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