LAST OF THE GREY GUARD
Thirty years ago this July, one of the great sports trivia questions was brought into the world. It went like this: which cyclist’s stage win in which Tour de France was simultaneously the first and the last ever for his country? The answer: Olaf Ludwig, stage winner at Besançon in the 1990 Tour, scoring the first stage victory in the Tour for East Germany, which was to be reunited with the West that October, bringing to an end 40 years of bitter division. Though riders who’d grown up in East Germany continued to win Tour stages - Ludwig, Erik Zabel - they did so for the unified Germany.
It all happened so fast for men like the ‘East German Sean Kelly’, as one contemporary described Ludwig. Cycling’s ‘grey guard’ - the East Germans in their trademark off-white kit - had dominated amateur cycling since the 1950s but they had been “overtaken by events”, as the headline read in the middle of one of the ’s sports pages on Friday, February 23, 1990. The photograph of Ludwig resplendent in full Panasonic rig by the late Mark Wohlwender sat centre page, below Matthew Engel’s story on the latest moves in the controversial Mike Gatting-Ali Bacher cricket tour of South Africa. Ludwig was the cycling story of that early season, winning his first professional race in stage 1 of the Ruta del Sol, adding two more wins in the Ruta and adding a fourth 12 days later in the Giro di Sicilia. His successes marked, had been “as decisive and surprising as the circumstances which had allowed him out of the country in the first place”.
