ROLF ALDAG - The Alchemist

Over five seasons, former domestique Rolf Aldag turned Highroad into one of the most successful teams that cycling has ever seen. Now he is doing the same at Etixx-Quick Step. Just what is his secret?

WRITER: Daniel Friebe - Procycling, June 2015

Even in the branch of show business we call professional sport, under the glare of the spotlight, there are those who bask and those who shield their eyes. To witness this in action, we need only recall a scene from the 2003 Tour de France, the ninth of the 10 in which Rolf Aldag competed. In our mental photograph, we see the winner of stage 7 to Morzine, Richard Virenque, sweeping through the finish line with his right arm and index finger thrust heavenward in selfcongratulation, then the Frenchman pulling on the yellow jersey to a hysterical ovation moments later. Then, in the next frame, we see Aldag as he discovers that, with Virenque in yellow and him lying second in the king of the mountains classification, behind the Frenchman, he will wear the polka-dot jersey the following day to L’Alpe d’Huez. Aldag squints, his mouth crumples at one side. Later he’ll tell a reporter: “My first thought was that I’d have to wear a rain jacket. Me in the polka-dot jersey going up Alpe d’Huez? That just wasn’t on.”

THE HUMBLE MAN once described as cycling’s hardest-working domestique, and now credited with one of the sport’s most brilliant brains, was born in Beckum in north-west Germany, in August 1968. Aldag’s father worked as a postman. The family was not rich; Aldag’s parents didn’t so much buy his first bicycle as lease it to him, at a rate of seven Deutschmarks per month. If he hadn’t already worked it out, at age 15, Aldag learned that nothing in life came free when he left school and began an apprenticeship as a toolmaker. The days were long, the work gruelling. He trained when he could – just enough to keep winning races for his RC Olympia Dortmund club. In the four-man team time trial at the Amateur World Championship, he led Germany to third in 1989 and fifth the next year. The bosses of the Swiss Helvetia team thought that his versatility across different terrains and upbeat, flinty character would make the base ingredients of a decent pro. Two respectable but unremarkable seasons later, Aldag signed for the team with whom he would spend the rest of his career, Deutsche Telekom.

Over the next decade, Aldag would contribute to victories in almost all of the sport’s major races but rarely, if ever, be the man lapping up kisses, flowers and applause on the podium. Rare, notable individual successes included the 1999 Bayern Rundfahrt, the 2000 German road race title and three top-10s in Paris-Roubaix. The arrival of Bjarne Riis in 1996 and the Dane’s infectious winning mentality had turned Telekom from also-rans into tyrants but also split the team; Aldag became chief butler to his friend Erik Zabel, while half of the team was allocated to Riis and, later, Jan Ullrich. A fly-on-thewall documentary filmed at the 2003 Tour, Höllentour, offers a vivid, sometimes poignant portrayal of the Aldag-Zabel alliance. In one scene, Zabel meditates on Aldag’s years of loyal service, concluding, “When I think of everything Rolf has done for me, his contribution to so many big wins… You say to yourself that you’ll never be able to give it all back.”

Not that Aldag ever demanded much recognition. When one day a journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeine asked whether he didn’t slightly envy Zabel and Ullrich, he cackled, “The wage would be nice! But no way and never would I want to swap places with them.” In another piece, the Süddeutsche Zeitung described him as a “Hero of work… a man from another time” and even “the clean conscience of T-Mobile [formerly Telekom]”.

It seemed then that Aldag’s salt-of-the-earth image would accompany him into retirement. He earned acclaim in his new guise as a race pundit on German television, ran the Hamburg marathon in two hours 42 minutes, and crossed the line 50th of 825 finishers in the Ironman Lanzarote. Then, in the summer of 2006, the Operación Puerto doping scandal and Ullrich’s involvement nearly capsized T-Mobile, and an American businessman named Bob Stapleton was brought in to steady a sinking ship.

Stapleton collected references and soon identified Aldag as the man to steer T-Mobile out of stormy waters. Aldag warned Stapleton: his statements to the media during his career – for example telling the ZDF TV network during the 1998 Tour, “We distance ourselves from doping”, or assuring a journalist a few years later, “My dad would knock my block off if I got involved with that muck” – weren’t exactly a true representation. Stapleton was unperturbed, or at least convinced enough of Aldag’s remorse to declare, “Rolf stands for everything you should stand for in cycling”. One thing that neither Aldag nor anyone else familiar with the old regime had told Stapleton was that Telekom’s doping had been systematic and overseen by the doctors Lothar Heinrich and Andreas Schmid of the University of Freiburg. Stapleton unveiled Aldag and his new management team at a press conference in Bonn in September 2006… and also confirmed that Heinrich and Schmid would oversee a new internal testing programme. Aldag thought that he had escaped the ghosts of his past – until one named Jef D’Hondt, a former Telekom soigneur, returned to haunt him and his former team-mates in April 2007. In a book, Memoires Van Een Wielerverzorger, D’Hondt revealed that he had doped Telekom riders in the mid-1990s. He also implicated Schmid and Heinrich.

ON 1 MAY 2007, Aldag directed Patrick Sinkewitz to victory in the Rund um den Henninger-Turm but could only smile through gritted teeth as his rider celebrated. That evening, Aldag and his old friend, Erik Zabel, chatted for hours at the hotel that the T-Mobile and Milram teams were sharing. It was no good, Aldag told his pal – they couldn’t keep lying, not when Aldag was supposed to be educating and protecting young riders from the perils of doping. Two days later, Aldag told the truth, his whole truth, at a press conference in Bonn. Sitting alongside him, a tearful Zabel shared only some of his (he would finally confess fully in 2013). The same day, T-Mobile suspended Schmid and Heinrich.

Aldag said that, for friends and family members, his confession “was like the sky falling in”. For Stapleton, the revelations about Freiburg also felt like a betrayal. Later, he would also regret that Aldag hadn’t been more honest or less naive about some of the team’s riders – “whom he was basically asking to change their habits”. Within three months of Aldag’s confession and an immediate vote of confidence from Stapleton, Patrik Sinkewitz and Lorenzo Bernucci had both tested positive. Serhiy Gonchar’s contract was terminated due to suspicious blood values.

Ultimately, though, Stapleton knew that Aldag was too precious to lose, even when T-Mobile pulled the plug on their sponsorship at the end of 2007 and the team became Highroad. On the road, they had already improved vastly. Stapleton says that throughout the team’s lifespan, Aldag’s acuity was never more evident than when, multiple times every season, the directeurs and Stapleton would convene to mull over potential recruits for the following year.

Like another sporting empire builder who made silk purses out of sows’ ears, Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s, Stapleton placed his faith in the “wisdom of the crowds”. Practically speaking, at Highroad that meant each directeur nominating prospective signings, followed by a debate and vote.

Aldag believes today that, perversely, the severe financial constraints under which Highroad operated became a blessing. “Usually, if you’ve got a guy on, say, €150,000 and he’s doing an okay job and everyone likes him, you just say, ‘Ach, let’s just renew his contract.’ This is one of the things that actually stops teams developing. And not having that option was great for us. Because we didn’t have budget, we’d often have to replace a guy on €150,000 with a guy on €100,000, and that forces you to continually look around for the best value.”

Sometimes they would find hidden treasures in the unlikeliest places. In the team’s first ever recruitment brainstorm in the autumn of 2006, Aldag made the low-cost case for an Australian mountain biker who the previous year had shared a tent with one of the team mechanics while winning the Crocodile Trophy mountain bike race in Australia. Two years earlier, the rider had also performed impressively in a physiological test at the University of Freiburg. As he listened to Aldag, though, his friend and fellow Highroad directeur sportif, Brian Holm, shook his head in exasperation. “The Crocodile Trophy? What the fuck is that?” Needless to say, Holm had also never heard of Adam Hansen.

Within months, Hansen’s new team-mates were calling him ‘The Terminator’. Eight years later, Hansen is one of the most respected domestiques in the peloton and has finished 10 consecutive grand tours, only two short of the absolute record.

Over the next four years, there would be many more stories like this, as Stapleton, Aldag and Highroad gave a passable impression in cycling of what Beane and the Oakland A’s had achieved in baseball. Michael Lewis turned the A’s underdog story into a bestselling book, Moneyball, which later became a Hollywood film. “That was a definite inspiration for us,” Stapleton has since admitted.

Stapleton’s team would amass 318 victories in five seasons. In 2009, their most prolific season, they won 85 races with exactly half of the budget that had paid for just 17 T-Mobile wins in 2006.

Aldag was even prouder to have turned the team into the sport’s leading star academy, the alma mater of Mark Cavendish, Tony Martin, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Gerald Ciolek, Tejay Van Garderen, André Greipel, John Degenkolb and more. Stapleton says that Aldag’s own experience at T-Mobile has taught him vital lessons. As Aldag himself explains now: “At T-Mobile, you might be on the longlist for the Tour and miss out but you’d say to yourself that you’d work hard and get on the team the following year. You’d be super-motivated, then, BAM, Savoldelli arrives. Or Botero. Or Sevilla. There was never a philosophy of buying guys young and cheap and developing them. At least once in a while you have to send a signal that this is a place where you’ll get opportunities.”

IRONICALLY, THE POLICIES underpinning Highroad’s success would in some ways be their undoing. For five years, they had been doubling, trebling and quadrupling their riders’ market value. As Brian Holm conceded later, ‘Something in my head always said: how the f**k are we going to do it next year?’ Indeed, after five years, Stapleton realised that to keep the likes of Cavendish and Martin, or sign replacements of similar calibre, they would need triple the budget, over €30 million. No sponsor would be prepared to give it to them.

The four years since Highroad’s demise have given Aldag new perspective on what at the time seemed incomprehensible: that no one would bankroll the sport’s most prolific, cosmopolitan and probably also most vocally anti-doping team. At Etixx-Quick Step, he is reminded of what he now believes was one of the main reasons many times a year, whenever he sees team manager Patrick Lefevere schmoozing with sponsors in hotel bars or restaurants. “That’s not my strength and it wasn’t Bob’s strength,” Aldag conceded against exactly that backdrop, with Lefevere and former Quick Step company president Frans De Cock propping up the bar a few yards away, at the team’s training camp in Calpe in January. He explained further: “It was easy for sponsors to step out because there was no personal or emotional connection. It was all about, ‘Let’s win bike races. The sponsor wants something? Is there money on the account? Yes? In that case, forget it, we’re here to win.’ We never had any sponsor in the car. I think Bob was in the car twice.”

Stapleton and Aldag also had no interest in relinquishing control to a meddlesome sugar daddy, or indeed downsizing their objectives. Stapleton eventually admitted defeat just over a week after the end of the 2011 Tour de France: Highroad would wind down at the end of that season.

While Holm accepted another DS position at Omega Pharma-Quick Step (news that the Sky-bound Cavendish greeted with the text: “You’ve got to be f**king kidding me!”), his old pal, Aldag, took a job as the managing director of the World Triathlon Corporation. But after Highroad, it was always likely to be an anticlimax. More to the point, Aldag found the workload and travel unbearable. Within a year, he had left, telling the German press that his wife and two children were the most important thing in his life and he “couldn’t carry on subjecting them to that”. Having already moonlighted as a technical consultant to Specialized and Tony Martin in 2012, Aldag now accepted an invitation to extend his work to the entire Omega Pharma-Quick Step team in 2013. In 2014, he was upgraded from technical manager to sport and development manager. The team would end that season with 62 wins courtesy of 18 different riders from 10 different countries.

At first, Aldag was allowed only a fraction of the influence that he enjoyed at Highroad. Even now, insiders note that Patrick Lefevere remains fiercely protective of what he regards as his specialist domain, the Belgian Classics. But beyond that, says Mark Cavendish, Aldag does “everything”. What does he mean, “everything”?

“Like, absolutely everything,” Cavendish stresses. “I mean, the other day they had to change the stickers on the team buses. And who’s at the service course in Belgium pulling the old ones off? Rolf.”

“Rolf is the best around,” Cavendish goes on. “There’s nothing else you can say. Brian [Holm] is my mate, and he’s good in the car, but Rolf is just superb. Clear, direct, decisive. Like last year at Sanremo, the plan was for Štybar to attack on the Poggio but he waited and waited, then 500 metres before the top, Rolf comes on the radio and says, “Too late for Stybie. No one’s getting away now. Everything for Cavendish.” Just dead clear, precise and cool. And that’s what he’s like in everything he does.”

Cavendish concludes with an admission: “I’ve already thought that, if I run a team, when I’ve retired, Rolf is going to be central to it. There’d simply be no point having a team if Rolf wasn’t involved.”

Cavendish’s homage could be explained by personal affinity. Everyone who has worked closely with Aldag, though, seems similarly enamoured. Stapleton tells us that, “Overall, without his insight, work ethic, understanding, we were just going to be a failed experiment. Rolf was the glue, the insight, and to a large extent the heart of the team.” And Etixx-Quick Step’s communications chief, Alessandro Tegner, tells Procycling: “I don’t know every coach or manager in cycling but I’d be pretty sure that Rolf is the best. He has two extraordinary strengths: his curiosity and his communication skills. Because of the abilities and passion he has, Rolf does in one month what would take anyone else three.” Specialized’s Simone Toccafondi effuses: “You can make up for a lack of knowledge with openmindedness but Rolf is both incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly open-minded.”

Hearing such accolades, Aldag would no doubt assume his trademark pose – hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, mouth furrowed into a gawky, endearing smile. The rider who never yearned for a life like his friend Zabel’s, “because I couldn’t stand getting stopped by 20 people at the supermarket and asked for autographs”, is still most at home in the shadows, as that “hero of work” depicted years ago by the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

If it was up to him, there would be enough hours in the day to work on the cattle farm that he still owns but now rents out near Ahlen. Or give his wife more help in her small fitness studio in their home, a renovated old school, on the Möhnesee lake.

As it is, Aldag has his hands full just trying to keep E-QS winning. It’s a breathless, pressurised existence but one that hasn’t driven him to insanity… yet. “I don’t have a psychologist,” he says, “but maybe a few more years in cycling and I will need one.”


Passport Details
Name: Rolf Aldag
Born: 25 August, 1968,
Beckum, Germany
Age: 46
Pro career: 1991-2005
First team:
Helvetia
Present team:
Etixx-Quick Step


Career Highlights
1996 Stage 3 Tour du Limousin
1997 Stage 8 Tour de Suisse
1999 1st Bayern Rundfahrt
1999 Stage 2 Deutschland Tour
2000 1st German National Road Championship
2001 Stage 7 Deutschland Tour
2002 Stage 2 Bayern Rundfahrt
2003 1st Sparkassen Giro Bochum