Ulle & Rick

A feed older than the double act

The show that reaches a stage for the first time on 7 November 2026 is younger than the feed it comes out of. The podcast first appeared on 26 September 2019, built around Rick Zabel, who was then still racing, and ran under the title Plan Z — a name that survives in the Podigee web address the Apple listing still points at. The pairing that gave the show its current name dates from 8 May 2025, when the first episode as Ulle & Rick went out across the usual platforms with Jan Ullrich alongside Zabel.

What makes the partnership work is the gap between the two men. Ullrich was born in Rostock on 2 December 1973 and turned professional with Team Telekom in 1995, at the point when German cycling was about to become a television sport. Zabel was born in Unna on 7 December 1993, the son of the sprinter Erik Zabel and the grandson of Detlef Zabel, and came through a professional peloton that had already been rebuilt around the wreckage of Ullrich's generation. Two decades of German racing sit between them, and most episodes end up crossing that line at some point.

What Ullrich brings into the room

The record is unambiguous in its first half. Ullrich won the 1997 Tour de France at 23, the first German to do so, took the Vuelta a España in 1999, won the Olympic road race in Sydney in 2000 with silver in the time trial, and was world time trial champion in 1999 and 2001. Between 2000 and 2005 he finished second at the Tour five times behind Lance Armstrong, which earned him the label of eternal runner-up, and in the 2003 race he waited for Armstrong after a crash, a decision that brought him a fair-play award and outlived most of his results.

The second half is the reason his return to a microphone took so long. He was barred from the 2006 Tour over the Operación Puerto investigation and retired in February 2007 insisting he had never cheated as a cyclist. In February 2012 the Court of Arbitration for Sport found him guilty of a doping violation and voided his results from May 2005 onwards. In 2023 he said he had used performance-enhancing substances throughout his career, from the moment he turned professional in 1995.

He has since talked about the collapse that followed in similarly plain terms. In the BR24Sport podcast Pizza & Pommes, published on 16 September 2026, Ullrich described the point where one direction meant leaving life altogether and the other meant trying to get back into it, said he chose life, and named fatherhood as the thing that made the choice stick. He called withdrawal the hardest phase after stopping, said he no longer feels the urge to tear the world down, and described having made peace with a sport he had come to regard with something close to hate as much as love.

The other half of the microphone

Zabel's own career ran from 2014 to 2024: BMC Racing Team until 2016, Katusha–Alpecin from 2017 to 2019, then Israel Start-Up Nation and its successor squads from 2020. He was a sprinter with two professional wins, a stage of the Tour of Austria in 2015 and a stage of the Tour de Yorkshire in 2019, and he rode both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. He announced his retirement in May 2024, after Rund um Köln.

By then the podcast was already a working business rather than a sideline, which is why the switch from racing to talking about racing left no visible gap. The Munich venue copy for the live tour bills him as a professional cyclist and influencer, and that is roughly how he functions on the show: the one who has been inside a modern team bus recently enough to say what the radio traffic and the power files actually look like, against Ullrich's accounts of an era that ran on different assumptions.

Weekly, on Thursdays, and in the top fifty

The output is steady rather than spectacular. Episodes land on Thursdays and run long — recent ones between an hour and nine minutes and an hour and twenty — and the German Apple Podcasts listing showed 288 episodes in the feed by late October 2026. The structure is conversational: the week's racing, then a longer argument about whatever the sport is currently chewing over, occasionally with a guest rider.

The commercial breakthrough came in its first summer. By August 2025 the show had reached 48th in the monthly German podcast charts compiled by agma, the only cycling podcast in the top fifty, with more than 500,000 downloads and growth of close to 100 per cent between June and the chart month. The 2025 Tour de France did most of that work, which is a useful measure of how the show is consumed: it swells with the Grand Tours and holds a core audience in between.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The 2026 season gave the podcast a lot to work with and Ullrich a reason to be back in the race convoy. On 18 July 2026 he appeared on ARD at the Tour de France, his first return to the race since his own career ended, talking about German podium prospects and conceding that he had trained enormous numbers of kilometres the wrong way. ARD Sounds has also run a series on his career, Jan Ullrich. Held auf Zeit.

On the feed itself, the late-season run tracked Remco Evenepoel closely — an episode on 23 September on the Belgian taking the field apart, one on 30 September on a surprise winner at the world championships in Canada, and the 2026 season review on 7 October, an hour and a quarter built around Evenepoel crashing and becoming European champion anyway. That episode is the last one published before the tour opens, and it doubles as the stock of material the stage show will draw on.

Seven nights, three already gone

The live run is seven dates between 7 November and 5 December 2026, promoted in part by FKP Scorpio and routed through halls rather than arenas. It opens at the Paulussaal in Freiburg on 7 November, doors at 19:00 and on stage at 20:00, and that night is sold out. Cologne's Theater am Tanzbrunnen follows on 9 November, the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt on 10 November at 20:00 with tickets at €40.70, and the Isarphilharmonie at Gasteig HP8 in Munich on 19 November at 20:00 at €39.95. December brings the Kultur- und Kongresszentrum in Gera, the Colosseum in Berlin on 4 December, and the Elbphilharmonie's Kleiner Saal in Hamburg on 5 December at 19:30, with the foyer open an hour earlier and seats at €39, €42 and €45. Berlin and Hamburg are both sold out; the Hamburg hall seats 550, which explains how quickly it went.

No support act is listed on any of the venue pages, and no guest riders have been announced. The billing is consistent across promoters: the great moments of the sport, anecdotes that have not been aired on the feed, and a description of the podcast as following seven professionals through a racing season. Because the first performance has not happened yet, there are no reviews of the stage show to go on, and anyone judging it in advance has only the podcast and the room sizes to work from.