Summary of Daniel Friebe's Jan Ullrich

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#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.

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Sports

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 24 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822547193
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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 their case, Dynamo Berlin. They had caused a sensation a few months earlier by leading Dynamo Rostock West to victory in the district championship four-man team time trial.

#16

Ullrich was born to ride, but his genetic predisposition nearly turned into too much of a good thing. In a medical check-up shortly before KJS selection weekend, a doctor in Rostock noticed what he believed was an irregularity in Ullrich’s heartbeat. But Ullrich simply had an unusually large heart and slow pulse, which were two indicia of his exceptional aerobic abilities.

#17

Sager, the coach, has been training kids for nearly half a century. He has seen many more stories of unfulfilled potential than fairy tales. The art of coaching was to get the message across.

#18

The story of East Germany and its sports miracle, which was achieved by training its athletes and giving them financial incentives, has been turned into a chemical formula that ignores the extent to which that apparatus relied on massive funding, political indoctrination, and material incentives.

#19

In August 1987, Jan Ullrich’s mother, Marianne, drove him to Berlin to see him fly the family nest. She was nervous about seeing her Jani fly, but excited about seeing him in Berlin. The city had changed little since Bowie had moved out of his apartment in Schöneberg.

#20

The DDR sports system was as notorious for its secrecy as it was for its discipline. One nickname for Becker was a hard dog, meaning that his bark was as bad as his bite.

#21

I had a tour of Becker’s house, which was full of taxidermy and cycling trophies. He was a lifelong naturalist and graduate of forestry school. He loved to talk.

#22

The story of how Peter Becker fell in love with cycling is a simple one. He saw his first bike in 1949, at age eleven, in Bad Belzig, an hour west of Berlin. He began competing in races like the Little Peace Race for junior riders.

#23

The DDR, East Germany, used sports to glorify their fascist tendencies. They were determined to ruin the festivities at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by systematically and illegally doping their athletes.

#24

The DDR method was to differentiate biological and chronological age, and it was common practice in DDR sports schools to differentiate between them. Ullrich was still awaiting his growth spurt, but he was already receiving training that was lighter than usual.

#25

The process of refinement was a time-consuming one. Ullrich would spend three to four hours on the bike every morning, then afternoons in the classroom at the Werner-Seelenbinder high school. He would ride around 6,000 kilometres in his first year in Berlin, 9,000 in his second, and 13,000 in his third.

#26

The DDR’s hermetically sealed simulacrum was a lot different from the illusion of a socialist utopia. It was a rigid routine, and Ullrich thrived within it. He enjoyed and thrived within the framework of a rigid routine, as long as he didn’t have to create that structure himself.

#27

Ullrich had no trouble adjusting to life in East Germany. He lined up in the B-Youth category in the DDR national road race championships, and won by over two minutes. He received a white jersey decorated with the black, red, and gold bands of the national flag.

#28

The highpoint of Ullrich’s second year at Dynamo Berlin was in July 1989, when around 2,000 of the DDR’s most talented junior athletes converged on Berlin for the event that exemplified the spirit, reach, and goals of the DDR sport system.

#29

In November 1989, the first crossings between the East and West German governments took place, and the Berlin Wall fell. In November 2019, Germans were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the moment when, as I kept reading in the papers, the fear switched sides.

#30

The subject of the German occupation of the East is so ubiquitous in the conversations of most Germans over thirty that it hardly seems to need a week of parties, exhibitions, and public debates to remember it. However, this introspection is far more intense since the 2015 refugee crisis.

#31

After November 1989, things in the sports schools didn’t change all that much. In 1990, Ullrich and Becker traveled to Middlesbrough in the United Kingdom for the world championships, and they did better indoors than out.

#32

Between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays, from December 1989 to December 1990, Ullrich grew twelve centimetres. In January 1991, he became the first former East German cyclist to win a medal in a unified national competition.

#33

For many in the East, the door to adulthood had swung open at the same time as one leading to a land of new opportunity. But for Mark Scheppert’s generation, life was just beginning.

#34

The story of how Jan Ullrich came to Hamburg and to Strohband was a perfect post-Wende feel-good story. It was a tale of new opportunity, blessed happenstance, and unification that could not have come about otherwise.

#35

The team had money, a team name, and identity. They just needed to find their riders and a coach to manage them. They met with Strohband in 1991, and he offered them a house on the outskirts of Hamburg, and apprenticeships similar to the ones they had in Berlin. Five riders signed up: Becker’s son Erik, Michael Giebelmann, Ralf Grabsch, André Korff, and Jan Ullrich.

#36

In mid-February, Becker drove his sons to the Costa Blanca for a training camp. They were initially offered positions at a BMW plant, but the invitation was withdrawn when Strohband and Peter Becker made it clear that their riders needed afternoons off to train.

#37

Ullrich was a talented rider, but he was also extremely lazy. He knew how to ride a bike, but he didn’t bother about anything else. He was extremely lucky with many things in his life, and he was often very comfortable.

#38

When the German team was choosing room-mates for the Norwegian race, Ullrich was paired with Lutz Lehmann, who was the oldest member of the team. Lehmann was a mentor to Ullrich, and they had battled frequently in Bundesliga races.

#39

Ullrich was the youngest world amateur champion since Eddy Merckx in