JAN ULLRICH THE BEST THERE NEVER WAS

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