Jan Ullrich recounts his dark past: "Either you're dead next week, or you regain control over your life"

Jan Ullrich was one of the great stars of world cycling in the 1990s. The German flew on the roads on his bike and won the Tour de France in 1997, the greatest victory of his career. However, years later it became known that he had doped and all his exploits were called into question. In a conversation with WDR he spoke again about all these episodes of his life.

Last year, he released a documentary on Amazon called 'Der Gejagte', which showed everything Ullrich had gone through years after leaving professional cycling: "The documentary was a kind of therapy for me. Now I can talk about it with my children, because in the end it's part of my life."

"I'm glad I showed myself as I am in that documentary, now I can move on more easily. There was a lot of speculation. I needed to change something in my life, so I decided to talk about it. It helped me, the weight was less and now I can move on. I waited to confess until Lance Armstrong and others did. Maybe I was too weak, I didn't want all that media storm."

"People must understand that doping was part of the system. The sponsors knew everything. I wouldn't call it silence, but they paid me well. It was a mutual agreement not to talk about it. But finally I made a mistake and I had to pay for it, being the villain. It's a role I have to take on."

Finally, he mentioned the moment when his life was about to go as low as it could go: "I fell into a deep hole and it almost ended in a catastrophe. I thought my mother and my coach took on the role of a father, but in the end I realized I never had one."

"I could supress things pretty well and I did that for a long time. In the end, everything got out of control, also with drugs and so on. In the end, it was love for my children that got me through, but I couldn't have fallen any lower. I was practically dead, visually I saw hell. That's when I said: 'this is it, no more'. Either you're dead next week, or you take back control of your life. My children made the difference."