by David Millar
My progress continued and in 1994, I became a part of the Great Britain Junior National Team. But support was minimal. A kind volunteer would give you a ride in his car to Belgium, put you up in a hostel and lend you a jersey for the race. And racing in Belgium, with its deep culture of cycling, was brilliant. Everything seemed so professional and the races were hard and incredibly competitive. I was 17 and I realised that if I really wanted to be a pro cyclist, then I would have to leave the UK.
With another year of school remaining and my A levels to come, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to return to Britain for the selection races. So the GB Team made an unprecedented decision to give me a guaranteed place on the Junior World Championship team for 1995, almost a year away. I returned to HK and was surprised to find I’d been selected as a prefect and house captain for athletics and cross-country. I began my last year in Hong Kong with the intention of enjoying it and making it memorable.
School had become a meeting place to organise my extracurricular activities, and I was now fully committed to becoming a professional cyclist when my A levels were finished. I was quietly confident that this was a certainty, although I hadn’t actually admitted it to anybody. Cycling had taken me over but it was still my secret – I’d stopped trying academically and didn’t even bother filling in university applications, relying solely on a hopeful art college place, so determined was I that racing was my future.
Dad was spending more and more time away from Hong Kong. Ally had moved back to the UK and he would return there whenever he could, leaving me alone with the townhouse, car, speedboat, supermarket cards and club memberships.
I was flying by the seat of my pants. I also knew that it was my last year in Hong Kong and I wanted to live it to the fullest. So far, I’d done well to avoid much of the partying that went on, but I didn’t want to leave Hong Kong and have any regrets, so I set about making up for lost time. I was still too gauche to have a long-term girlfriend – two weeks was my record – and with cycling so important to me, girls, in all honesty, weren’t top of my list of priorities.
I fancied them, and was intrigued by them, but I didn’t want to be tied to one. As for sex, well, it terrified me, despite losing my virginity in a disappointing drunken episode the year before. In fact, the most time I spent with girls was in my art class, as I was the only boy.
As I dived into HK’s after-hours social scene, our house became a haunt for my friends. We would hang out there, do bongs in my room, talk shit, go to the yacht club, eat Singapore noodles and drink gunners.
Ruggero Nardone was my wingman in these escapades. We didn’t really know each other until arriving in sixth form and finding ourselves in the same small graphics course. Rog is half Italian, half Chinese, a brilliant mix. We became firm friends in our general indifference to school life, bouncing between groups and having fun.
Our weekends would comprise mainly of getting a little drunk, hanging out in the bars before finding other things to entertain us. Most of the time it would mean hitting the dahgay (games arcade) and playing Daytona. Soon we were as good as the local Chinese at this game. This was an achievement that had required many lunchtime excursions from school to Mongkok to hone our skills.
Although I was drinking and smoking a little bit, I was quite evangelical about chemical drugs. I found the thought of them disgusting and fundamentally wrong. At one of the parties in my house, I came across a guy chopping up some powder in my bedroom. I flew into a rage, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and threw him out, telling him never to do ‘that shit’ in my house. It was one of the only times I have ever come close to being physically violent with anybody and it was over drugs.
Yet despite my immersion in the social scene, I grew more and more lonely. I was living by myself most of the time, with nobody to answer to or to regulate me. There is only so much fun a teenager can have before it starts to go too far, and it was obvious that was the case with me. I lived by my own rules.
As the exams came around and that final year drew to a close, I became brutally aware of the ending of the Hong Kong dream. The day after the end of year dance, sitting on top of Rog’s roof in Kowloon Tong, under the flight path of the incoming planes, I got Rog to cut off my long hair. I was preparing myself to leave for the UK and to start my other life, my cycling career.
I hadn’t told anybody I was leaving, as I had no idea when, or if, I’d be coming back. Only Rog knew and we went to one final party on a junk in the harbour, knowing my flight left the next morning.
The next day, Dad took me to the airport. I gave him a ‘Thank You’ card.
‘Thanks, Pater-san, for the last five years,’ I wrote. ‘I’ll be surprised if I ever beat them. Love, your son, David.’
4
CHASING A DREAM
After flying back to England from Hong Kong, I had a few weeks till the Junior World Championships in San Marino. But with that guaranteed place in the British road race team came anxiety because I knew that I hadn’t trained enough to ensure I had the form of the year before. So I panicked and pushed myself as hard as I could in training and racing in an attempt to try to recover some semblance of form.
Meanwhile, I had to race in a time trial in the north of England in order to qualify for the World Championships time trial, as my place in this discipline was not guaranteed. Mum and I travelled up north but, under the nose of the British selector, the trip was a disaster. Rolling to the start line, I punctured and missed my start time.
In what I considered to be typically petty British fashion, I was not allowed to start again. I refused to accept this, waited till the last man had gone, and set off 1 minute later. Unlike most of those competing, I wasn’t on a special bike – just my road bike with clip-on triathlete bars and borrowed wheels. Despite that, I completed the course in the fastest time by a significant margin, but it still wasn’t accepted as legitimate and I was not selected. That experience cemented my desire to get out of the British racing scene as fast as I could.
After cramming my training, I arrived in San Marino for the Worlds thinking I had made up enough ground in the previous four weeks. I was proven gravely wrong. It was a very hard course and I couldn’t even do half of the race distance with the front of the peloton. I got dropped unceremoniously but stuck with it, riding lap after lap on my own. It was humiliating, but it taught me a lesson. At one point out on the circuit, there was a quiet area with nobody around. I got off, put my bike down and sat there for a few minutes in despair.
I was so angry with myself. I felt like such an idiot for being given the opportunity and just wasting it by having too much fun in HK. It didn’t take me long to realise how ridiculous I must have looked, so I pulled myself together and promised to prove that I was better than this. I’m quite sure that was the moment that gave me the drive to work as hard as I did over the next eighteen months.
The British team rode terribly, yet the results failed to reveal just how badly we performed. Although Charlie Wegelius finished in front of me and I ended up getting lapped, I was somehow awarded twenty-seventh place in the results – making me highest finisher in the British team. We took a bit of a beating in the British cycling scene’s traditional mouthpiece, Cycling Weekly – more often called ‘The Comic’.
I noted the name of the author of the piece, determined that one day I’d be able to exact my revenge on him. But the desire to prove myself was becoming intense and I went back to racing and winning road races and club time trials in the UK.
I was with the biggest British cycling team at the time, Team Energy, and, against my will, they wanted me to ride the National Junior 25-mile time trial championships. Under duress, I acquiesced and travelled up north with one of my older teammates, designated as my chaperone for the day. Once again, contrary to the majority of other competitors, I was on my road bike with time trial addons.
It was a classic British open time trial, out and back on one of the busiest roads in England, the A1. This did mean it wa
s very fast, and it was one of the first times I got to race on a far bigger ‘senior’ gear, a 52 × 12 ratio compared to the 52 × 15 we were limited to as juniors. In the end, I barely used it, but I did use it enough to have a sore knee for the next week. I won, and it remains the only open 25-mile time trial I have raced in the UK, so officially I’m yet to better my time of 52:05.
Next came a GB trip to the Junior Tour of Ireland, a race that at the time was organised by current UCI (International Cycling Union) president, Pat McQuaid. At the last minute, the volunteer manager in charge of the trip was changed to Mike Taylor – a fortuitous moment in my cycling life.
I can still remember arriving in Chapel-en-le-Frith in the Peak District, at the Taylor household, where I was to stay the night before we left for Ireland. Ten years later, when I was the fallen-from-grace British number one, I was given the same warm welcome from Pat, Mike’s wife, as on that first meeting.
‘Hello, love,’ Pat would say. ‘Come in. You must be tired – fancy a cup of tea?’
Mike and Pat are two of the loveliest people I’ve met through cycling, and Mike went on to play a very important role in my future development.
That trip was my first visit to Northern Ireland, and it was shocking to see the armoured cars and fortress-like police stations. Before then the ‘troubles’ all seemed so distant – far-off events I only saw on the news. Just in case it wasn’t overwhelming enough, we arrived in Londonderry on the day of the Orange Walk, a Protestant march that wreaked havoc in the town.
We were kept awake for hours that night as all hell seemed to break loose outside our hostel. When we dared step outside the next morning, there was debris everywhere – windows were broken and there were bricks and other missiles scattered all over the place. Great Britain’s junior cycling team were, to be frank, shit-scared.
The race itself went brilliantly. We won the overall classification and, on the day of the time trial, I won the road stage in the morning and the time trial in the afternoon. Mike was a great teacher, but he was also our manager, masseur, coach and cook. I learned more about bike racing in that one week than I had done in all the races up to that point.
Mike and Pat were huge cycling fans and had been travelling to Europe to watch races for years. He was full of stories and he seemed to know all the big British continental professionals well, as he’d take care of them whenever they came back to race in the national championships.
He was good friends with the commentator and ex-pro Paul Sherwen, and I’d seen photos of him with Robert Millar, Sean Yates, and even one with Eddy Merckx. In short, Mike was like a god to us.
We came out of the Tour of Ireland different bike racers. Mike gave me the confidence to believe I wasn’t insane in thinking I could just head across to Europe and hold my own. The next step was to tell Mum that I wanted to postpone my art college entry so that I could race on the continent with the goal of turning professional. This took some courage.
I didn’t have a place on a team in France – tradition and statistics dictated that France was the best place for British riders to graduate from amateur to pro as, from Tom Simpson to Sean Yates, they’d almost all taken this route. I had very little money, and there was the small matter of having decided a few years earlier, with Dad’s backing, that it was pointless to learn French. All of these were mere details however.
Mum was very logical. She listened carefully to me as I explained The Plan to her.
Funded by my winnings from the Tour of Ireland, I intended to leave for Belgium the next week, staying with another British junior with a family in Ieper, in western Flanders, and race against continental juniors for the last month of the season, in order to get results which would add value to my palmares – my cycling CV. This would help boost my search for an amateur team for the following year.
While there, my supposed excellent results would supply me with enough money to live. I would return from Belgium, find a coach and train all winter while living at home with Mum in Maidenhead. During this time I would start to learn French in order to make my arrival in France a little easier. I would give myself a maximum of two years as an amateur and if by the end of this I didn’t have a contract, I would return and go to art college.
Mum sat and listened patiently. Then she rained on my parade. ‘So what job will you get when you come back from Belgium?’ she said.
It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I’d have to get a job, but I knew she was right. I was fuelled by the self-belief and desire to prove everybody wrong that characterises most teenagers, and was desperate to race in Europe. Once again, I was about to leave the confines of the UK. Sadly, that was how it felt – as if I was suffocated, restrained and held back by the parochial British cycling scene.
Fifteen years on, things are very different and it’s a measure of how far British cycling has now come that I am perhaps one of the last riders to have followed this tortuous path. Back then, there was no National Lottery funding, no national team to speak of, no indoor track in Manchester, barely a racing scene and hardly any sponsors.
Everybody meant well, but the British cycling scene, such as it was, only survived because of the goodwill and charity of the people who loved it. Racing at home was light years away from the Tour de France and the continental professional scene. I had to get out.
Sleeping in a bunk bed for over a month in the home of a cycling-mad Belgium family was an interesting experience and surprisingly good fun. Ieper had been the scene of great destruction during the First World War. There were family connections: my great grandma – who was still smoking and drinking whisky at 99 – lost her brother in the final horrific fighting of the battle of Passchendaele in 1917.
There is something very haunting about Flanders. The scars of battle are still evident. On every ride we would pass fields of white crosses, sometimes stretching beyond the horizon. Riding a bicycle through the countryside while surrounded by such tragedy felt frivolous, yet the melancholy of the place was important to me. I never really understood why.
The cornerstone of Flemish racing is the local kermesse race. Kermesses are the village or town festivals, and these festivals wouldn’t be complete without a bike race hurtling through the town, and finishing, at the heart of the kermesse, on the main street. We would just turn up to these, jump on and race. The locals would bet on us, and it would all be fun and games. As gung-ho juniors, we’d just smash each other for the full distance, usually about 90 kilometres, and be given our cash prizes at the finish. I didn’t finish lower than third in the ten or so that I raced in.
The last kermesse I rode was the big one and also the last race of the year, in Koksijde, called ‘Keizer der Juniores’. Within two laps, my roommate of the previous four weeks, Paul Butler, and I found ourselves off the front of the race on our own. It was horrible weather – cold, dark, raining – anybody who knows Koksijde will also know that even on a perfect summer’s day the place doesn’t exactly glow.
With about 100 of the 120 kilometres still to race, it wasn’t an astute move tactically. Thirty kilometres from the finish, we came round a corner on the seafront a little too fast and slid off in perfect unison. I got up, Paul didn’t. Somehow I managed to hold on for third place. It was enough to seal my reputation in Flanders and to return to Britain, head held high, convinced I had done enough to get myself a ride with a top French amateur team.
I’d got to know one of the Cycling Weekly journalists, fellow Scot Kenny Pryde, quite well. Through his contacts, Kenny found me a place with a big team in Brittany. I wouldn’t be expected to go over until the following February so I had almost four months to get ready. I found myself a coach, and – as Mum had suggested – got a job stacking shelves in Tesco’s at night. But I didn’t learn French.
Over the winter, I discovered that there were others in the British scene, who, like Mike Taylor, backed my decision to head over to the continent. They were again ex-professional cyclists and keen lovers of the sport, two of whom
were Sid Barras and Keith Lambert. Along with some like-minded others, they had started a small fund in order to help young British amateurs head over to the continent. It was named after a talented young English pro called Dave Rayner, who tragically died very young.
Because Mum and I only found out about it late in the day, my application to the Dave Rayner Fund was sent after the closing date. Fortunately, they were not of the rigid British cycling school of thought, and still read my application and invited me to the interview weekend in Yorkshire.
We stayed at Sid Barras’s farm and met all the people behind the fund as well as the other applicants. One by one, we met with the committee members and then impatiently awaited their response. I was lucky enough to be the rider they chose to back, and their financial help and their belief in me was an incredible help. It was also hugely motivating.
I trained ferociously through the winter, regardless of the weather. My coach, Dave Smith, had developed a very technical training programme and I followed it obsessively. I barely stayed in touch with any of my Hong Kong friends and I didn’t make any attempt to find new ones. I was extremely determined to arrive in France in the best possible condition. Nothing else mattered.
But then, late in January, I found out the team in Brittany had decided to take another foreign rider. I was devastated and completely lost as to what I should do next. So I turned to Mike Taylor. ‘Don’t worry, Dave,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix it.’
Ten days later, Mike called asking if I could get down to the Basque Country. I had to ask Mum where the Basque Country was – for some reason I imagined it was in Switzerland. Mike explained that the team was based in St Quentin, in the Picardie region of northern France, but was down in the Basque Country training and competing in early season races. We decided that I would head over to St Quentin to be there when they got back. Mum had sold her car to help me buy a battered Ford Escort. I packed it up and set off for France.