Erik Zabel - Part One - Marco Quezada photo credit

Rapha NYC and Canyon Bicycles recently hosted Tour de France great Erik Zabel for a weekend of talks, clinics and rides. A recap.

In 1980 I was in Switzerland when my Adal team received an invitation to race the Four Days of Berlin, a race held entirely within the very hard borders of then West Berlin. We drove the 600-miles, stuffed into two team cars, no mechanic nor masseur, just a collection of racers out on adventure, and adventure it was. Passing through Nuremberg, we entered East Germany, an eerie place trapped in suspended animation. The Autobahns hadn’t been touched since Hitler built them in the 1930’s, cement slabs thunking under our tires with nothing to see but overgrown landscape. Alone on the road, we never saw another car, only two ominous police motorcycles, all flat black as were their pilots, following close behind and believe me, we respected the 90 kph limit. Entering West Berlin through the Russian zone, a most frightening experience, and finally into the free city, it was as though the lights had been turned back on: I wanted to throw myself on the ground and kiss it. An unforgettable emotion.

I write this because on the other side of that Wall in that bombed out Nina Hagen East Berlin, was 10-year old Erik Zabel who was then playing soccer (“I was talentless” he laughed) and just beginning to think about cycling. Erik’s father Detlef had been an international, finishing 9th in the Peace Race – the Iron Curtain Tour de France – who never encouraged Erik to race, but offered this advice once Erik decided to try: “It’s a very hard sport, maybe the hardest, so if you do it, do it well with everything you have.”

Erik was supplied with a government bicycle – “a new bike, that got me excited” – and became one of the 120 boys who had been given a chance. Tests and training cut that number in half, then half again, then half again. Erik, as one of the 15 left in the program, was groomed as a track racer, winning a national pursuit championship. He told me: “In East Germany, the training and life was so hard, that athletes rarely made it past 28-years old. I thought that if my body could hold out for 10-years, I could have a nice life as an athlete and a good future.” Note: their system did reward and care for, even in retirement, athletes who had brought glory to the DDR.

Erik’s dream came crashing to a halt at a World Track Championship where he failed to qualify for the Points Race (a most exciting event with racers sprinting for points every few laps). The coach – there’s a lot of Prussia still in those East Germans it should be pointed out – furious, took Erik’s bicycle away and told him that he was finished, that he’d never race again. Erik calls it luck, I believe it’s because he’s such an endearing personality and so chock full of talent, but somehow a phone call was made and he was given a chance to redeem himself through the road racing program, an almost unheard-of switch-over in that rigid system.

With his track-honed speed and racing skills, along with his relatively light weight (150 lbs.) Erik took to the road with immediate success and a new world opened up. “When I first went to race in Italy, well, I won’t say that we didn’t have color in East Germany, but those bright, bright colors everywhere, the life, the flowers, the incredible Italian food…, that was something I’d never experienced before.” Perhaps it was then that the seeds of his love affair with the great Milano Sanremo race (he’s known in Italy as ‘Signore Milano-Sanremo’ for his four wins on the via Roma) were sown.

On November 9th, 1989, the historic day that the Berlin Wall began to come down, Erik and the national team were in Tunisia at training camp. “We completely missed that most important day in German history, had no idea of what was going on.” It was only the next afternoon that the hotel concierge told the team, “People are dancing on top of the Berlin Wall.” The East Germans thought it was a bit early in the day for him to be so drunk and laughed until he insisted that they watch television when it came on that evening. Then they saw the truth: the older racers immediately sprinted for the phone booth to try and get pro contracts while the East German coach laid down the law. History or not, they all had to finish training camp. Those Prussians….

Another life-changing phone call was made on Erik’s behalf and he soon found himself in the German cycling capital of Dortmund – where he’s lived ever since –racing for the famed RC Olympia Dortmund where Hennes Junkermann, once 4th in the Tour de France, and my old teammate and friend, double Olympic Champion Gregor Braun, took young Erik under their wings. “That was the reason for my successes,” Erik said, “I had the East German training discipline – 10:00 means 9:58, 100 kilometers means 110… mixed with the West German knowhow of international cycling. Hennes and Gregor taught me the secrets of racing and the combination of the two systems made my strength.”

At age 22, Erik won the Points Jersey (the inner-race competition based on number of high placings in the stages rather than time) at the Peace Race, a harbinger of his professional successes to come, and just missed out on a medal at the Olympic road race. He, surprisingly given those results, only turned pro for a small German squad, but, yet again, a friendly phone call got him onto to the famed Telekom Team where the great Zabel emerged, starting with his first of three Paris-Tours victories in 1994.

I asked Erik who he considered his greatest rival in the sprinting world and he responded: “No question, Mario Cipollini. He was the greatest, I think he could put out over 2000 watts in a sprint and, for a sprinter that is, was a gentleman in the races. If I beat, him, I could say to my wife – ‘I beat Mario Cipollini’ – if he beat me I could say, ‘ah it took Mario Cipollini to beat me today’ – for me it was a win-win situation….” I don’t do it justice here, but when he tells it, it’s really funny.

I brought up that, while we were all at Rapha seeing a laughing, charming person, his race persona was not quite that. In listening to the NBC (SBS) live feed of the Tour, commentator Robbie McEwan, his Australian sprinting rival, during a piece in the show that commemorated the 10th anniversary of Erik’s Yellow Jersey, was asked what Erik was like. “I have no idea,” replied Robbie, “He never said a word, maybe nodded to you once or twice…it was like racing against a stone wall, one that just kept coming at you: he was relentless.” Lance Armstrong, in his podcast, made it clear that Erik terrified him in the peloton: “That damn Zabel, he wouldn’t say a word, he’d just start smacking you in the ass with his handlebars to get you out of the way.” My own experiences on the finish line crew of the Tour for ESPN, where we basically assaulted the racers with our cameras and microphones, brutalizing them for interviews while they were gasping for breath, taught me that Erik was one to leave alone. He’d sprint right into us and simply start hitting the cameras to get them out of his way.

(here is a good vid of that, start at 3:30 in to get the sprint and bloody aftermath - Erik is in Green

https://youtu.be/w1W5xF1MR2I

“Yes,” responded Erik, “I had a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. I was there to win and nothing else.”

Part Two to come