LAST OF THE GREY GUARD
The green jersey in the 1990 Tour de France was won by East German rider Olaf Ludwig, who had emerged from behind the iron curtain as the Berlin Wall fell. Procycling looks at his successful professional career
Thirty years ago this July, one of the great sports trivia questions was brought into the world. It went like this: which cyclist’s stage win in which Tour de France was simultaneously the first and the last ever for his country? The answer: Olaf Ludwig, stage winner at Besançon in the 1990 Tour, scoring the first stage victory in the Tour for East Germany, which was to be reunited with the West that October, bringing to an end 40 years of bitter division. Though riders who’d grown up in East Germany continued to win Tour stages - Ludwig, Erik Zabel - they did so for the unified Germany.
It all happened so fast for men like the ‘East German Sean Kelly’, as one contemporary described Ludwig. Cycling’s ‘grey guard’ - the East Germans in their trademark off-white kit - had dominated amateur cycling since the 1950s but they had been “overtaken by events”, as the headline read in the middle of one of the Guardian’s sports pages on Friday, February 23, 1990. The photograph of Ludwig resplendent in full Panasonic rig by the late Mark Wohlwender sat centre page, below Matthew Engel’s story on the latest moves in the controversial Mike Gatting-Ali Bacher cricket tour of South Africa. Ludwig was the cycling story of that early season, winning his first professional race in stage 1 of the Ruta del Sol, adding two more wins in the Ruta and adding a fourth 12 days later in the Giro di Sicilia. His successes marked a major step in the reunification of German sport after the fall of the Berlin Wall the previous year. His successes, I wrote in that piece in the Guardian, had been “as decisive and surprising as the circumstances which had allowed him out of the country in the first place”.
After the arrival the previous year of the Russian contingent at Alfa Lum, the transfer to the West of the East Germans represented the final fall of the barrier between cyclists east and west. These were surreal times, with 40 years of Cold War concluded in a matter of weeks. The last time I had spoken to an East German - while at university in Russia - the final words said were, “Sorry, I can’t give you my address because if you write to me I will be expelled. I can’t have yours because if they find it on me, I will be sent home.” This was less than four years earlier.
When Mark and I spoke to Ludwig at the Giro di Sicilia - won by Rolf Sørensen - he had been a professional for just four weeks, but he had been one of the world’s leading cyclists for nearly a decade, reflecting a time when the sport’s elite was divided between professionals in the West who raced for money, and ‘amateurs’ in the East who raced for status, privilege and national pride. The hulking, quietly spoken Ludwig had dominated the amateur side of the sport together with the rest of the East German grey guard since 1982, when he had won the Peace Race.
The Warsaw-Berlin-Prague event had turned into Ludwig’s personal fiefdom. He landed 38 stage wins in nine starts, beginning in 1980 just a month after his 20th birthday. In 1988 he landed the amateur side of the sport’s ultimate prize, the Olympic road race title in Seoul. He had twice been East German sportsman of the year, in 1986 and 1988. But those 38 stage wins in the Peace Race summed up the problem he had faced since his early 20s: once you had reached the top of the amateur tree, there was nowhere to go for an ‘Ossie’. Had the wall not fallen, he would have retired that summer.
The Wall had fallen on November 9, and within a few days of this seismic event, Ludwig and his peers in the Grey Guard asked permission from the East German cycling federation to take out professional licences. For all that season they had had their eyes on this prize, having seen their old rivals from the USSR go professional with the Alfa Lum squad. The Russians and the East Germans had shared the spoils in amateur cycling since the 50s, and if the likes of Dimitri Konychev and Andrei Tchmil could perform with the pros, so could the Ossies.
The Federation didn’t respond to Ludwig’s request, most probably because like most of East German officialdom they were desperately trying to catch up with the fastmoving new state of affairs. But only a few months previously such an inquiry would have meant the end of a riders’ career; now the silence could be taken as tacit approval. A middleman in Munich did the business with Peter Post at Panasonic, who had already signed the brightest prospect in the USSR, Viatcheslav Ekimov, like Ludwig a gold medallist in Seoul.
Ludwig’s contract was £50,000, not immense compared to what the likes of Greg LeMond were earning, but more than decent for a rider who would turn 30 that spring. His team-mate, the Olympic team time trial champion Jan Schur - son of the legendary Gustave, twice a Peace Race winner - made the move without an agent, turning to friends in the west to get him a £25,000 contract with Gianni Bugno’s Chateau d’Ax along with Mario Kummer, another team time triallist. The best of the East German crop, Uwe Ampler, winner of three Peace Races in a row from 1987 to 1989, ended up at PDM.
That spring, Ludwig moved to Valkenberg, in the east Dutch enclave of Limburg, hard up against the German border; it was a compromise that reflected the travel difficulties he still faced in heading west from his home in Gera, 70km south of Leipzig, where his wife Heike and their two children had stayed.
In Sicily, Ludwig wasn’t the most forthcoming of interviews, but that was as much a reflection of how new this world was to him as to the fact that the system had taught him to be conservative in what he said. He had had dreams of being a professional, he told me, but “it didn’t dominate me”. He knew full well what it meant: “I would have had to leave my country and never come back. I didn’t want to then, and I don’t now.”
His views on the system that had produced him were nuanced. As one former East German coach explained to me, it consisted of a pyramid with
Ludwig landed two classics wins, Amstel Gold and Henninger Turm, and got close in Roubaix, Omloop and the Worlds
a base consisting of a network of sports clubs linked to major state enterprises - the police, railways, and so on. At the top were half a dozen national cycling centres across the country, each with about 10 trainers who were responsible for maybe 100 athletes. Children were selected from an early age, partly through biometric tests which assessed their suitability for different sports, partly through their parents’ background, partly through selection races.
There were official guidelines but the coaches enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy in setting their own criteria. The athletes’ Stasi files would be consulted - to see whether there were any West German connections for example - but coaches might well deploy a blind eye if someone had real potential but a slightly ‘suspect’ background. “A lot of political capital was made out of our results. The people at the top didn’t care how much they spent,” he said. “Anybody could do any sport without buying equipment - that was very good. We top athletes got so much support but there was a lot of pressure. You had to do certain times or not make the team. If you were not good, you were not looked after, and some were treated unfairly. We got money only for gold medals - it meant that one rider had the chance to pick up 15,000 marks for a world championship win. Many people were only a little inferior to those who got the money.” Ironically, precisely the same criticism was levelled at professional cycling - that only the big winners earned well, while the strong lieutenants who provided vital support took home far less.
By 1990, Ludwig could sense that the system had outlived its usefulness and that the inquest would begin soon. “They didn’t understand how to pay for it all.”
He lamented the fact that the East German officials had never got to grips with the fact that there was huge appetite in the capitalist West to see stars such as himself and sprinter Marita Koch; they could have all benefited financially. Instead, if a rider won a race in the West and the race sponsor published a photo of him with their product, he might face a Stasi interview on his return home, to double check that no payments were involved.
The system produced hard men with a utilitarian side to their bike riding. As pros, their Western team-mates noticed that if 100 kilometres were on the programme the Ossies would simply ride out for 50km on the same road, do a U-turn, then ride back. One told me how when he’d figured that out, he would find a coffee shop at 45km, stop for a coffee, then pick up the former East Germans when they rode back the other way. They observed the training methods: long rides in low gears - maybe 220km in 42x16 - interspersed with climbs tackled flat out in 53x12.
By the time the 1990 Tour de France came around, Ludwig had managed half a dozen more wins to the four he took early on, including stages in the Tour of Switzerland, Three Days of De Panne and Tour de Trump. He had ridden a promising classics campaign, with a top 20 at ParisRoubaix and top 10 at Gent-Wevelgem, which all boded well for July, even though it turned out the Tour wasn’t one for the sprinters, with few opportunities in an unstable race which no team managed to control.
The first real chance at a bunch gallop came on day five, when the race was whisked by a tailwind across Brittany from Nantes to Mont Saint-Michel. Ludwig had just taken the points jersey, and Panasonic made a point of controlling the insanely hectic finale across the flatlands between Pontorson and the causeway leading to the Mont, where a series of crashes split the bunch to ribbons. At the finish, he was third to Johan Museeuw, who was in the sprinter phase of his career before he turned classic
specialist; he started his sprint too early, chose the wrong wheel, the rider ‘died’ 400m out, and there he was.
Panasonic made a mess of the stage 6 finish into Vittel where Guy Nulens and Ekimov failed to control Jelle Nijdam of the big Dutch rivals Buckler, but two days later as the race ran south towards the Alps, the bunch split in the run-in, with a 15-rider group going clear. In the slightly uphill finish, Ludwig was three lengths too good for Museeuw, cementing his grip on the green. There were no more bunch sprints until Paris, but the East German retained the points lead that far, finishing third to Museeuw in the French capital. His consistency had netted him East Germany’s first stage win and green jersey, and reunification that October meant that they would also be the country’s last.
After which, Ludwig was pretty much part of the pro scene’s furniture. He nailed two more Tour stage wins, including the final stage on the Champs-Elysées in 1992 - a fine Panasonic pincer movement with Ekimov in the late break - and a regular string of stage race wins in pretty much every week-long event going. He landed two classic victories, Amstel Gold, and Henninger Turm, and got close to the win in races like Paris-Roubaix, Omloop Het Volk and the World Championships, taking third in the 1993 race in Oslo behind Lance Armstrong and Miguel Indurain.
The big change in German cycling was the foundation of the Telekom team, later T-Mobile, born out of the small-time Stuttgart squad run by Hennie Kuiper. Two years after Walter Godefroot began gathering every decent German rider under the same banner, Ludwig joined up.
So too did Brian Holm, now a DS at Deceuninck-Quick Step. Holm was impressed with the attitude of all the former East Germans - “hard bastards but all gentlemen, who didn’t talk too much” - but most of all with Ludwig: “The hardest man I ever saw, and like Sean Kelly, one of the humblest men I ever met.” The episode that epitomized Ludwig in his eyes came in 1994 at Germany’s biggest one-day race, the GP Frankfurt, when
the Telekom team were placed under pressure by their sponsors, who effectively told them they had to win or their backing would be in jeopardy.
“We chased down a big break, dug deep and Olaf won the sprint. Afterwards, I saw him putting his bike in his car; the seat post was pressed down into the tube. I thought he’d pushed it in, which wasn’t the right thing to do when you packed your bike because you’d scratch the post. I said, ‘Olaf, what are you doing? You have to take it out when you pack it, because you’ll scratch it.’”
A weary Ludwig replied that he hadn’t pushed the seat post into the tube. On the bumpy roads leading into Frankfurt, the fixing bolt had broken and the seat post had dropped down of its own accord. Holm continues: “He said, ‘Brian, I was pedalling with my knees; I had to win, but my legs have never hurt like that’. Most riders in that situation would come back to the finish and have a go at the mechanic, but he was just going to go home and take it to the bike shop. He was from another planet.”
Ludwig would finish his career with T-Mobile, and then worked in management until 2006, when the team was shaken up by the Operation Puerto scandal. The issue that ended his time there was partly the need for new thinking when Bob Stapleton took over in the wake of Puerto, but also a falling out with Andreas Klöden - who stepped in after Jan Ullrich was pulled out at the start as Puerto broke - after the team’s tactics fell to bits in the Pyrenees. These days, he still lives in Gera, and runs cycle tours to Bulgaria.
Cycling’s greatest champions are bred through adversity, be it Fausto Coppi half starving on the farm in Piedmont, or Rik Van Steenbergen peddling watches in post-war Switzerland. That rule certainly applies to Ludwig and his East Bloc brethren, but that’s no reason to celebrate the system that produced them. Its cruelty can be summed up in many ways, but one tale will suffice.
At one race in the mid-1990s, a DS at Telekom decided to search the riders’ rooms to root out fattening snacks, going through their suitcases. Some of the riders - not unreasonably - felt this was an unwelcome invasion of personal privacy, simply going too far. Ludwig and the other Ossies kept quiet. They were asked why they didn’t speak up, and Ludwig replied: “Under the system we grew up with, they did this to us every day.”