of the guard. Everyone agreed: Jan Ullrich was the future of cycling. And yet, he was never again to regain those heights. Though perfectly respectable, his career was already in decline as he stood on the winner's podium. And when he retired almost a decade later amid allegations of doping, his reputation lay in tatters. Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was by Daniel Friebe, the acclaimed British cycling journalist and author of Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal, is an exploration of what went wrong. It is not a sporting disaster story, for Ullrich was one of the pre-eminent riders of his time and a German national treasure for almost a decade, and credited with popularizing cycling in his home country. This is a gripping account of how unbearable expectation, mental and physical fragility, the legacies of a troubled childhood, a morally corrupt sport and one individual - Lance Armstrong - conspired to reroute his destiny as well as that of cycling. Never again after 1997 would cycling fans react to that level of performance with untainted awe.