webvan said:
Good thread, bottom line is we'll have to wait till Ullrich decides to come clean...if he ever does. Common sense would tend to indicate that he decided to go to Fuentes after the 2004 tour fiasco after being convinced he'd win the tour after coming so close in 2003.
On the other hand his 2004 and 2005 tour performances may have been hampered by his huge muscles, compared to the lean and mean look of 1996 and 1997, does anyone know his TDF weight for each year he participated? He looked closer to that in 2006...
Someone mentioned that Ullrich was sick on the Alp du'ez in '03, though I've never heard that. Thought it was just one of his bad days - and quite typical of Jan to have that on the first big day in the mountains.
That differed to his poor performances in the first mountain stages of '04, when he was definitely sick - it has been documented that he picked up a flu/virus right on the eve of The Tour.
Even if Ullrich had joined Fuentes before the '05 Tour, it wasn't really going to give him a chance of winning as even Basso was too good for him in the mountains, and I thought that Jan's form was good in that race except for his typical struggle to Courchavel (excuse my bad spelling, can't be bothered looking up exact names and often I don't remember them anyway!) which was the first high mountain stage. But then there was '06......
I can remember seeing Jan looking extremely lean and mean when the OP scandal hit. I think that Ullrich was the likely winner of his second Tour then. Nice ITT win at The Giro, victory in the overall at the Tour of Swiss - and Basso may have already burned himself out from The Giro (though on/in that form Jan could not have beaten him). Plus, as we saw in the actual race, T-Mobile had the strongest squad. Imagine all of those guys (with all that extra help
) supporting Ullrich! And as a minor example, on that Alp du'ez stage, when only Landis could ride with Kloden, imagine if Ullrich was working alongside of him? Though of course the same could be said for the Sastre/Basso partnership, among others.