterances are usually limited to "ja" and "nein," Jan Ullrich has lately been talking up a storm.

Two storms, actually. The first involved doubts expressed by Lance Armstrong about what many people acclaimed as Ullrich's sportsmanship in the last Tour de France. The second centers on the long-running soap opera about which bicycle team Ullrich will ride for.

Second things first because they are clear: after leaving the Telekom team, which had been his home since he turned professional in 1995, Ullrich signed with Coast this year. Before Ullrich had a chance to begin racing after a suspension for using the drug Ecstasy, Coast ran out of money and was banned by the sport's authorities.

The Italian bicycle manufacturer Bianchi stepped in and put up the money to keep Ullrich's team on the road and save his comeback season. He finished a surprising second to Armstrong in the Tour in July, then decided he had taken too large a pay cut — probably half of the $2.05 million Coast promised — to continue with Bianchi next year.

So last weekend Ullrich found a new team. In fact, it's an old team: Telekom.

"I think that's where I have the biggest chance to achieve my goals," he said. "It wasn't a question of money, since I had a more interesting offer," presumably from the Italian team Saeco or the Spanish team that is rising from the ashes of iBanesto, but not Bianchi.

The German newspaper Bild has reported that Telekom will pay Ullrich $2.93 million a year in a three-year contract. The money had to be hefty for a rider who will not be 30, a peak age, until December and who has won the Tour once, finished second in it five times and won the Olympic road race in 2000 and the world championship time trial in 1999 and 2001.


Those five second-place finishes, three of them behind Armstrong, influenced the move to Telekom, Ullrich said. "What decided everything was I felt I had been runner-up too often," he explained. "I just want to beat Lance, and to do that I need a strong team."


Jacques Hanegraaf, a former Dutch rider who now heads the Bianchi team, was unavailable for comment on his negotiations with Ullrich. Hanegraaf may not have been returning phone calls because he suspects they deal with the first storm, about which he has been questioned repeatedly.

In the 15th of 20 daily stages in the last Tour, a weakened and somewhat demoralized Armstrong was clinging to a small lead over Ullrich in the overall standing at the start of the major climb in the Pyrenees, 99 miles, to the peak of Luz Ardiden.

With about five and a half miles left and the leaders bunched, Armstrong, who heads the United States Postal Service team and was seeking his fifth straight Tour victory, edged too close to the spectators.

In his new autobiography, "Every Second Counts," Armstrong tells what happened next: "A flash of yellow caught my eye. A small kid was holding a yellow Tour souvenir bag, whipping it back and forth. Uh-oh, I'm going to catch that thing, I thought.

"Suddenly, the bag was tangled on the handle of my brake. I felt the bike jerk violently beneath me — it flipped over sideways. It was as though I had been garroted. I went straight down and landed on my right hip, hard."

He took a Spanish rider, Iban Mayo, down with him. Ullrich was riding behind Armstrong, off a bit to his left. Television images showed Ullrich looking straight ahead as he passed the two men sprawled on the road.


The two remounted and continued the climb. Armstrong's right foot came out of the pedal and he swerved and nearly crashed again, jostling Mayo. Finally they made it back to the leaders, including Ullrich.

What had the leaders been doing while Armstrong was decked?

The sport's unwritten code of conduct dictates that nobody take advantage of a leader who has crashed. Two years earlier, Armstrong waited after Ullrich, a prime contender but not the race's leader, missed a left turn and went off the road and down into a gully. Had Ullrich repaid that act?

The controversy begins here.

Everybody agrees that the leaders slowed when Tyler Hamilton, a former lieutenant to Armstrong with Postal Service but then the leader of the rival CSC team, came to the front and yelled at them to wait. They did, but had Ullrich already eased off?

"Afterward," Armstrong wrote in his new book, "Ullrich would be credited with sportsmanship for waiting. But in retrospect, I'm not so sure he did wait. In replays, he seems to me to be riding race tempo. He didn't attack, but he didn't wait, either — not until Tyler accelerated in front and waved at them to slow down and yelled, `Hold up!' "

Armstrong made the same charge earlier, in an interview with the Outdoor Life Network in the United States. "I watched the footage and I'm not so convinced that Jan Ullrich was waiting," he said. "Everyone said that, and that was the `feel good' story, but after watching the footage, I'm not so sure he was waiting."

Others agreed, but some spectators' opinions differed. The German Olympic Committee awarded Ullrich a fair-play medal. A torrent of letters from his homeland both congratulated him for sportsmanship and denounced him for letting Armstrong rejoin the leaders and zip away for a victory in the stage and, ultimately, the Tour.

"The television footage, which I remember perfectly, speaks for itself," Ullrich said recently. "I simply want to say that if this happened again, I would do the same thing. In our sport, which is so difficult, fair play is always written in letters of gold."

Hanegraaf, predictably, supports Ullrich. "He said that?" an incredulous Hanegraaf asked the British magazine Procycling when it relayed Armstrong's comments. "Jan Ullrich avoided the crash and stayed upright, and then he waited. He kept going because if he'd have gone much slower he'd have had to stop. I can only say that Jan waited because that's what I saw."

The magazine also printed letters and e-mail messages from 31 fans, mainly Americans. They divided fairly evenly between those who thought Ullrich had waited and those who thought he had not.

A few even denounced Armstrong for attacking, and winning, on the rest of the climb to Luz Ardiden. Somehow or other, this was deemed unsportsmanlike.

 

Return to BRinIN