Why I'd rather be a work-horse than a Wunderkind

I have a friend who used to live in the heart of the Old Town. (She's since moved back to California - one of the pitfalls of expat life.) She and her husband lived on the second floor (that's the American third) and their living room and bedroom windows looked down onto the cobblestones of Gerechtigkeitsgasse (justice street). They had front row seats to all the interesting goings-on in Bern - everything worth mentioning comes up Gerechtigkeitsgasse: Fasnacht parades, the Grand Prix, the victory parade when our hockey team won the national championship, demonstrations, they all made their way beneath my friend's window.

Last year the final stage of the Tour de Suisse - a time trial - ended in the Old Town. From my friend's living room we could look down on the riders as they made their way to the finish line just two blocks west of us; if we looked right we could watch live coverage on the large screen and keep track of the action on other parts of the course and see the times and rankings as riders crossed the finish line without ever having to leave the window. If we leaned out far enough and looked left, we could see the finish line itself. We leaned perilously far out the window when home-town boy Fabian Cancellara passed by, taking, but not holding, the best time. I leaned even further out to cheer on Jan Ullrich as he powered up the slight incline to the finish. He did hold the best time and the overall victory.

It turns out that was Ullrich's final professional performance.

Jan Ullrich always frustrated the hell out of the cyclist in me. He could have been, he should have been, the best cyclist of his generation, Lance Armstrong notwithstanding. At least one of Lance's seven Tours should have been Ullrich's - 2003, at least, should have been Ullrich's. Ullrich was brilliant, the real deal; but he was the guy who seemed to think that being the real deal was enough. In a world where guys like Lance Armstrong go on training rides on Christmas day and count their calories in the off-season, where Ivan Basso spends the winter in a wind tunnel breaking down his time-trial form and putting it back together again, being the real deal wasn't enough. Natural talent was never going to be enough when you have Lance Armstrong redesigning his water bottles to shave off an extra ounce. Ullrich was a Wunderkind, he really was. He could time trial like nobody's business. He could climb, he could tear mountains apart. (And as the Tour de France wore on and he popped out in freckles across the bridge of his nose and into his sun- and wind-reddened cheeks he was cute as a button, to boot.) When he won the Tour de France in 1997 everybody - including Lance Armstrong - assumed it was just the first of many Tours in Ullrich's future. But it didn't work out that way. Partly because Lance Armstrong recovered from his cancer and Lance is, well, Lance. But also because Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn't going to cut it in the new world forged by Lance Armstrong's iron will.

When I cycled in college, I was quite good. I had a certain level of athletic ability, but nobody would have confused me with a natural talent. But I was stubborn. I put in the hours and the miles. I rearranged my academic schedule to maximize track time. I took every tip my coach ever gave me, did everything he said, and he won me races that I wouldn't have won on strength alone. I was never great, but I was really good. And I got as good as I did precisely because I was willing to accept how very far from great I was. Had I been better naturally, I suspect that I would have turned out marginally less successful. But the gap between me and the top girls was just visible enough to me to drive home the need for a little extra effort on my part. And the link between my effort and my results was clear; we kept training logs, after all. In autumn we'd do a ten mile time trial out on Flat Bottom Road to get a base-line and then in the spring we'd do a few more. I got faster. AJ would teach us about rolling through our gears, how to make a U-turn in the fastest possible way while still staying upright, how to dole out our energy. I got faster still. It was exhilarating, getting faster. More exhilarating was the knowlege that I was making myself faster, that all the tools for my success or failure were in my hands. I was never the very best, but the women who could beat me made up a small crowd; two of them were my own teammates who knew my tricks. For the specific event I trained for, I was top-tier. I did not start out top-tier, but I ended there. I forced my way into that circle by sheer will. And I was never the very best, but I was proud to have gotten so close.

Jan Ullrich. He stood on the very edge of greatness, of once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-lifetime larger than life greatness. Season after season he frustrated the cyclist in me so. So close, so very close, just a few calories, a few more hours on the road away from blinding greatness. But the gap between him and the small handful of guys who could beat him was too small for him to see. He was too good, far far too good, to see for himself how much harder he still needed to work and the people around him failed him by not driving home the point. For a person like me to be a step away from great (within my little universe, of course) was a tremendous success. For a person like Jan Ullrich to be a step away from great was a profound failure. He could have been, he should have been so great. Just an ounce, just an hour more effort. But Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn't going to cut it in a world filled with work-horses.

Because no matter how good you are, somewhere out there lives somebody just as good. But she's trying just a little bit harder.

(Phantom blogs the academic aspects of being the Wunderkind v. the hard worker here)