by David Millar
I knew it wasn’t good to need sleeping pills, but my sleeping patterns had become so chronically bad that at times I relied on them completely. I had even taken Rohypnol on occasion, when my insomnia had become unbearable and untreatable with Stilnox. Sitting down with the Team GB doctor, I realised this wasn’t normal behaviour. Yet such was the culture of my pro team that it was seen as completely normal – pills were even offered before I would ask for them. With Team GB, I felt like I’d entered a different world, a naive and uneducated one, far from the harsh realities of the European professional scene. It woke me up: I was clean but already corrupted by the world I lived in.
At the same time, I was wobbling, melting down, becoming a problem. I demanded to be sent to Sydney as I was going stir crazy in Brisbane. I argued that I’d be better off staying in the Olympic Village. It was a bad idea. When I got to the Village, I was even more manic. I was too excited and barely touched my bike. I chose not to ride in the road race as I had only been training for the time trial, which was three days later. I watched the road race, then that evening, when I couldn’t sleep, left the Village and went into the centre of Sydney to the after party. Obviously everybody knew that I shouldn’t have been there, but nobody said anything. Looking back, I think it was quite obvious that I was a little unhinged. The time trial came and went and I got fourteenth place – not exactly what was expected, but precisely what I merited. Afterwards, I started a 48-hour bender.
The next day, I met my mum, dad and some friends who had come to watch the Games, and had a drink with them. At one point, my dad took me outside to speak to me in private, telling me he was worried about me. I didn’t really understand what he was worried about. I recognised I was in a manic state, but I wasn’t going to tell him about the realities of the world I was living in.
The bender continued right through to the closing ceremony. I borrowed a loudspeaker and ended up on the Australian team bus to their post-Olympic party. At that time, I had more friends on the Aussie team than I did on the GB team, so being with them made sense. I didn’t sleep that night and wandered back to the Village the next morning to find the British team buses waiting and Jez Hunt and myself the only two athletes not on board. I ran and got my bags but Jez decided he didn’t want to go back to the UK and didn’t get on the bus.
The European pro cyclists had made a bit of a name for themselves.
When I got back to England, I shut myself away at my mum’s house and didn’t get out of bed for 24 hours. I didn’t want to go back to Biarritz, and I didn’t want to even look at my bike. I’d turned my phone off and intended to keep it that way for a while. I couldn’t think about going to the World Road Championships, yet instead of telling the team, I just put my head in the sand and waited for them to find out through some other channel. I’d closed down. I’d pushed myself to breaking point and was now in a depressed mood, one that would become increasingly familiar in the coming months.
Dad was so worried about me that he flew over to the UK from Hong Kong. It was a bit of a wasted trip for him, because after a couple of days I started to feel better and couldn’t really understand why I’d been so down in the first place. I didn’t know why I was so manic-depressive and I convinced my dad that I was fine, as I didn’t really know any better.
After more time in the UK, Biarritz and then Hong Kong, far away from the world of cycling, I headed off to Australia in November to keep a promise I’d made to Stuey O’Grady. I’d told him, at both the Tour and the Olympics, that I would head down to Australia for a criterium in November, in a place called Noosa Heads.
Noosa had become a legendary party week, incorporating one of the world’s biggest triathlons and an hour-long circuit race in which the pros and local riders mixed it up. Unexpectedly, it was one of the most fun weeks of my life, as Stuey proved once again that he is in a different league when it comes to burning the candle at both ends.
Stuey is one of the greatest cyclists of his generation. His career to date spans five Olympics and he has achieved success in most of the biggest races in cycling. During all that time he has always been the same ball of kinetic energy: a moody bastard at times, but one of the funniest at others. He is one of my most loyal friends and we sealed our friendship in Noosa that week. We have been very close ever since, through the best and worst of times.
On the first night in Noosa, I met a girl called Shari. Within a week, we’d fallen for each other and become an item. Because of that, I stayed in Australia for two more blissful weeks. I had come to the conclusion that I needed somebody in my life and Shari seemed just perfect to me. Until then I had been too focused, lacking the energy for anybody else. Selfishness had worked to a point, but although I didn’t see it at the time, my falling for Shari was directly linked to my increasing instability. Love is blind as they say – even when it’s selfish.
It wasn’t the perfect situation. Australia really did feel too far away from Europe, but all obstacles seemed surmountable. We started planning her first visit to Europe. It got me through the next couple of months of training. I rediscovered my drive and got down to business, putting my worries behind me.
I stayed in Biarritz on my own throughout Christmas, shutting down my social life and living like a hermit. To remind me that I had another life, I started sticking photos on my living room wall and, over time, this turned into a massive mural. I enjoyed my monastic existence, watching the transition in my body as training took me over. It was hard, but as soon as I started to get some physical condition and could feel progress being made, I loved riding my bike again. It was hugely gratifying to see the dieting and training have such quantifiable results as my weight dropped and my power increased.
Alain Bondue and I had bonded a lot since my success at the Tour the previous year. Until that point, I had been seen as ‘difficult’. Unlike some of the other pros, I wasn’t very scared of authority and had been questioning him since day one of my professional career. Also, Alain spoke English, which ensured that I’d always had a closer relationship with him than with anybody else on the team’s staff.
We had history. We’d fallen out over his handling of Gaumont and Vandenbroucke and then when he’d sent me to a race on crutches, but I really liked Alain and saw him as one of the smarter guys in the sport. He had found me the place on my amateur team in France, he’d been there when I’d first met with Guimard and also when I’d signed my first pro contract. So our relationship was closer than that of most riders and their general managers.
At the brief December team get-together we’d had a late-night drinking session and put all our differences behind us. After that night and following my success in the Tour, I’d become his golden boy. It also meant that I was now the main man in the team: I started the 2001 season as leader of Cofidis – then the biggest team in France.
My monastic existence paid off that New Year. At the January training camp, I was on another level to everybody else and was able to ride away from the rest of the team. I would often get back to the hotel well ahead of the others. I wanted to be ahead of schedule with my training as Shari was arriving a few days later and I was sure that things would fall by the wayside during her visit.
We had a great time together, although by the time she headed back, there were the first seeds of discontent. Things weren’t as perfect as they had been in Australia, even though my feelings for her were undiminished. But it was the first time I’d been in love and, as someone would later wisely point out, maybe I was more in love with being in love than with the object of my affections.
By the time of my first race, the Tour of the Mediterranean, I’d lost my training camp condition. I finished dead last on the first stage, but my strongest memory of the race is of a conversation David Moncoutie and I shared with l’Équipier.
‘Moncout’ and I were rooming together and one day l’Équipier was in our room chatting. He may have been an old school cyclist, with a different ethical stance to us, but he was also good fun and
an asset to have out on the road during a race. He knew everybody in the peloton and was a brilliant road captain.
We were chatting away, when l’Équipier paused and then said: ‘You two are incredible. You’re never going to dope, are you?’
Moncout and I looked at each other.
‘No,’ we responded almost in unison. ‘I don’t think we are.’
L’Équipier seemed genuinely impressed, as if it was a stance he admired, but fundamentally couldn’t understand.
He was from a hardcore world where doping was simply part of the game. He was a good guy who took care of the lesser riders and was universally liked, but he inhabited that parallel universe. Nobody within our team ever asked direct questions – doping wasn’t even a point of discussion within the team. Clean or doped, the sport shrugged off all the accusations of malpractice; the omertà – the law of silence – was as strong as ever, and there was no stance taken on anti-doping within the team. There was nobody there to tell us that we were doing the right thing, that we should be strong and believe in ourselves.
In fact, there was no anti-doping support or leadership whatsoever. The UCI and the team bosses considered their job done because the riders had signed meaningless charters pledging not to dope. Meanwhile, the dopers carried on doing what they were doing, while the non-dopers raced alongside them.
Yes, there was the longitudinal blood testing and, by 2001, an EPO test that apparently worked. But the word on the street was that EPO was out of the body within three days, so the test served little purpose as EPO was used in training before races – when we weren’t tested.
Cycling had cleaned up in some ways since 1998, but only the French had radically changed their mindset, and that was out of fear of the real consequences that now existed. An anti-doping law had been passed making it a criminal offence to dope in France. Arrest was a real possibility if you failed a doping control or were in possession of banned products.
There were only two French teams, those managed by Roger Legeay and Marc Madiot, that had managed to shift their mentality right across even their international riders, and those were the same two teams that had acted immediately after the Festina affair. Cofidis lived in a grey area; the team had some clean riders, and some doped riders.
After Guimard’s departure, Cofidis had lacked a proper boss, and Bondue and Francois Migraine effectively ran the team. Migraine was a lovely man, but he was an accountant at heart and he only saw the riders as names that accumulated points, and races as events that offered points. He was a fan, and he was playing the ultimate game of manager.
Bondue, the firewall between Migraine and the team, was too concerned about maintaining the influence he had. On the ground we had no real direction or leadership. We were made up of two types of rider, fonctionnaires who were simply looking to maintain their contract and renew, and mercenaries, foreign riders, signed to score UCI points, make their bonuses and guarantee a future bigger contract. At Cofidis, almost all riders had a bonus system of some sort based on UCI points. We were all driven to look after ourselves.
We were held 100 per cent responsible for our actions. This was made clear on many occasions and was in keeping with how the sport as a whole treated the riders. If a rider was caught doping, then the buck stopped immediately with him. He would be fired and disowned as the management of the team expressed shock, disgust and disappointment, while his teammates would be surprised and appalled that he’d cheated them. The team held zero liability, just like the UCI and the major race organisers.
Although cycling may have appeared cleaner from the outside, it was essentially as corrupt as ever. Nothing was being done to help the non-dopers, to encourage or support them. Even the clean riders like myself and Moncout knew how easy it was to cheat the tests.
You would take some time away from racing, travel to Spain – or maybe Italy where it was easy to obtain EPO – and turn off your phone to avoid an out-of-competition anti-doping control. You’d dope for the necessary period of time and then come back to racing, having given your body enough time to rid itself of the traceable banned drugs.
You didn’t even need a doctor to do this. There were stories of EPO being sold over the counter in Spain and of riders, without guidance, just injecting themselves, basing their techniques on hearsay and tips from others. It was all still a mess.
When I told l’Équipier, with conviction, that I wasn’t going to dope, I surprised myself a little. Perhaps a part of me wasn’t sure any more. Did I really still believe that I could hold out?
I avoided thinking about it too much. Everybody knew that Moncout and I were talented, and we were also known for being strong-willed and for doing things our way. It had taken us both a long time to embrace injectable recovery and we were both quite fragile, yet we had survived our first four years as professionals. The only encouragement we got on a regular basis was: ‘Putain, vous êtes des premiers propres, ça c’est sur!’
‘Shit – you’re the first clean riders to finish, that’s for sure!’
We stopped enjoying that after about the fourth time we heard it.
Moncoutie came from a very provincial area of France. His parents worked for the post office. That was probably where he’d have spent his working life if he hadn’t been so amazingly gifted on a bicycle, particularly when it came to climbing mountains.
He has a tousle of dark hair and a wide smile, and lives in his own world. Material possessions, and fashion, seemed to have no hold on him whatsoever. He wore the same team-issue trainers for about three years. His great passion was cartography. Quizzed on most areas of France, he could cite road numbers, distances and place names.
In many ways, David was a bit of a hippy. He renounced chemical drugs and ensured that everything he took was homeopathic. If he did get ill, which he did quite often, he would be urged to take antibiotics. He’d take one pill from the course and pronounce: ‘Ça suffit’ (‘That’s enough’). This, of course, is exactly what not to do with antibiotics, but there was no telling him. He was infuriating.
Moncoutie’s racing style was to sit right at the back of the peloton, waiting for the road to climb. Once the field thinned out, he was left at the front with the strongest. Physically, he was one of the best climbers in the world, and therefore something of a loner. That was where we differed. I had lots of ambition, an absurdly loyal sense of duty towards my teammates – and I’d always finish a course of antibiotics.
Perhaps it was because we were both talented and stubborn that we’d escaped doping. We were young and we were able to survive and, on occasions, excel. We’d still not even reached our physical peaks, dope or no dope; we were considered works in progress.
Yet what it eventually came down to was the environment you were in and the personality you had. For some, doping was almost inevitable, while for others it was simply never going to happen, even if every single rider around them doped.
When l’Équipier asked us the question, Moncoutie and I seemed untouchable. For Moncoutie, it was unthinkable. Yet deep down I was beginning to wonder why I still felt so strongly about not doping.
Shari’s next visit came during the Circuit de La Sarthe, a small, but prestigious four-day stage race in France. The time trial fell on the afternoon of the penultimate day. I won it convincingly and took the race leader’s jersey. Shari arrived that night, so for once I had somebody to give the presentation flowers to.
Her visit coincided with the hardest stage of the race, which included a demanding finishing circuit. Lance, although not in contention for the race overall, had made it known that it was a stage he wanted to win. Contrary to being worried about how tough this was likely to make the stage, I was excited.
But there was a problem – our team wasn’t strong enough to control the peloton during the race. Because of this we had no option but to fall back on one of the conventions of the pro scene – we struck a deal with another team to help us keep it together until the finale, when I’d look after m
yself. Our team directeur looked for a team that had no chance of winning and that wouldn’t mind making a bit of cash in hand.
As it turned out, there was a Polish team racing there that was perfect for the job. This was, and remains, a fairly standard practice in professional cycling, and ad hoc alliances – sometimes as a favour, sometimes paid for – have long been commonplace. We relied on a financially induced alliance that day.
As I’d expected, all hell broke loose on the finishing circuit. The first time up the steep climb, I was at the front and scanned the crowd to see if Shari was there, cheering me on. I couldn’t see her anywhere and so went back to concentrating on the job in hand. I followed the attacks going off the front, but I was, as expected, isolated and had no teammates to protect my position.
Lance was using his team to make the race as hard as possible and whittle the lead group down before he made his decisive move. With two laps to go the attacks started going again, and as I saw everybody suffering, I realised that I was on a different level. One rider was a hundred or so metres ahead – deciding offence was the best form of defence in this precarious tactical situation I put my head down and sprinted across the gap, leaving the others behind.
The lone escapee was Nicolas Vogondy, a rider I knew quite well as we’d turned pro in the same year. As I reached his shoulder, I told him: ‘Nico – on y va.’
Lance had his team chasing hard behind us, but we kept putting time into them. With a couple of kilometres to go, Nico asked if I was going to let him take the stage, a done thing if you’re in the race leader’s jersey. But this was the last stage and I wanted to win. I wanted Shari to see me cross the line with my arms in the air, triumphant.
I won the sprint from Vogondy, taking the stage and the overall victory. After the finish, I rolled back to the team bus, amid much hand-shaking and back-slapping, proud as hell of a big win. More than anything I wanted to see Shari, but I still couldn’t find her. I assumed she was somewhere in the finish area and asked the soigneur.