PAST IMPERFECT

HOW DID GERMANY COPE WITH ITS DISGRACED HEROES?

As cycling continues its (largely pointless) post-Armstrong navel gazing, it could do worse than to look to Germany. The sport there was deeply wounded by the revelations that the greats Jan Ullrich and Eric Zabel had doped. Ciolek, though, is pragmatic about what they did, and about their legacy:

“It’s easy to have a go at those guys in retrospect but they simply conformed to the cycling paradigm back then. Obviously you can’t defend doping but neither should you just assume that they’re all bad people. I suppose when you deal with that era, you have to avoid making judgments about their morality. You just have to accept that the sport was different back then.

“We also need to admit that they inspired huge numbers of people to get out and ride, including kids like me. I started riding because I saw Jan Ulrich win the Tour and you could apply that to hundreds of thousands of Germans. The sport has been through a terrible time off the back of the EPO years but without Ullrich and Zabel, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”