Cycling star is back
Distance over 312 kilometers: Jan Ullrich is pedaling again in races
Jan Ullrich, here at the Tour de Suisse in June 2005, is back in the saddle.
© Eddy Risch / DPA
For a long time it was quiet around Germany’s former cycling king Jan Ullrich. The 47-year-old competed in a race for the first time on Sunday – for him, however, something else was in the foreground.
With a race over 312 kilometers, the former Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich has made an impressive return to cycling. In the “Mallorca 312” race on Sunday, the 47-year-old completed the full distance in around eleven hours and was one and a half hours behind the winner, Dominic Aigner, who was also from Germany. “It was a dream,” said Ullrich to radsportnews.com about the race. Mallorca was simply a dream for cyclists and the race was perfectly organized.
The race started early in the morning and the sun rose on the way over the Puig Major, at 1,445 meters the largest mountain on the island. “That was just fantastic,” the site quotes the former German cycling star. In the Everyman’s Race with around 4,500 participants, other former cycling greats also started. Ullrich’s former competitor Joseba Beloki completed the full distance in around 12.5 hours, the former tour winners Miguel Indurain and Alberto Contador drove shorter distances.
On Saturday, Ullrich had already expressed his love for cycling at an event before the race. “Cycling is my drug! Finally I’m back in the big cycling family,” he said according to radsportnews.com. He spent six months preparing for the race on the Balearic Island, and last drove a distance of 300 kilometers in 2002 or 2003. However, more important than the result is to have fun and reach the finish line without falling.
Jan Ullrich has been back in the spotlight since September
Jan Ullrich, who had hit the headlines again and again after retiring in 2006 because of health problems, had withdrawn from the public three years ago. At the end of September, the cycling star was seen on a bike tour in Mallorca together with the former tour winner Lance Armstrong. The former rivals have become friends, the American wrote in a post on Twitter. Ullrich himself recently posted a photo together with Tadej Pogacar. The 23-year-old is the star of the cycling scene and won the Tour de France and a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and 2021.
Source: radsport-news.com