by David Millar
The week after Romandie, I went to a weekend race near Madrid, the Clasica A Alcobendas. The format was similar to the Criterium International race in France in that there was a fairly straightforward road stage and then a mountain stage and time trial. I was surprised to be one of the strongest on the mountain stage, attacking on the final mountain to Navacerrada and dropping some of the best Spanish climbers.
My teammate David Moncoutie took the stage and I advised him so effectively on time-trialling techniques that he managed to hold on to the leader’s jersey and beat me into second place overall. I like to think that I remain very generous when it comes to advising my teammates on time trialling.
The result gave Jesús and I confidence in what I could achieve. Although Jesús wanted me to prepare for the Tour de France on EPO, I decided I would only use it for the Vuelta. I felt like everybody only saw me as a time triallist, but, as a rider, I was so much more than that. But I had to prove it by winning a road stage at the Tour clean. If I won doped then it meant nothing, I was very clear on that.
We decided I would go to altitude before the Dauphiné and prepare for the Tour the natural way. So I returned to Navacerrada, close to Jesús and also where many of the Spanish riders trained. It was miserable though, as one of my sporadic bouts of self-doubt settled on me.
Everything caught up with me: the concentrated block of training and racing in the previous months, my lack of Spanish and the isolation I felt being alone. I was cripplingly demoralised and could barely get out of bed. Worse, no matter which way I came back to the hotel, I faced a 12-kilometre climb at the end of each training ride.
One day, a spent force, I simply stopped at the side of the road and waited to hitch my way back up. But no vehicles passed for an hour, as if the gods were playing with me. Eventually, I crawled back up to the hotel, went up to my room and climbed into bed in my cycling gear. I lay there for hours. I texted Jesús and told him I couldn’t do it any more, that everything was shutting down.
Without telling me he was coming, he drove up to the hotel that evening and we had dinner together. His gesture meant so much to me. It was wonderful to have company – he explained that he wasn’t surprised I was feeling down.
‘I work with so many athletes,’ he said, ‘but it’s the guys like you that I like working with the most. You are so intense and I get better feedback from you than anybody else. But you can’t be like that all the time – you’re going to have times like this, when you burn out. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it – it’s just the way you are. You can’t hit the highs that you do, and be as intense as you are, without having these lows.’
Nobody had ever said that before – it made a lot of sense to me. He told me to go home the next day and have some rest, and to forget about the altitude training. His visit made our relationship even closer. For the first time, it felt like I had a coach who understood not only my physical strengths but also the psychological characteristics that had always left me in such deep holes.
Even so, I remained erratic. Typically, after resting, I jumped in at the deep end and went on a big ride, hoping to get an understanding of my form. But 70 kilometres from home I simply couldn’t go on. I spent half an hour searching for a taxi before I found one that would take me back to Biarritz. It was a little embarrassing explaining to the taxi driver that I was racing in the Tour de France in four weeks time, yet couldn’t ride home.
After the Dauphiné Libéré and the British National Road Race Championships, I travelled to Luxembourg for the Tour, head firmly screwed back on. I’d hooked up with Bridget Carter while I’d been back in England. We’d gone to the same primary school and I’d had a crush on her when I’d been at Aylesbury Grammar. She’d become an airline pilot, I was about to ride the Tour de France: we hit it off immediately.
I took fourth in the Tour prologue, which, in hindsight, was a remarkable performance on what was a physically demanding course, yet I was still disappointed. So I set my mind on winning the road stage I so wanted. A few days later, as I sat studying the Tour’s road book, after the finish to Plateau de Beille, I realised that the next day’s stage, from Lavelanet to Béziers, was my opportunity.
The next morning, at the team meeting, we were asked if any of us were keen on going for the stage. I immediately said that I wanted to win it. Bondue smiled at that. ‘Well, that’s a done deal – shall we sign on the dotted line now?’
It was the first real transition stage, taking us from the Pyrenees across the Midi. It was also one of my best days on a bike. I led from start to finish, racing in a break with French star Laurent Jalabert, one of my idols and riding his final Tour.
Laurent was wearing the climber’s polka-dot jersey and had already been on the attack on his own in the two previous stages, so it was absolute madness that he was attacking again. Yet it was as if he was squeezing the last drops out of his career and the French public loved him for it.
I could see he was tired, so I helped him win those first few mountain sprints of the day, feeling honoured to be able to do what little I could to make sure he rode into Paris with the mountains jersey still on his shoulders.
After we’d exited the Pyrenees, it became a flat race to the finish, with fourteen riders in the breakaway, battling for the win. Tactically, it was going to be a tricky finale. I had no teammates with me and the run-in was not physically challenging: I knew I would have to play my cards right if I wanted to win.
Fifty kilometres from Béziers, Jalabert moved alongside me. ‘You need to stop making it look so easy,’ he said. ‘Everybody is going to be watching you.’
‘Really . . .?’ I said, taken aback by what he’d said. ‘And you, Laurent – will you be watching me?’
He smiled and said: ‘The opposite, David.’ Now I knew that he would repay my help.
On the course profile, there was one tiny climb, about 20 kilometres from the finish. The rest of the run in to Béziers was pan flat. I knew I had to attack on that hill, but I didn’t know if it would work or not.
As we began the climb, I drifted to the back of the group and watched. Sure enough, the attacks came and, before long, Jalabert made his move, attacking ferociously hard.
Being the classy rider he was, everybody panicked and chased after him, but he just kept going with the group desperately hanging onto his back wheel. Immediately, I realised what he was doing. I knew that the second he relented, his exhausted pursuers would sit up to catch their breath. That would be my moment.
As he finally eased up and the others breathed a sigh of relief, I launched myself as hard as I possibly could down the left-hand side of the road. I didn’t look back over my shoulder until I’d been going for about half a minute, but when I did, I saw there were only four riders left with me.
What I saw told me I was up against it, as three of them – Michael Boogerd, Laurent Brochard and David Exteberria – happened to be among the world’s best riders. All were proven winners.
But none of that mattered. I was too good, too collected, too sure of my own strength for any of them. There is a photo of me crossing the line in Béziers that will always be one of my favourites. The photographer had climbed up on to scaffolding adjacent to the finish line and caught the moment of victory. It captures exactly how I felt: invincible.
I’d just killed some of the best riders in the world – and I was clean. I’d taken nothing – no EPO, no cortisone, no testosterone, no painkillers, no caffeine. I had justified to myself that I was a great rider without drugs – yet perversely given myself the green light to dope again.
I’d proved what I could do clean – how much more could I do if I was doped?
Cofidis had nothing booked to celebrate the end of the Tour that year, no restaurant or nightclub. So, in my new moneyed manner, I hosted the team at a restaurant in Paris. A lot of my friends were there, including new girlfriend Bridget. By coincidence Team Sky hosted their post-Tour debut dinner at the same restaurant eight years later.
Once again, I returned to a monastic existence. My phone was switched off for most of the time and the distance grew between myself and Bridget. I withdrew from the world as soon as I began to dope, and became a different person, insular and focused. This latest programme was nothing like the first time in Tuscany the year before. Now I was cold and calculating.
I didn’t use EPO at first, as I allowed my body to react naturally to altitude before provoking it artificially. I wasn’t doing much training beyond riding on the little plateau that was only a few kilometres long.
Jesús had given me training plans with codes on them, according to the drugs I would be taking, when they had to be taken and in what quantities, so my days were very structured.
There was a combination of EPO, testosterone pills and, after a week, one normal dose of cortisone followed by weekly micro-doses. On top of this were the legal injections for vitamins, iron, anti-oxidants and, on occasions, amino acids and glucose. Before long, I was injecting at least once a day. If I hadn’t felt like a doper before then, now there was no doubt.
The longer this went on, the more injections and pills I took, the deeper I got into it, the more I felt I had to perform. There was no longer any thought of fun or enjoyment – it was completely professional now. I had bought into the belief that doping was the only way of being a player in a Grand Tour. That’s what the programme was all about: seeing if I could manage it in the Vuelta, and if I could, who knew – then maybe I could also do it at the Tour.
By the time I returned to Biarritz, I was lighter than I’d ever been in my professional career and the same weight I’d been when I was 18. Jesús and I were sure this was the ticket to success – we were following the old Michele Ferrari adage of losing weight, increasing power – and then going faster. The problem was that I’d lost too much weight, and with it, the power I needed to go fast. I had become obsessive. I wasn’t eating enough and I was stressed. I was trying too hard. I wanted it too much and I had taken it too far.
The Vuelta didn’t go as planned. I was still holding on to a top ten place as the race entered the final week, but it was clear that I wasn’t at my best. Because of what I’d done to prepare for the race, I kept pushing on and not throwing in the towel. It would have been totally unacceptable for me to have doped and failed. That wasn’t an option: mentally, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the consequences of that.
It would mean I’d have to face the fact that it wasn’t just my prior refusal to dope that was stopping me from being the most successful rider I could be. I’d have to acknowledge that maybe there were other characteristics preventing me from achieving the success I craved. I didn’t want to know what they were.
I started the key stage, climbing the vicious Angliru, in this confused state of mind. The Angliru is in Asturias in north-west Spain and had only been raced on once before. It was reputed to be perhaps the hardest climb that any bike race had ever gone up, a road so steep that cars could barely make it up there. In just a few seasons, it had become the most feared summit finish in the sport.
But the forecast wasn’t good and before the start, ‘Chechu’ Rubiera, who was from Asturias, was telling all the teams that if it rained we should strike. The roads in the region were covered in coal dust from the local mines and could be treacherously slippery in the rain.
There were two approaches to the foot of the Angliru. One took the main valley road, which Chechu said would be quite safe; the other climbed over one mountain then dropped down the other side of the valley to the foot of the Angliru.
This was the route the Vuelta organisers had taken the previous time they had used the mountain. It had rained and there had been crashes everywhere, forcing some of the main contenders out of the race with broken bones. Instead of learning from this, the race organisation had decided, recklessly, to use the same approach. It was clear they wanted crashes and they wanted spectacle. We all agreed we would call a truce to the racing if it rained. They were empty words. When it started to rain, we rode even faster.
The roads were like an ice rink. There was a series of crashes on the descent towards the Angliru and I was involved in the first of these. I got up without serious injury, although my left side had been ripped, but on the false flat leading to the foot of the Angliru my wheels disappeared from under me and I went down again, this time on my right side. It was a farce. I was one of the best riders in the wet and yet I had no control of what was going on. Remarkably my bike was still fine, so I straightened it up and set off again. But it was more dangerous than it had been all day, and we were going uphill.
Soon afterwards, I went down again, sliding along in the middle of the road on my left side. The car that was following me ran right over my bike – and I still had my feet in the pedals. Now I was furious. I dragged myself to the side of the road and just sat there with my wrecked bike, watching as bloodied riders came by. I love competition on an epic scale, but this had nothing to do with sport. We were being exploited. It was incredibly irresponsible of the organisation but they were getting what they wanted – headlines and TV ratings – at the risk of not only our health, but even our lives.
But the peloton had only itself to blame. We, the riders, let them do it to us. We were a bunch of lone-wolves, contracted mercenaries who stabbed each other in the back at every opportunity. We couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, I thought to myself as my peers struggled onwards. Then I corrected myself – actually that was probably the one thing we could do.
Eventually, my team car pulled up, with my spare bike on the roof. I got back on, but mentally I had quit the race. Bingen Fernandez, my loyal Basque teammate, finally caught up with me and tried pushing me, but I told him to forget it – we were so far behind that it was over.
It was so dark now that in the pouring rain it felt like dusk. I was covered in blood and had ripped a lot of skin, as coming down on my right side twice had worsened the road rash. I still wanted to finish the stage, even though, at the speed I was capable of, there was still close to an hour of climbing ahead of me.
The last part of the Angliru is the hardest. Over the final 6 kilometres, it averages 13 per cent with some passages at 24 per cent. Bingen didn’t leave my side and, as a Basque rider, he was massively supported. Basque fans are among the most devoted in cycling and they were desperate to help him, but every time they tried to push him he would wave them away and tell them to push me.
I was a mess: it was all I could do to keep momentum. With just a few kilometres to go, we had to weave through broken-down cars and the dark misty air stank of burned-out clutches. The fans that were up there had no doubt climbed the mountain on foot and waited all day, but were now trapped behind 2-metre-high riot barriers guarded at intervals by police.
I’d never seen this before at a bike race and I haven’t seen it since. Clearly, just to guarantee the spectacle, the organisation had wanted the bloody stragglers to suffer unaided, without any fans interfering in their bloody battle.
Not far from the finish, a fan managed to squeeze between the barriers and came running up to help me on what was one of the steepest parts. It was obvious I was in a lot of pain and although pushing me at this point made no difference to my race, or to the race overall, he wanted to help.
He’d barely started to push me, when a policeman came running over and slammed him against the fence crushing his neck with his forearm. I stopped – which wasn’t difficult as I was riding at about 1 kilometre per hour – and went for the policeman. I couldn’t believe it was happenin
g. It had nothing to do with cycling.
Somebody had to take a stand against the madness. I decided it had to be me. I hated everything about cycling at that moment. I blamed it for the mess I found myself in, the doping, the loneliness, the craziness, the exploitation.
So just short of the finish line, I stopped. I leaned my bike up against the crowd barrier. Then I ripped my race numbers off and threw them on the floor, leaving my bike where it was. It made perfect sense to me.
The irony was that everybody thought I was protesting because of the difficulty of the Angliru, when it was in fact directed at the race conditions and the irresponsibility of the race organisation. Afterwards, I needed to explain on several occasions why I had done it. My ‘strike’ started the discussion though, and proved that I had the balls to do it. Funnily, my name is always linked to the Angliru, even though I have posted possibly one of the slowest-ever times for the climb.
I was still bandaged after the Vuelta and didn’t really have much time to prepare for the World Championships in Zolder, Belgium. But I was committed to racing there, so after ten days off the bike, Rob Hayles was recruited as my temporary head coach. This involved him riding my scooter, while I chased him on my time trial bike. I was in terrible shape, but I rode in the World Championships time trial anyway.
Somehow, I got sixth place, only 35 seconds off the winning time. But the real up-side of making the trip to Belgium was that I met David Brailsford, who was at his first road World Championship in his role as Team GB Performance Director. We were like peas in a pod and instantly became friends.