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Hello, I'm Lionel Bernie and in this episode of the Cycling Podcast you're going to hear

a conversation between me and Daniel Freib because a couple of weeks ago on the jurid

Italian rest day in a Brutso, Daniel and I sat down with a pre-prandial glass of white

wine to talk about a project that has just like a fine wine itself taken a number of years

to mature. Daniel's biography of the German cyclist Jan Ulrich is published this week. It's

called The Best They Never Was and it's been years in the making. There was a research

and writing that goes into any book project of course but also a sense of responsibility

to the subject who had had some very well publicised difficulties with depression and alcohol

use in the years since his retirement. It's an intriguing subject because Ulrich

burst onto the scene in 1996 when as a relative unknown he finished second in the Tour de France

behind his telecom teammate, Björner Eres. The following year still aged only 23,

Ulrich won the Tour by 9 minutes and it seemed that if the sport was in front of an era of total

domination by the German. After that though Ulrich's career did not run smoothly. There was an

era of domination of course, Lance Armstrong came back from cancer and won the Tour seven times in a row.

Ulrich was the nearly man of that era, second to Armstrong three times, third once and fourth once.

And when the American retired the first time round in 2005 Ulrich looked set for a battle with

Ivan Basso for the right to assume Armstrong's crown. Except neither he nor Basso got the chance

because both were revealed to be clients of the blood-doping doctor Ufemiano Fuentes and they left

Strasbourg in disgrace on the eve of the 2006 Tour de France. Ulrich never raced again.

I was really interested to hear from Daniel about the process of writing the book and first of all

...