by David Millar
It didn’t hamper my form though and I won stage six, escaping in the finale with one other rider before beating him in the sprint. Although I didn’t really notice any marked physical difference due to doping, things were becoming easier for me. I still felt like I suffered as much, but now I could suffer for longer and then recover faster. It was like having the form of my life, day in, day out.
Before the stage to Zaragoza, a rumour spread through the peloton that the Spanish team ONCE had fitted 55-tooth chain rings on their bikes. Clearly they knew something we didn’t.
But as I’d barely slept the night before, due to my skin burning and itching, I was neither worried nor concerned about what ONCE had or hadn’t planned. I was not a factor in the overall classification and my two stage wins meant that the team basically had carte blanche for the rest of the race, so it wasn’t as if we had much to stress about.
In howling winds, that stage to Zaragoza became one of the fastest bike races in history, as the peloton averaged 56 kilometres per hour over 180 kilometres. It also opened my eyes to the power of doping.
When we began to hit the crosswinds in the final stages of the race, I was sitting too far back in the peloton. Within a kilometre I found myself in the third echelon of riders, watching the front of the race disappear at speeds nudging 70 kilometres an hour.
Partly due to the adrenalin rush of riders getting physically blown off the road and partly due to the absolute panic surrounding me, I was motivated by the situation and spent the next 30 kilometres of racing bridging on my own between groups. I wasn’t that surprised that nobody could or would work with me, but I began to think it was strange when nobody could even hold my wheel.
It only took me a couple of minutes to recover from the first bridging move. I thought it was a bit odd that I felt so good, but I was beginning to have fun. Without even trying to take anybody with me as support, I went off in pursuit of the front group that was, by now, out of sight.
It was an absolutely ridiculous move, and in the unwritten rules of cycling an impossible one. I spent the next 20 minutes riding at over 60 kilometres per hour, with a cadence in excess of 115. I closed most of the gap in the first 15 minutes and was then able to see the front group, only 100 metres ahead.
They were within reach when I started to fall apart. I was way over my limits, my breathing was out of control and my whole body was starting to lactate. Unable to get closer, it was only because one of the riders at the back of the group saw me, and then told l’Équipier, that I finally made the junction.
L’Équipier dropped out of the safety of the group’s slipstream, came back and towed me on to the tail end. I was in a mess, but my lone ride between the groups went down as legendary, a ride that nobody apart from the professional peloton knew about. Yet it also showed what EPO could do. My body was responding in an unprecedented way to the demands of racing.
That experience had an impact on me. I began to think of myself as two separate entities: mind and body. My body was a tool that was capable of things that I previously hadn’t thought possible. Now I knew why Frank Vandenbroucke was always pushing the envelope and seeing how far he could go. It was a game, in which he played God with his own body. And in the process, Frank lost his mind.
As the Vuelta went on, my sleep patterns worsened due to the incessant burning and itching from my allergic reaction. We’d set a deadline for me going home if it didn’t improve, but the only immediate solution to the problem was cortisone, although cortisone was illegal unless it was for tendon treatment.
Cortisone could sometimes have been used to good effect. There was a famous example of this when Jonathan Vaughters was stung on the face by a bee during a stage of the Tour de France. His eye became so inflamed that he couldn’t see. A simple cortisone injection would have quickly treated this, but because Jonathan and his team followed the rules so honestly, he ended up having to quit the race.
In my case, we found a less honest, more pragmatic, solution. The team told the world that I had tendonitis in my ankle and that I’d been given cortisone for this. In fact I’d been given an intramuscular cortisone injection in an attempt to calm the allergic reaction.
All that was needed to satisfy the UCI was for us to note this in my medical records. Then if cortisone appeared in an anti-doping sample, they would look back at my medical record and see that I had a legitimate reason. As long as the right product was listed in the medical book, and was allied to a legitimate use – in this case tendonitis – it didn’t matter if the reason given was accurate or not.
The team doctor and others had been saying I should take cortisone since the rash first showed itself. Yet, even as an EPO user, I held off for a week on taking cortisone. I didn’t want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body. It was probably the most potent drug out there, yet with the right prescription it could be used legally. There wasn’t any great resistance to cortisone use within Cofidis, a stance replicated by most pro teams at the time. Even now, cortisone is abused by some, its use being hidden behind the TUE’s (Therapeutic Use Exemption certificates) which can be easily acquired.
A few days after the cortisone injection I began to lose weight. I was skinnier than I’d ever been. There were veins appearing all over my legs and my torso as the last bits of fat left on my body were eaten away by the cortisone. Once the fat was gone, it began eating into my muscle, causing my weight to drop continuously.
By the time I got to the World Road Championships in Lisbon, ten days after the Vuelta had finished, I was skin, bone – and a little bit of muscle. Logic would dictate that I felt weaker, and yet I’d never felt so strong. I felt like I could suffer more and push myself harder than ever. And that was exactly what I did in the individual time trial.
Competition in the men’s time trial that year was fierce. Santiago Botero, Levi Leipheimer, Jan Ullrich and I were all in contention, but I led through every time check and on crossing the line it appeared that I was world champion. I was chaperoned to the podium, receiving congratulations on the way, not really knowing anything about where I stood, but assuming that I probably wouldn’t be beaten.
But Ullrich was still out on the course. As I was taken through the crowd barriers towards the presentation, he and Hungarian rider Laszlo Bodrogi crossed the line together and I sensed the mood change around me.
Ullrich had finished 6 seconds faster than my time, demoting me to second place. It’s against the rules to be paced by another rider during an individual time trial, yet this appeared to have happened on the last lap.
Ullrich had been behind Bodrogi, then had caught him. He had overtaken him only to have Bodrogi pass him. Then Ullrich caught and passed Bodrogi once more. Effectively, they paced each other to the finish. This helped Ullrich, not only aerodynamically but also psychologically, and gave him the necessary boost to move from fourth place at the last time check to fastest time at the finish.
I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that this could be allowed to happen and wanted the commissaires to act. But the result stood. I sat in the press conference with my head in my hands, in a state of shock. It took me a good hour to pull myself together.
Later, sitting in the doping control, I said hello to the UCI anti-doping commissaire, the same guy who had also been responsible for the anti-doping procedures at the Vuelta.
We got chatting and at one point he asked if he could see how my ankle was healing. I stared at him, a baffled look on my face.
He repeated the question.
‘Your ankle, David . . .? How is it?’
He bent down and looked directly at the burned skin and the rashes, now healing, that had covered my legs.
Finally, I twigged.
‘Oh, my ankle . . .’ I said. ‘Yes, much better thanks. It healed quite quickly after we treated it.’
He was very thoughtful and seemed genuinely interested in how I was. Yet he also made it obvious that he knew exa
ctly what was behind my supposed cortisone treatment for tendonitis. He wasn’t judgemental, but was simply making it clear to me that, even though he knew the truth of what had gone on, there was nothing he could do.
15
MY PERSONAL JESUS
Despite the problems we’d been having, I spent the winter of 2001 with Shari, in Queensland, in a rented house in Noosa. After everything that had happened during the season, I was looking for an escape. It became a winter of excess and indulgence, during which I lost my way.
I partied far too hard in Australia and there was nobody to blame but me. During one particularly late night, I asked Shari to marry me. I had been thinking about it for a couple of months and had even had a ring made in Biarritz. I proposed to her one night when sleep proved impossible and when, for once, we were alone. It wasn’t romantic, but I believed that it was what I wanted to do. Amazingly, she said yes to my proposal and we became engaged. Somehow, I thought marrying her would stop the bad times and leave only the good.
I had gone to Australia hoping to come to terms with the decisions I’d made, but instead I became more isolated and mired in denial. Even if at times I wanted to, I couldn’t tell people I doped. Perhaps they would have understood, but I didn’t want to share because I was ashamed. As a successful athlete, I was held in some regard, which made me feel even more ashamed. My guilt over the deception crowded in on me so then I’d launch into another bender, in a desperate effort to forget what I’d done.
My recklessness and excesses alienated most of the people I’d become friends with – and then Shari and I broke up. I returned to Europe in early January a shadow of myself. I was still at racing weight, even though I hadn’t touched my bike since the World Championships in Portugal, and I was so tired from sleep deprivation and emotional turmoil that I could barely walk between my flights when I transferred in Hong Kong.
As I sat there, between lounges, lost in transit, I realised that I blamed cycling for the mess I was in. I should have been more than a little concerned about the fact I was heading to our January training camp with no kilometres in my legs at all, yet I didn’t give a shit. I had no desire to ride my bike at all.
Because I’d become team leader, I was rarely, if ever, taken to task. So when we arrived in the south of France for the training camp, and I was only doing short rides because I was too tired to do more, it was accepted without discussion. By the third day, I was barely getting out of bed, and it became apparent that I was suffering from more than just jet lag.
After a series of blood tests, I was diagnosed with glandular fever. Told to rest, I headed back to London briefly and then returned to Biarritz. I’d only spent a few days there in the previous six months, but when I got back, it felt like home. Maybe the trip to Australia had opened my eyes, but I decided that after all the years as a nomad, Biarritz was a good place to put down roots. So I started looking for a house.
I had finished in the top fifteen riders in the 2001 world rankings, which had massively boosted my bonus scheme and placed me in one of the highest bonus brackets. I received a lump sum on 31 December 2001 and then would receive a major pay rise for 2002. I had more money in my French bank account than I’d ever had before.
My image contract was paid into Luxembourg, so I gave the Cofidis contact in Luxembourg a call and asked if they’d received my 2001 bonus. I was stunned to be told that I had been sent close to €400,000.
Cofidis had first started paying me through their Luxembourg holding company in 2000, but I had not known what to do with it. I repeatedly contacted IMG (who were supposed to be managing my financial affairs), yet IMG repeatedly failed to do anything with the funds. Eventually, I bypassed IMG and then opened a bank account. But because IMG had me sign my image contract as David Millar, it was fairly pointless. In order for it to serve any purpose, a holding company should have been created and been the beneficiary of the image contract.
The image contract, a ploy used a lot in sport, is really a tax avoidance trick. Image contracts escape taxation through canny use of offshore banking. The culture that permeated cycling considered it a schoolboy error for a high-earning professional athlete to be taxed on their full income. That is what you’re told – by managers, fellow riders, accountants and agents – so it’s hard not to start thinking it’s your right as a pro athlete to be taxed minimally.
I had trusted IMG to organise my affairs, just as Marc Biver had told me they would, yet the moment they had finished negotiating my contract I felt they effectively washed their hands of me. Nonetheless, I was contracted to pay them 10 per cent of my principal contract and 20 per cent of all other earnings (before tax) until December 2003. Now I understood why Biver had been encouraging me to win more points. After all, he received a percentage of everything I earned. He was the stereotypical cold-blooded sports agent. It seemed to me that he had completely played me.
Later, I was able to get out of my IMG contract. A London lawyer, Mike Townley, won the case, but IMG fought so hard that the decision was only accepted after they had taken it to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. I think I am one of the only athletes ever to win a case against IMG, and that is thanks to the skills of Mike Townley.
House-hunting in Biarritz was fun. I looked at a few places, including Coco Chanel’s first atelier, a beautiful old apartment in the centre of town. It wasn’t very practical but it appealed deeply to the dreamer in me and I adored the fact that she had started her fashion house within those walls. That was how I imagined things would be – I’d be a former Tour de France cyclist living in Chanel’s apartment in Biarritz.
Eventually I saw reason and let go of the Chanel dream. Instead I bought one of the oldest villas in the town, beautiful but derelict. It still had its original fin de siècle electrical fittings. I found a copy of a 1953 Vogue in the basement. I loved it.
I was still recovering from my illness, but I caught up with old friends in Biarritz and then made some new ones. Before long we’d created our own little group. There was Sabine, who with her mother owned the Ventilo Caffé; Loïc, a true Marseillaise who loved surfing so much he had moved to Biarritz and taken his flooring business with him, and Olivier, the owner of a restaurant called Le Lodge.
There was also Alain, a true Parisian who managed the Hermès shop in town. Alain had grown up in one of the less salubrious arondissements in Paris, but had started working at Hermès as a teenager. He had worked his way up to become head of the made-to-order section in the flagship St Honoré store, before coming down to manage the shop in Biarritz.
We’d sit drinking coffee on the Grand Plage and he’d occasionally say: ‘You see that woman . . .? Her bag’s worth €40,000.’ Neither of us understood why somebody would buy such a bag, yet he’d help create much of the demand.
And there was also a young Australian cyclist called Benny Johnson, who I’d got on with really well during my time in Noosa. He became my protégé and close friend. I wanted him to have somebody to guide him through the shit, even while I was up to my neck in it.
I was still ill, but after a month in Biarritz I decided it was time to get back to cycling. I needed a coach – somebody who could give me a programme to adhere to. I’d been introduced to sports doctor Jesús Losa at the World Championships, although at the time and in subsequent weeks I hadn’t really thought much more about him.
Jesús worked for another professional cycling team, Euskaltel. It wasn’t difficult to find his number through a carefully chosen Spanish pro that I knew and, after speaking to him, we decided that I would go down to his offices in Valladolid to do physiological testing as well as blood tests.
Jesús was a cool guy, typically Spanish, warm and affable. He was married with two kids and trained athletes from all sports, although his preferred clientele was from cycling. Although he was the official doctor and coach for Euskaltel, he was allowed to keep his personal client base, and this included a certain number of pro cyclists.
At that firs
t meeting in his lab, I underwent the usual physiological tests, to establish a base line of my fitness and ‘engine’ size. Given that I had been diagnosed with glandular fever, I was concerned, but Jesús seemed absolutely convinced there were no issues. We discussed training at length and it was clear that he had an in-depth knowledge of sports science and pro cycling. Then I brought up the subject of doping.
I wanted to let my body get back to its top level on its own without drugs. More importantly, I wanted to win a road stage at the Tour de France clean. It was a strange attitude to have – after all, I wouldn’t have been having a secret meeting with a Spanish sports doctor unless there was a desire to dope (even if, back then, doping athletes wasn’t a criminal offence in Spain). Yet that first meeting revolved around me telling him I didn’t want to dope – at least not for the time being.
At that time, I didn’t consider myself a fully fledged doper. Yes, I had used it to great effect but I didn’t yet see myself as one of them. I didn’t feel like I really needed it – maybe I’d made a mistake the year before. So I told Jesús that I would hold off doping for as long as possible. I had to prove I could win once again at the top level without drugs. I was definitely confused.
The practical side of the relationship was quite simple. I would pay him €12,000 a year for his coaching and expertise; any medical supplies I needed – legal or otherwise – I would pay for separately at the end of the year, in addition to the bonuses that Jesus had earned depending on the number of UCI points I had won.
The bonus system was lucrative for him and, I hoped, would keep him motivated. The downside to the bonus system was that it meant it was in his interest that I dope. I hadn’t really thought about that at the time; he seemed like a really good guy who understood my motivations. The thought of him encouraging me to dope seemed ridiculous.
When I got home, I put my head down and, with about six weeks before my first race, the Tour of Romandie, started training. By then, Jesús and I had formed a strong working relationship. His training was advanced and much harder than I was used to. With all of it based around power output and heart rate, I grew used to staring at the computer on my handlebars. Our disregard for my glandular fever had paid off, as I had not suffered once from any more symptoms.