by David Millar
I was picking up on it more and more but not noticing any correlating injuries. I couldn’t figure it out. When I was sharing with somebody who received one of these late night or early morning ice deliveries, he’d disappear into the bathroom soon afterwards with another small bag, normally a shoe bag or large toiletry bag, dug out from his suitcase.
Incongruous visits to the bathroom by roommates was one more thing I was growing accustomed to. Most were unlike Frankie and hid everything from me. I would tell myself they were protecting me from knowing too much too young, but in honesty I think they were simply protecting themselves.
There was always an urge to dig around in their suitcase when they were away at massage or elsewhere, but at that stage, that would have been an unforgivable faux pas – a neo-pro, a jumped-up Brit, found rifling through an older pro’s suitcase?
I would have been a dead man walking if I’d been discovered. In that world, I was at the bottom of the food chain, a burden to the team, more than likely a dud who would not make it further than my first contract. I had no rights and few expectations.
I had to impress them and to prove myself. It wasn’t just my performances on the bike that were being judged. I had to make myself liked in order to ease my acceptance within the team and within the sport. This was especially true as a foreigner in a French team, perhaps the most chauvinistic of cycling nations.
After we got back to Nice, I managed to pluck up the courage to ask Bobby about the ice deliveries. He was straight with me, telling me what he’d seen: that some of the guys were using EPO, and that EPO has to be kept chilled or it’s ruined. So they kept the ampoules and syringes in an ice-filled thermos. Twice a day they’d replenish the ice.
If it wasn’t chilled, EPO didn’t work – and you’d come down with a fever that would leave you pretty damn sick for 24 hours. Then there was the pain of the wasted expense and the stress of sourcing more.
I didn’t ask Bobby much more than that. I’d learned that I could really only expect to ask one question, otherwise it all became uncomfortable and reduced my likelihood of ever being able to ask any more questions on the subject.
Bobby was great though. Like Frankie he was open with me and treated me with respect beyond my neo-pro status. He told me about how EPO use had become rife, especially in Italy. I did slide one last question in there, the same as I’d put to Frankie, the one that now interested me the most.
‘Does it make that big a difference?’ I asked.
‘It can turn a donkey into a race horse – from what I’ve seen,’ he told me.
It’s hard to describe my feelings after he’d told me that. In a way I was relieved that there was something going on that explained the massive difference between the amateurs and the professionals. It meant that I wasn’t doing that badly; I was simply young, lacking experience – and clean.
But it also confirmed that there was some bad shit going on. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could just tell my mum or anybody else. My initial shock and sadness on discovering such a degree of doping already seemed a lifetime ago. What I was beginning to learn was too big for me to fully grasp, let alone comprehend. The ‘system’ was already working on me.
I was wrecked for ten days after Tirreno, too exhausted to ride for more than an hour and a half. There was no way I could even contemplate racing. The team wasn’t bothered though and I was sent to Cholet–Pays de Loire, a one-day race in Brittany, three days after Tirreno finished. I can’t remember it; if I finished then I’d be surprised.
I went back to Nice, skulked around, bought some roller blades, and started skating again in an attempt to remember happier times. That backfired when, after two years off the skates, I fell badly trying to slide along a rail, smashing my leg and giving myself deep tissue damage.
Obviously I couldn’t tell anybody, certainly not the team, so I just kept quiet about it and hoped for the best. I visited my mum and Fran back at home and tried to ride my bike there, but it was a lost cause. I returned to Nice to an empty apartment, as Bobby was away racing.
Living in Nice wasn’t quite the existence I’d imagined. Although it was much better than northern France, life was becoming lonely. Instead of hanging out in the Cora supermarket in St Quentin, we now had a panini stop down in Vieux Nice.
I started to read more and to listen to music, buying many books – Irvine Welsh, J.G. Ballard, Brett Easton Ellis, James Ellroy and Cormac McCarthy became favourite authors – and numerous CDs. That was about the only thing I spent money on during that first year.
I also started to feel a little ashamed, aware that perhaps being a professional cyclist wasn’t something to be very proud of. I tried to develop myself by widening my interests, with music and reading at the heart of things. And reading helped while away the endless hours of nothingness I had to fill.
I realised I was going to need somebody who could be my mentor through these early years. So I contacted Tony Rominger, the elder statesman of the team, as he seemed to be one of the more cerebral – and hugely successful – cyclists out there. Tony lived in nearby Monaco, which made contact a lot easier. I thought if anybody would be able to steer me through all the shit it would be somebody like him, somebody nearing the end of his career and who had seen it all.
Tony seemed almost flattered when I asked him if he could help me out. He was very keen and I flew to Manchester to see him as he was undergoing some tests for an hour record attempt in the new velodrome.
It was the first time I’d ever been to Manchester. The velodrome was quiet back then, in the pre-Brailsford-run Team GB days, and barely used. There wasn’t the hustle and bustle of a hugely successful national squad buzzing about as there would be in years to come.
Tony was there with a small entourage. When I arrived he was whirling around testing equipment and positions, so I left them to it and found myself a basketball and started shooting hoops on one of the courts in the centre of the velodrome.
Eventually, as they began wrapping up, I wandered over. Tony was, as ever, excited and happy. He introduced me to the small group, one with his head down over a computer. Tony pointed in his direction and said: ‘That’s Michele, he’ll join us for lunch.’ Immediately I realised that this was Doctor Michele Ferrari, a legend in the professional peloton.
In European cycling, Michele Ferrari had become the guru of sports doctors. He was already a controversial figure even before the allegations and scandals that would surround him in the years to come (he was convicted of doping offences but later acquitted following an appeal). At this time, though, his was still a name riders were proud to be associated with. He only coached the best and had been a student of Professor Francesco Conconi, perhaps the first recognised sports doctor in cycling.
I had heard of Conconi as a junior, as any physiological testing I did was based on the ‘Conconi Test’. This was a ramp test that measured the point of maximal steady state workload, that is, the highest intensity effort an athlete could maintain for a prolonged period of time – in other words, their threshold.
After Ferrari had finished poring over Tony’s results, we all went back to the hotel where they were staying. Tony suggested I got a massage from his personal soigneur. Massage was one of the things I disliked most about being a professional, as I could never relax, and whoever was massaging me would have to keep reminding me to de-contract my muscles. It just didn’t come naturally to me, but I thought it would be bad form to ignore what Tony said, so I took his advice.
Afterwards, I sat down for lunch with Michele and Tony. I’d never thought about Ferrari having anything to do with my relationship with Tony, and thankfully neither had Tony. But Michele was still curious about me. He asked me about my statistics – weight, height, threshold and power – I was simply a set of numbers to him. At one point, out of the blue, he reached across the table and pinched my biceps. I wondered what the hell he was doing.
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Could get skinnier though.’
&nb
sp; Ferrari was obsessed by weight. In his world, the lighter you were, the faster you would be. I didn’t really understand his philosophy – if I’d got any skinnier I wouldn’t have been able to ride my bike, let alone race it.
He was an odd fish, something of a nerd. For a man with the reputation he had, he was hardly imposing. He had an odd rodent-like appearance, accentuated by a skeletal physique and slightly protruding teeth. He topped his look off at the time with some oversized, slightly feminine, spectacles.
What he lacked in physical presence, he made up for in seriousness. Cycling wasn’t romantic in Ferrari’s eyes, it was simply about numbers: weight, watts – and wads of cash. It was all business to him. I saw that within minutes of this, our one and only meeting.
Over the weeks that followed, Tony took me under his wing. It was Tony who told me the harsh realities of professional cycling in the 1990s.
We were out on a training ride together, just the two of us, an easy ride – and there are very few to be found between Nice and Monaco – of some laps around Cap Ferrat. It was a remarkably beautiful place to learn such ugly truths.
By this point, I understood that most of the top guys were using EPO, and that even those who weren’t knew about its potential, but I still couldn’t believe that that was the only way to win big races. That didn’t seem right and surely wasn’t possible. How could it be so prevalent? Did no one care?
‘Tony,’ I began, ‘is it possible to win big races without EPO?’
At first, he was a little taken aback. ‘Oh. Uh, well, it’s possible,’ he said.
‘In one-day races, sure, I believe it’s still possible. The Classics, if you do everything right, yeah, it’s possible. I’m sure of that.’
‘What about the Tour de France?’ I said.
‘Hmmm.’ He thought for a moment. ‘No, it’s not possible. Over three weeks you can’t compete against guys on EPO.’
‘Really?’ I was devastated. ‘Shit. Why?’
‘EPO allows you to go faster for longer. I mean, you still have to train and diet and do everything else, but with more oxygen you can stay at threshold for longer and recover faster. That’s what the Tour is all about.
‘It’s just the way the sport has gone,’ he said. ‘It’s sad. When I started we used to turn up to Paris–Nice with 2000 kilometres in our legs. Well, maybe!’ That triggered the classic Tony chuckle.
He continued. ‘Now some guys are arriving with 8000 or more kilometres with full preparation. My God, we used to race with leg warmers those first races. Now they are treating it like the Tour de France! EPO changed everything. Now everybody thinks they’re champions. I’m glad my career is at its end now – the sport’s not the way it used to be.’
Well, great – fucking brilliant, I thought. Now I knew.
Strangely, what he said didn’t really have that much effect on me. I’d figured out for myself what was going on, but I just wanted to hear it confirmed from somebody who would know.
What Tony told me meant that I didn’t need to question it any more. Those were the facts, I told myself. Get used to it.
Preparation was a term I was to hear more and more. It had another more sinister meaning. If you were prepared, it meant you were doped; it also meant you were ready.
‘Il est bien préparé,’ they’d say. If that was said about a team leader at a race, it meant that it was all systems go and that his team would be working their arses off for him.
It is hard to explain how I felt about this and it may also be difficult for some to understand. I had been upset and angry when I’d been confronted with the realities of pro-racing at my first race. But Mum had been right. I could just walk away, pack it all in, and go back to Britain and become an art student.
But I didn’t want to do that: I loved racing and I loved my dream of one day racing in the Tour de France. I was young and blindly optimistic. I still had a lot to learn, about the characteristics of the races, the intricacies of the peloton, which wheels to follow and when. I reckoned I had a good few years before I would even reach my physical maturity, and who could tell what I’d be able to do when I was at my peak – so, I left it at that.
Doping was not for me; what the other guys did, well, that was nothing to do with me. If the riders, governing bodies, teams, race organisers and media weren’t doing anything about it, then what the hell could I, a 20-year-old neo-pro from Scotland, do about it?
And that was that. I had to live with it going on all around me.
David Moncoutie, a young Frenchman who joined Cofidis when I did, was of the same opinion. We did our thing and kept our heads down. It was amazing how well that tactic worked. The need to dope wasn’t foisted on us because in many ways the idea was to see how far we could progress a l’eau claire, on simply bread and water. That would gauge what sort of talent we had and hint at what sort of future lay in front of us. So both of us just trained hard and turned up to races where we would systematically get our heads kicked in. And race we did: I had over eighty days of racing in that first year as a pro.
I had to quit most stage races due to exhaustion, climbing into the voiture balai – the broom wagon (so called because it brushes up the weak and sick who can no longer ride their bikes to the finish) – on the last day. Yet I don’t think there was one race where I wasn’t in a breakaway on one stage or another. I could always get in a break if I wanted to, but I wasn’t really strong enough to survive in it and, come the finale, I was too tired to actually race for the win. The next day, still tired from the effort, I would be on my hands and knees and could barely finish the stage.
I didn’t confront my first ‘recovery’ moment until a few months into the year. It was at the Vuelta a Asturias, a five-day stage race in north-west Spain. It was my first race in Spain, and it was very different from racing in France or Italy.
In France, there was no rhyme or reason to the racing. Sometimes, it was almost amateurish the way in which everybody just smashed themselves from kilometre zero to the finish line.
The Italian scene, on the other hand, was pure finale racing. The days followed a predictable scenario; start fast, get faster, finish at warp speed. I never really experienced warp speed, as I was generally out of the picture before then.
In Spain, there was a very civilised feel to it all; a calm to the racing. There was little other than stage racing on the calendar and these followed an unchanging pattern. Flat stages finished in mass sprints won by sprinters, although a kamikaze breakaway would slip away early on, and usually be controlled by the chasing peloton until the final 10 kilometres.
Summit finishes were won by climbers, their teammates controlling the day’s racing until the bottom of the decisive climb. If there was a time trial, then the team with a general classification rider strong enough against the clock would control the race and the outcome would be decided in the time trial. Each day, when we rolled away from the start, we knew what awaited us. It was refreshing and more akin to what I had expected of professional racing.
But the shock came when we hit the mountains. The climbing speeds were like nothing I had encountered in France or Italy. The Spanish are primarily great climbers, and this stems as much from nurture as nature, as most racing in Spain, from junior level up, is hilly.
In order to be a successful pro in Spain, you have to climb fast, in much the same way as in Belgium all racing is flat, windy and cobbled, breeding hard northern classic riders. The Italian scene breeds a combination of the two, as the majority of their racing is hard, tactical one-day racing.
I was considered something of a climber with the amateurs, and my time-trialling ability meant that I was expected to be a general classification rider in the future. In theory, Spanish racing was made for me. But in Spain, the climbing stages were ridiculously fast and once again my weakness riding out of the saddle was exposed, as my arms gave way before my legs. I was out of my depth, a minnow in a sea of big fish.
Tony Rominger was using that Vuelta a A
sturias to lose weight and fine-tune his condition for the Tour de France. His soigneur, Torron, was on ‘making-sure-Tony-had-no-chocolate-duty’ and also focused on ensuring that his pre-race morning meal was pasta with olive oil, nothing else.
Tony was a clever man; he spoke six languages fluently and was very dynamic, but when in the team environment he was cared for like a little boy. His big thing at this time was PlayStation football, which he loved and took very seriously.
Meanwhile, I was expected to room with a young French pro who wasn’t a renowned talent or even a key member of the team, but seemed to have been in the right place at the right time to fill the quota of French professionals required on ours, a French team.
When we’d all met at the gate for our flight to Spain, everyone was relaxed and jovial except the young French rider, who kept to himself and looked a little on edge. Once he started talking, we couldn’t stop him bragging about how hard he’d been training. On the flight I sat with Laurent Desbiens, who was in his first year back racing after a doping ban. He and Philippe Gaumont, also in Cofidis, had served a ban together after testing positive while on the same team the year before.
Both Laurent and I had registered that there was something up with my future roommate.
‘I can see it in his eyes,’ Desbiens said, as we chatted on the plane.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘He’s allumé,’ he replied. ‘Lit up . . .’
When we got to Spain, it became clear that ‘lit up’ was an understatement. The young Frenchman didn’t speak to anybody on the way to the hotel, only glancing at Desbiens nervously as we sat on the bus.
I wasn’t overjoyed when I got to the hotel and saw that the two of us were sharing, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I dropped my stuff, ate and had a massage. When I came back from massage, my roommate wasn’t there. About half an hour later, one of the soigneurs came in and asked angrily what I’d been saying about him because he’d apparently complained about me saying things to the others. I was completely taken aback, annoyed even, and roped in Desbiens to back me up. By this point, my roommate was avoiding me, and when he didn’t turn up to dinner we were starting to get a little worried.