The End of the Road by Alasdair Fotheringham

Author:Alasdair Fotheringham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

13

The Exception to the Rule

Tuesday, 28 July. Stage 16: Vizille–Albertville, 204 km

A former reporter for a news agency used to make an odd boast about Jan Ullrich. The journalist would claim that every early spring at Ullrich’s start-of-season press conference when the 1997 Tour winner outlined his objectives for that year, the German’s comments would be so predictably similar to those of the previous January that he would write up the entire event, complete with quotes, beforehand. Two minutes after the press conference was over, much to the bewilderment of his competitors, he would have stepped outside the auditorium and filed his copy.

That was when Ullrich was racking up one runner’s-up or podium spot after another behind Lance Armstrong, alternating them each January with increasingly unlikely claims that the following July he would be defeating Armstrong. Back at the start of his career, however, Ullrich was still occasionally able to take the world by surprise. That was, arguably, never so true as on stage 16 of the 1998 Tour. Twenty-four hours after suffering what amounts to possibly the worst ever defeat of his career, on the Tour’s second to last mountain stages Ullrich launched what would prove to be, in hindsight, one of his most courageous attacks. Although the move seemed more designed to prove his own strength to himself and his team after a stinging setback on stage 15, outside Telekom the question of whom it would affect the most of the overall contenders was the main point of interest.

Crucially, Ullrich’s comeback, launched on the hardest climb of the stage, the Madeleine, was not damaging to Pantani although it proved a severe test. The Tour’s new maillot jaune was able to follow Ullrich’s move although the Italian admitted later that it had been touch and go. ‘He told me that if Ullrich had gone half a kilometre an hour faster up that climb, he’d have cracked,’ Traversoni recalls. Instead, the day after Pantani had left Ullrich without his yellow jersey, on stage 16 the Tour’s top two adversaries formed an alliance. Their collaboration strengthened Pantani’s overall domination and simultaneously regained Ullrich time on the two riders who had eased Ullrich off the two lower steps of the podium on stage 15 as well: Julich and Escartín.

Once Pantani’s ability to retain his overall lead had been tested and not found wanting, albeit by a very narrow margin, Ullrich’s move developed into a classic example of how the old adage ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ can play out in high-level stage racing. It was, essentially, an open admission that a second straight victory in the Tour was no longer possible. Six days out of Paris, rather than oust Pantani from the game altogether the fight for the right to stand next to the Italian on the final podium had begun. What was so unusual was that here was Ullrich, a rider who had hammered out a reputation for his time trialling skills and for entrenching himself behind his support riders on all but the most set-piece of mountain attacks, opting to tear up the script.

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