Ludwig, Olaf

In 1977 and 1978, Olaf Ludwig became the world champion in the junior team road race in the GDR team. In 1980, he won his first four stages of the World Cycling Race : in Wroclaw , Berlin , Halle and Pechitsa. At the Moscow Olympics, twenty-year-old Ludwig won a silver medal in the team road race as part of the GDR team.

In 1981, with the GDR national team, Ludwig became the world champion in the amateur team race. In 1982, he won the overall standings of the World Cycling Race, winning four stages and a prologue, and less than a minute and a half ahead of Soviet athletes, winners of two previous races, Shahid Zagretdinov and Yuri Barinov ^[3] .

In 1983, Ludwig won his national championship for the first time in his career, becoming the champion of the German Democratic Republic in mountain racing. In 1986, he added to this title the title of champion of the GDR in the race for points on the track and in the individual road race. He also won silver in the track points race at the World Championships in Colorado Springs and for the second time in his career he won the World Cycling Race, which started this year from Kiev , only 11 days after the Chernobyl accident .

In 1987, Ludwig became the champion of the German Democratic Republic in the points race for the second year in a row, and in 1988 he won the group road race at the Seoul Olympics , having beaten at the finish a colleague from the German national team Bernd Gröne . In 1989, Ludwig became the champion in the individual road race, first in the GDR, and then in the combined championship of Germany. He also won the last two careers of the World Cycle Race in Halle and Berlin, bringing their total to 38, which is an unbeaten record twenty years later ^[4] .

Since 1990, Ludwig has been a professional. He became the champion of the GDR among professionals in the same year and at the same time joined the Panasonic-Sportlife team, where another Olympic champion, Vyacheslav Yekimov , performed. In the year of his professional debut, he won the first stage of his career, the Tour de France , and won the green jersey of the winner in the sprint event.

In 1992, Ludwig won the UCI World Cup. Of the ten stages included in the World Cup standings, he won only one ^[5] , but in the overall standings he was far ahead of Swiss Tony Rominger, who took second place ^[6] . He also added another victory at the Tour de France to his accomplishments list. Ludwig’s team, Panasonic-Sportlife, won the World Cup in the team event ^[6] .

In 1993, Ludwig won the bronze medal of the world championship among professionals in the individual race. In the same year, he signed a contract with the Team Telekom team , in which he remained until the end of his active career in 1996 . In the first year with the team, he won his fourth round of the Tour de France.

In 1996, at the end of his career, Ludwig took part in the Olympic Games for the third time, but this time he was left without medals, finishing sixteenth in the group race.

After the end of his active career, Ludwig headed the Team Telekom public relations department. Subsequently, he became one of the owners and chief manager of the team ^[7] - a post that he held until 2006 , when its composition almost completely changed after doping scandals ^[8] . In the last three years of Ludwig as a manager, a team (in this period called T-Mobile) won the Tour de France in the team event ^[9] .

Ludwig also served as vice president of the German Cycling Federation and as such played an important role in organizing the German Tour.

• Ludwig Olaf - article from the Grand Olympic Encyclopedia ( M. , 2006)
• Profile at Cyclingarchives.com