by Jens Voigt
Was it a hard period? Yes! Geez, I was just 14 years old when I started. I was missing home and at the same time seeing some of my friends go home and quit. We lost the first kid after just a month. And another went home for Christmas and didn’t come back.
It was just a very hard time for me. For the first 14 years of my life, I had lived pretty much a pressure-free existence. And all of a sudden, I was surrounded by pressure. Sports school was all about making the grade, about being good enough, something I’d never once questioned before.
In addition, I had grown up in a very harmonious family. I wasn’t used to being all alone. And because I was spending so much time training, my grades suffered. But I kept telling myself, “No, no, you can’t go home!” My parents loved me and always said I could come home. But I also knew that they were proud of me and where I was going. They never put pressure on me, but I really didn’t want to let them down. The result was that already at the age of 14 or 15, I was confronted with my first make-or-break moment.
To be honest, there were definitely some points when I thought about throwing in the towel. But, fortunately, I had some good friends who were there for me, and I learned a lot about myself and really grew as a person. And it wasn’t like I could just pick up and go home, either. My parents didn’t have a car at the time—they were still waiting to receive their first one—and they lived 300 kilometers away. So it wasn’t like I could go home crying whenever I wanted. No, I just had me!
Things started to improve after that first year, but in those first years in the sports school, I learned that you need a team to succeed . . . that you can’t always be the strongest, and that sports, like life, are about taking and giving. Now this happened to coincide perfectly with everything they were teaching us in school about the kollektiv, the collective, which was about taking and giving so that the stronger help the weaker. Nobody was saying, “If you’re going to have a career, then you’ve got to use your elbows.” That sort of mentality just didn’t exist!
The old sports school system also taught me how to deal with pressure, because like I said, it was always there. We were always being tested. And being selected was no pleasure cruise. All it meant was that I was going to be tested again and again. In the beginning, nearly 150 kids entered the program from all around the country, but by the time they got done with the elimination process, only about 15 riders qualified. So you really had no choice but to get used to working under pressure.
Yet while the East German system was very much based on working for the common good, the bike taught me the need to also fend for myself. Individualism, of course, was not part of the East German mentality, but something strange happened to me on a bike that made me question such ideas, because when I was in my third year of sports school, I won my first road race. Ironically, it was a race in which I was the only member of my team present. How crazy is that? That was a huge event for me, and it made me question a lot about myself and what I had been taught. I’d won some time trials previously, but this was a road race. I realized in that race that there were no safety nets. There was no one else to save the situation but myself. There was no coach telling me what to do, what to eat, when to attack. It was at that race that I first understood that once I took things into my own hands, I was a lot better than I thought. I’ll never forget that race. The weather was shitty all day, and in the final, there were only about 25 guys left. I was looking for the right moment, and finally I attacked about 3 kilometers from the finish. I just went full gas, and I won.
I was ecstatic, of course, but it was bizarre, too, because I did it alone. It was strange. Were my teammates just bringing me down? That thought did enter my mind. But mostly it just gave me a lot of confidence in myself. I realized that I didn’t have to be a follower, that if I believed in myself, things could work out, too! Because I didn’t win straightaway when I arrived at KJS Ernst Grube, I’d become much more of a worker, just doing what people told me. But from then on, I raced with a lot more self-confidence.
Nothing came easy in sports school, but the lessons I learned there served me well once I turned professional. I often say, in fact, that I had the best of both worlds.
Sports, of course, were superimportant in East Germany, and the school system worked closely with the sports system to find and develop talent. It was a very, very expansive system, and in many ways very successful. Obviously, we’ve learned, looking back, that it was a deeply flawed system, rife with doping. That said, we have learned in recent years that the other side was not much better, as doping among the West German teams has been widely reported. In retrospect, the Olympics were really nothing more than a clash of the titans.
Nevertheless, the East German system was very successful in its ability to identify and develop talent from a young age. And that aspect of the sports system has remained in place in Germany even today, long after the collapse of Communism.
It would have been impossible for me to spend so many years on the road as a cyclist without a good selection of books. (James Startt)
READING
“I want to open a bookstore where I am my own best customer.”
For most kids growing up, books, music, and movies play an important role at one point or another. I was no exception, even though the East German government censored everything that we read, listened to, or watched.
Nina Hagen was the enfant terrible of the German scene. She was so wild that the East Germans were actually happy to let her out to go to the West. She was just so different, so crazy, that people knew about her even without the social media outlets of today. To be honest, I wasn’t too into her music, but we sure talked about it a lot.
Some Western groups even made it across the airwaves to us. Duran Duran was just huge, and Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were getting big despite the censorship. That said, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” never did get played on East German radio!
For me, though, the big band I remember was Karat, as in “14-karat gold.” They had a song called “Seven Bridges.” It was about someone who was in prison for seven years, and each year he would cross another bridge toward freedom. I guess you could say it was a sort of metaphor for life under Communist rule; I’m not sure. And I’m also not quite sure how it passed censorship, to be honest. But it was a very popular song.
From a very young age, however, reading became a central part of my life, a great pastime as I got more and more involved in sports. It provided a perfect counterbalance.
Like pretty much everyone, I learned to read at the age of 6 or 7, and it just opened an entirely new world to me. I could get absorbed in books and spend hours with them alone in my room.
I loved adventure books by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper. I just loved stories such as The Last of the Mohicans. I loved learning about the Indians. And Cooper’s books were authorized by the East German authorities because the Indians’ struggle against the white man was seen as a sort of struggle against capitalism, and of course, the Communist regime liked anybody who was against capitalism!
And then there was Jack London, probably my all-time favorite writer. He, too, was authorized in East Germany because he was an early supporter of Socialism. And he has at least three books on my all-time favorites list. White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and Klondike Tales are right up there with Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass. As I got older, I also read more challenging books, such as The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. But I never forgot those adventure novels I read as a kid.
I just loved the simplicity of London’s writing. There’s always a central figure caught in this amazing struggle to survive against all odds. In order to do so, he can leave nothing to chance. It’s actually not unlike what a lot of cyclists go through when trying to get through a hard race such as the Tour de France.
Reading helped me. It was sort of an escape from reality, a dream. And still today, I dream of one day spending a winter in Alaska, out in the wild. The great o
utdoors just fascinates me. And whenever I go to a hotel that has the Discovery Channel available, I love to watch documentaries about people living in the bush, out in the wild.
In all honesty, I think that the adventurous spirit conveyed in such books had a profound impact on my worldview; you know, the way I look at life, my perspective on things.
I’ve always had a desire to make my own footprints on the path of life. And as I like to say, if you only follow other people, you never make your own footprints, and nobody ever notices that you’ve been here.
Those are big words, I know, but yes, I would like to leave something that’s bigger than me behind. I’d like to do that, be it by leaving my name in the record books or by having children. Some people build houses or make art, and I’ve always been looking for my own ways to leave a footprint.
I sometimes joked that when I finally retired from cycling, I wanted to open a bookstore where I would be my own best customer. Now that was never very realistic, because such a venture won’t pay the bills for my six kids. But it never stopped me from reading!
Even when we’re racing and training a lot, cyclists have a lot of downtime. And I love to use that time reading. Now I know a lot of guys have trouble reading at a bike race because, well, when you’re really exhausted, you get kind of “bike dumb.” Some guys are just too tired or always thinking about the race. Heck, sometimes after racing really hard, you’re barely able to pronounce your name, let alone spell it. But for me, reading has always provided a wonderful release.
A lot of my teammates just looked at me in disbelief with all my books. Every year before the Tour de France, for example, I went to my favorite little bookshops in Berlin—not the Internet, but real bookshops—and bought three books, one for each week of the race. My teammates were always saying, “Wait, isn’t that a new book again?” And each time I would just say, “Yeah!”
Now guys like Frank and Andy Schleck were honest and admitted that when they were racing, they couldn’t even get beyond the introduction of a book, let alone read an entire book. And they actually tried! They saw that reading helped me relax. So sometimes they would bring books along, too. But they just didn’t have the patience or energy during a hectic race to read them. But hey, they were always pretty good at Guitar Hero!
That said, there is a real correlation between the difficulty of the race I’m competing in and the difficulty of the book I can read. At a small race, such as the Tour du Poitou-Charentes, for example, I can tackle tough books. That’s where I read Peeling the Onion. Günter Grass was a former East German writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1999. His books are tremendous, but dense. They would be impossible to read during the Tour de France, for example. There, it’s just “books with colorful pages,” as my wife, Stephanie, says, basically page-turners. When it comes to page-turners, I’ve been a big fan of science fiction, conspiracy stories, and thrillers. Page-turners at a bike race are great. You can read 10 pages before you get on a plane, 10 pages on the team bus. I can always find time to read 10 pages.
I was never really the type of rider that always talked about his race and how many watts he pushed around what corner, and what gear ratio he pushed on what descent. Some people can recite every stage winner in the last 10 years of the Tour. That’s just mind-blowing. It’s so impressive to me. But that is just not me.
For me, cycling was always a great job, but I was also really glad when the day was done. And when it was done, that was exactly what it was—done! After I climbed into the team bus and took a shower, I put my mind on rewind, opened my book, and went back to reading where I left off.
My approach does have its drawbacks. The problem for me was that I never could remember my races. Guys will remember a particular race and say, “Oh man! Do you remember this or that climb? Oh, that was hard!” But I’m just like, “Sorry, no!”
You would think that with 17 Tours de France under my belt, I would know every finish in the Tour. But no, I don’t. Okay, I remember Alpe d’Huez and some of the big climbs, but there are plenty I just can’t remember. So while sometimes my approach to reading and riding can be an advantage, sometimes it can also be a disadvantage. I mean, it helps me to not be a complete bike nerd. Striving to maintain such a balance may have allowed me to maintain something resembling a normal personality. But it’s definitely a disadvantage when I don’t know where I’m going in a race!
Standing in front of the high school building of my sports school. (James Startt)
GERMAN UNIFICATION
“It’s easy to get lost in the land of abundance!”
After the wall came down, my life was suddenly filled with all sorts of possibilities. But it was also filled with questions I’d never asked myself before: questions such as, “How do I make a living racing my bike?”
In East Germany, my life was pretty much spelled out for me. As long as I continued to perform well and get results, I was treated as an elite athlete, a professional basically. Okay, that didn’t mean I was going to earn a huge salary or anything, but it would have secured me a four-room apartment—pretty much the biggest apartment available—in Berlin. The state would have given me a car without my waiting for 15 years, and I would have had plenty of money for food and clothes each month.
Once the Wall came down, I suddenly had the capacity to earn far more money than I’d ever dreamed possible. But I also had to figure out how to do it on my own. Somehow I had to be able to get to the races and get the results needed to attract a major professional team to offer me a contract.
For many of us East German athletes, the army provided the best option, because it provided security. So for four-and-a-half years, I was a soldier! Now the army, you have to remember, is one of the most important and valuable sponsors for German sports in general. If you’re in the army, you have a job, an official job with social security, retirement benefits, everything. And if you were a member of the special sports school or the German national team, like I was, the military duty was actually minimal. Once a month, I remember, I had to drive to an army base in Frankfurt, change into my army uniform, and stand guard duty for 24 hours. But once that was done, it was back into my cycling uniform and racing my bike! So mostly the army provided me with a practical way to have time to train and race.
And let’s not forget the most important part. Back in the day, the German army—and this was important for me—was not a fighting army. With Germany’s history in the 20th century, we were pretty much guaranteed not to go into any war. That’s not the case anymore. Today the army is voluntary, and they have participated in a lot of military actions: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Mali, and so on. But one reason the German army was an attractive option for some back then was that there was no chance you would be sent into war. In reality, it was just like any other job—well, actually better—because it allowed me to train and race full-time!
I was in the army basically until I signed my first professional contract. But you see, being in the army was the only way to be on the German national team.
Racing for the German national team after the Wall came down gave me my first taste of Western European racing. I did my first Circuit de la Sarthe and my first Tour du Vaucluse, two good races in France, as well as the PostGiro in Sweden. They were all good races where we had a chance to race against some of the big European professional teams for the first time.
But the highlight for me during all those years was winning the Peace Race with the German national team in 1994.
For old East Germans like me, the Peace Race was the Tour de France! Established after World War II, it was a sort of race of good faith around all the Eastern bloc countries. I mean, let’s face it, we Germans had brought so much terror to our neighboring countries in the 20th century that many people in those countries just looked at us like we were all monsters! So in order to rebuild some semblance of normalcy, some semblance of good faith and understanding, we came up with the idea of the Peace Race.
After World War II, peopl
e on both sides of the border didn’t want to have anything to do with war. All they really wanted to do was to raise their kids in peace, have a job, pay some taxes, see their kids grow up, and see their kids have children. In that regard, the Peace Race was helpful. It brought people together and made them remember that, whatever side of the border they were on, everyone was human. So the Peace Race helped a lot in building good relations after the war, and every year it would go between Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Russia. Every year it would start in the capital of one of those countries, go through another, and finish in the capital of yet another. And it always changed so that each country was equally involved. The race symbol was always a white dove, I believe inspired or designed by Picasso, which just goes to show at what level the race was designed to have social significance.
It was a huge race for us, and everything came together for me in 1994. On the first day, I got away in a breakaway with several of the prerace favorites. It was a leg breaker of a stage, I remember, with lots of climbs. I finished second on the stage, which gave me a lot of confidence for the rest of the race. I was the best climber in the group that day, so I had a real advantage.
Then I finished third in the time trial, which I was really happy about, considering how I didn’t have a special time trial bike. And as you may well know, when it comes to time trialing, aerodynamics is everything. I might not have won the stage, but I did cut my losses and manage to hold on to the lead. At the end of the week, I became one of the only riders in the history of the Peace Race to win it without earning a stage victory.