Summary of Daniel Friebe's Jan Ullrich

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Jan Ullrich was a professional cyclist who was widely expected to win the Tour de France in 1997. He had been second place to Bjarne Riis the previous year. Pressure was building in the Deutsche Telekom camp over the first week and a half of racing, and Ullrich’s room-mate, Jens Heppner, spoke for many of the Telekom riders when he told Ullrich that he was stronger than Riis.

#2 Ullrich’s attack marked the arrival of a new virtuoso. It was a moment of exhilarating performance, and it redrew the sport’s landscape within a matter of minutes.

#3 The heady quarter of an hour since his attack, no comparison had seemed too outlandish. How many Tours would Ullrich end up winning. In the coming days, Bernard Hinault predicted that Ullrich would be unbeatable for the next ten years.

#4 Greg LeMond, a former champion, had grown disillusioned with what professional cycling had become. He had heard about Ullrich, and was curious to see for himself. He came to feel that everything that had enraptured him when he had seen the Tour for the first time in 1994 was present in 2017.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822547193

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on Daniel Friebe's Jan Ullrich

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Jan Ullrich was a professional cyclist who was widely expected to win the Tour de France in 1997. He had been second place to Bjarne Riis the previous year. Pressure was building in the Deutsche Telekom camp over the first week and a half of racing, and Ullrich’s room-mate, Jens Heppner, spoke for many of the Telekom riders when he told Ullrich that he was stronger than Riis.

#2

Ullrich’s attack marked the arrival of a new virtuoso. It was a moment of exhilarating performance, and it redrew the sport’s landscape within a matter of minutes.

#3

The heady quarter of an hour since his attack, no comparison had seemed too outlandish. How many Tours would Ullrich end up winning. In the coming days, Bernard Hinault predicted that Ullrich would be unbeatable for the next ten years.

#4

Greg LeMond, a former champion, had grown disillusioned with what professional cycling had become. He had heard about Ullrich, and was curious to see for himself. He came to feel that everything that had enraptured him when he had seen the Tour for the first time in 1994 was present in 2017.

#5

After the Wall fell in 1989, Germany was officially unified, but people’s identities were still fractured and fragmented. When a East Berliner named Mark Scheppert took his girlfriend to see the first German winner of the Tour de France, Jan Ullrich, in 1997, it brought a lot of inspiration and hope for the East Germans.

#6

The East German athlete Franziska van Almsick, the swimmer, was the only East German to become world champion in 1997. The majority of the top sportsmen now were born in a unified Germany, but for a long time it was a big thing when someone from the East achieved something.

#7

The greatest road cyclist that Germany has ever seen was a mistake, the result of a miscalculation similar to the ones he would commit in adulthood. His mother, Marianne, had given birth to him nine months earlier.

#8

Rostock, the city where Jan Ullrich grew up, is a beautiful and peaceful Baltic Sea town that has a proud maritime-mercantile past. It is also the home to the oldest university in Northern Europe.

#9

Jan Ullrich’s life was shaped by two different worlds. The light world represented by his mother and father, and the dark world represented by his brother’s behavior.

#10

The author stayed around long enough to leave his son with another indelible souvenir, a scar just above the hairline inflicted when Jan was six for some unspecified sleight or misdemeanor. Soon, though, it had been so long since his last visit that Jan assumed they would never see him again.

#11

In 1980, Jan Ullrich was one of nearly 300,000 East German six- and seven-year-olds walking through the gates of a primary school. At some point over the next year, most but not all of that number would be put through the first phase of ESA screening.

#12

Peter Sager, the coach of Jan Ullrich, was responsible for finding and nurturing the young cyclists capable of graduating first to Dynamo’s main star academy in Berlin.

#13

Ullrich’s competitive fire was smoldering. He was obsessed with cycling, and he never messed around. He was a simple lad who never skived off or cheated in tests. He was given so much by Mother Nature.

#14

The Ullrich family moved to Rostock in 1986, and Stefan was sent to the athletics club in Berlin. Jan had turned thirteen by then, and the family was climbing the social ladder.

#15

In the spring of 1987, Ullrich and Korff faced their judgement day – the trials to determine which young cyclists would be delegated to a residential KJS, in