In Strasbourg everything should be as it used to be for a brief moment. That’s why the 1st Jan Ullrich Fan Club took part. Five men and two women, their hair long gray, set out to film a documentary about their hero, in whom many only see the fallen fraudster. They sing a song for Ullrich, accompanied by guitar and accordion, and hold a banner in their hands: “Merdingen greets Jan Ullrich”. Faded magenta caps from the then sponsor Telekom mix with new Ullrich merchandise. Past and present. Ullrich signs shirts. He laughs. Then he climbs into the saddle of his shiny gold Pinarello racing bike and sets off.
A man wants to escape his demons on a racing bike. This is what the four-part documentary “The Hunted” is about, in which Jan Ullrich has been trying to fight his way back into the middle of society since Tuesday on Amazon Prime. The fan club’s appearance appears to be a production. Like so many things in what is announced in the film as Ullrich’s “Way of St. James”. For Ullrich, confronted with old challenges, with memories of uplifting triumphs and humiliating failures, the filming should act like therapy.
“At the beginning he didn’t want to do it,” says Mike Baldinger, Ullrich’s manager and business partner, in an interview with the FAZ: “I said: We have to unlock the door, otherwise you won’t be able to get out of this thing. The more we talked about it, the more he was convinced to go to Arcalis, to Alpe d’Huez. I said, do you think I’d like to take you off the island in the coffin sometime? That’s why we looked into Pantani.”
“I chose life”
Like an amateur rider, Ullrich takes on the climb in the Pyrenees on which he won the Tour in 1997 with a solo. He puffs and pedals patiently in the Alps’ most famous switchbacks, where in 2001 Lance Armstrong outsmarted him by simulating weakness before beating Ullrich. And he visits the father and mother of Marco Pantani, who was highly doped and died of a drug overdose, whose fate he could only have narrowly escaped: “The point was that five years ago I had this extreme life crisis, this crash in my life, which I barely survived “, says Ullrich in an interview with ARD: “I then switched, I decided for life. After that I had to completely rethink how things got to this point. What else I want from life.”
You can tell from the many interviews with which Ullrich approaches his former audience that he has only just begun to process things. Saying “yes, I doped,” as he did last week at the film premiere in Munich, was probably a more significant step for him than for the public, who had been able to see him as a doper for 17 years. Ullrich becomes noticeably more specific in his memories, more certain in his self-assessment, and more relaxed in his demeanor. But he remains on the surface.
