by David Millar
It seemed more than likely that I would soon be arrested, so in the spring of 2004 I met with a Parisian lawyer to discuss my rights. As it turned out, I had very few. I had no right to a lawyer and could be held for up to 48 hours. I could be held longer if the judge saw fit, although I would then be allowed access to a lawyer. It was frightening. There seemed to be little I could do; my life was now out of my hands.
Then, as my panic grew, everything went quiet. There were no more heart-stopping phone calls from journalists who had seen the latest leaked reports, there were no more arrests. It seemed that the Cofidis affair had ground to a halt.
I thought that maybe I’d escaped it all, that maybe the investigation had reached a dead end. When it came to doping I had nothing to do with Bob or Gaumont or anybody in the team, except l’Équipier. So, as far as I could tell, they hadn’t got anything against me other than Gaumont’s allegations.
Ten days before the start of the 2004 Tour de France, I felt that the worst was behind me. Dave Brailsford and Lisa, his pregnant girlfriend, were having a short break in Biarritz before Dave headed off to Athens for the Olympics, so we got together for dinner.
Dave had seen how committed I was to being on his team and living by his standards. He respected me for it. In many ways, the thought of working with Dave and Team GB had saved me from completely losing the plot. They had shown me there was another world beyond the corruption of the European professional scene. I clung on to what they represented: it was what kept me riding my bike when otherwise I simply would have disappeared into a black hole.
We decided to go to one of my favourite restaurants, in Ilbarritz, called Blue Cargo. It’s a beautiful converted house, perched on the hillside above the beach. It was the place to be seen. It had an adjacent bar where, late at night, dancing on the tables was considered the norm.
I loved going there. I’d been there before – once on a hot rainy night with Stuey, Matt White and Lance. It had turned into a memorable Blue Cargo evening, Stuey walking around shirtless with a bottle of vodka in each hand serving random people, while Whitey danced on the tables.
The next morning, Lance and Matt flew on a private jet to a race in Germany. Midway through the flight, Lance turned to Matt and said: ‘Whitey – what a night. Maybe in my top three best ever.’
Whitey stared back at him, baffled.
‘Fuck me, Lance,’ he said. ‘You should get out more.’
We’d ordered some wine and I’d just finished telling this story, when two frowning strangers walked up to the table and stood over us.
‘David Millar . . .?’ they snapped at me. They held up their police badges.
‘You have to come with us.’ We stood up and followed them out into the car park. A third policeman was waiting for us.
They told me to take off my belt and then to remove my shoelaces. It was the first step in dismantling me. Initially, I wasn’t scared or nervous, just very angry. One of them was particularly aggressive and seemed to take great pleasure in belittling me. It felt personal, as if they had a vendetta against me.
We were split up and put into different cars. I was on my own and Dave and Lisa were in another car, escorted to Biarritz police station by the angry policeman who spent the journey punching the back of Lisa’s seat, scaring her to death. Now Dave unleashed his anger, telling him to calm down and respect his pregnant girlfriend.
They took me back to my apartment. As I unlocked the door one of them restrained me, while the other crept in, gun in hand, to clear the place before we entered. I thought it was contemptible: I was a professional cyclist, not a drug-running murderer.
They switched the lights on and took me into the living room. They pulled one of the dining chairs into the middle of the room, sat me on it and told me to sit still.
‘Move and we will take you down,’ one of them said to me, with a look that told me that he meant it. I could see that he would not hesitate to use violence.
So I sat there, as still as I could, for the next three hours, as they turned my apartment inside out. At first I felt secure in the knowledge that they’d never find anything, but that smugness steadily dissipated as they started to go through everything I owned, effectively ripping my life apart. I felt violated. It was another step towards breaking me down so that I’d be easier to interrogate.
After over two hours, I could sense their frustration. The last room they took apart was my bedroom and, for some reason, I began to feel a rising panic. There was something there, something hidden, something incriminating.
What was it . . .?
Then I remembered.
The bookshelves.
No – please – you mustn’t look through the bookshelves . . .
I love books. They’re among my most treasured possessions. I take care of them. Even after reading them I try to keep them in perfect condition, the spines undamaged.
A month after I had come back from the World Championships in Canada, I’d finally got around to unpacking. That was when I rediscovered the two used syringes that I’d stowed away after taking my final dose of EPO in Manchester.
By then I’d already made the decision that I’d never dope again. I thought it would be a poignant souvenir to keep the last two syringes that I ever used, so I hid them in the bookshelves in my room. Then I forgot that they were there.
I could hear the jubilation in their voices even before they walked towards me, brandishing the syringes. I felt like I’d been punched. My world came crashing down. Suddenly, I was very scared. Panic gripped me and I denied their existence. They smiled at me.
They took me to the police station and led me to a cell. Later, a friend on the Biarritz police force told me that when they had arrived they had reserved the cell for 48 hours, whether they had found anything or not. They had always intended to detain me for as long as the law would allow.
18
CÔTE DES BASQUES
After 47 hours in custody, I admitted everything.
I was on good terms with the police when I left, the relief of having told them everything putting me in a state of euphoria. I was grateful to them for liberating me from the torment.
I was escorted out through the back door, away from the waiting cameras. Dave Brailsford was there, waiting for me. He didn’t look angry, or pissed off, just relieved that I was all right. He gave me a big hug. We got into a car and headed to a hotel. I don’t know what I’d have done if Dave hadn’t been there, really I don’t.
Dave had also had a rough time. They had presumed he knew everything about me and had questioned him for 4 hours. He explained the shock and incomprehension he had felt when they had shown him the two empty EPO syringes. He was only weeks away from leading Team GB’s cyclists at the Athens Olympics and had been advised to get out of Biarritz and as far away from David Millar as possible. Despite that advice, he had decided to stay.
Dave speaks fluent French. While I was in custody, he had tried to speak to Cofidis, but they had washed their hands of me. Now he realised how the professional world, my world, operated. He saw that I was now on my own, that the cord had been cut. This was when he decided that somebody had to be there for me when I got out, no matter what I had, or hadn’t, done.
He had booked us into the Sofitel, overlooking the beach – one of the most beautiful hotels in Biarritz. We stayed up late drinking. I told him everything, all the dark truths that I’d kept from him. He didn’t judge me. He understood what it meant, that my life was now in tatters. But the shit hadn’t even begun. In a way, that night was the last before I had to really face the nightmare ahead. When I woke up the next morning, the euphoria had gone.
I spoke to my sister, my mum and my dad. I told them all the same thing: ‘It’s over.’ Dad listened and then said: ‘Is it true?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Did you tell them everything?’ he asked.
‘Everything.’
‘David, I’m immensely proud of you,’ he said. ‘I hope Cofidi
s will now pay for what they did.’
I hadn’t expected that they’d be happy – happy that it was ‘over’. But then they had known for a few years that I hadn’t been right.
I called Francis Van Londersele, my directeur sportif on Cofidis, and told him the same thing: ‘C’est fini, Francis.’ That was the last contact I had with Cofidis. They fired me a couple of weeks later.
I needed a little bit of time before going back to my place. My friends, Xavier and Didier, spoke to their neighbour who lived in Paris most of the year, and, very kindly, he let me use his beautiful apartment for a few days. It looked out across the Côte des Basques, the waves crashing in the background, day and night. It would have been hard to find a more beautiful hideaway.
I spent a week there, partly thinking that everybody was being over-protective of me. I was sure I’d be fine back in my apartment. I was wrong. I did go back there to pick up some stuff, but found myself dizzied by the experience. The place was wrecked and reminded me of the state my life was in.
While I’d been in custody, Dave had spoken to Dr Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who had been working as a consultant to the national team. Dave decided to fly Steve down to Biarritz to spend a day with me. A couple of years later, I learned that Dave had funded this out of his own pocket. At the time, it hadn’t even crossed my mind who was paying for Steve’s time and expenses.
I sat down with Steve just two days after I was released. We met at the Sofitel, just after nine in the morning, and spent the day talking. He told me straight away it wasn’t going to be like the therapy sessions I’d seen in TV shows. He spent the morning asking me questions about my life and upbringing, starting at the beginning in Scotland, up until that day. Then we broke for lunch and met again in the afternoon, when he was able to explain to me why I’d made the decisions I had taken.
It was an eye-opening experience.
It became clear that I still had a fairly adolescent mentality, relied heavily on father figures and had created behavioural patterns that were destructive and self-perpetuating. He made me understand that most of the decisions I’d made were unavoidable, considering the personality and upbringing I’d had.
I then understood that my history, combined with the situations I had found myself in, gave a certain inevitability to everything that had happened. There was little emotion involved in the whole process, no floods of tears. It was all very clinical, but I left with the understanding that there was a lot of work to be done.
In the context of my development, I had acted normally. I relied heavily on other people guiding me and had been let down by the people around me, particularly my team. It would have been out of the ordinary, unusual, for me to have not made the mistakes I’d made. So, in conclusion, I was normal... and I had always thought I was different.
A few years later Dave told me that when he’d spoken to Steve after our time together, Steve had told him that there was no short-term resolution, that only the passage of time would allow me to sort myself out. In other words, I hadn’t quite finished my self-destruction. I still had a little way to go.
Fran had flown over to Biarritz almost immediately and was there, waiting, as I spent the day with Steve Peters. We met at the Côte des Basques after Steve and I had finished talking. I was a bit dazed. I hadn’t talked that much about my life to anybody before and I’d certainly never had anybody dissect it in the way he had. It left me feeling very open to the world.
We sat at the top of the steps that led down to the beach. I was in jeans, wearing a T-shirt, leather jacket and some big black sunglasses. I didn’t belong there, a brooding presence, on the beach in summer time. Everything felt wrong, as if all the shit that I protected myself with had been stripped away. I was 27 and I’d thrown my life away. I felt empty.
We sat there in silence for what seemed like an eternity, watching people come up and down the steps to the beach. None of it made sense: how had I done this? I was both angry and sad, filled with incomprehension.
Finally I spoke.
‘They said I’d still be able to do the Tour de France.’
Fran looked at me. ‘David, I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.’
There was another long pause.
‘Are you still proud of me?’
‘Of course I am, you’re my big brother.’
I watched some little kids playing in the sand.
‘If I ever have kids, I’m never letting this happen to them,’ I said, with conviction. A tear escaped from under my big black sunglasses.
France reached across and put her hand on mine.
I looked at her and smiled sadly.
‘I wish I had a fast-forward button,’ I said.
Biarritz is a small place. It wasn’t possible for me to go into town without bumping into people I knew. Those I didn’t know probably knew me, and the prospect of walking around daunted me. It was shameful being known as a doper, a cheat. It’s one thing doing it in secret, lying to yourself – but there was now no hiding from who I was and from what I’d done. I dreaded living with it.
But my dread was misplaced. I was lucky in that the friends I had made were all great and took particular care of me. Alain and his girlfriend Valerie now had a café-restaurant on the Côte des Basques and I would spend my days between there and Sabine’s Ventilo.
They organised mini-football tournaments on the beach and generally it felt like my life was unchanged, even if it was now a life without cycling. Even random people, people I’d seen around but never spoken to before, came up to me and asked if I was okay.
From older members of the Biarritz community to the surfing crowd, there was genuine concern. I had never expected that. One day I was walking through town, down one of the quiet back streets, when a local surfer dude, sitting on his window ledge having a cigarette, called out to me.
‘Daveed! Putain, c’estlo merde. Ça va?!’
I was a bit surprised but mustered a response: Ça va, bon, pas trop, mois ca va aller.’
Then he said the loveliest thing: ‘Tu sais on pense a toi, tu n’est pas un mauvais mec – d’accord?’
‘You know we’re thinking of you, you’re not a bad guy – okay?’
I muttered some thanks. It cut deep to realise how lovely people were and how much I’d let them down.
I never met anybody who was critical of me in Biarritz. I think most of them knew me, or knew what had happened, even if they’d never spoken to me. They’d watched me grow and seen my success, yet I’d always been one of the few anglophones who had been totally immersed in French life.
I was fiercely proud of being from Biarritz and in the two previous years I’d become known in the French press as Un Biarrot, a local, a part of the town. In my downfall the town took me under its wing more than it had ever done at the height of my success. All of a sudden I was accessible, and people reached out to me. That got me through those first few weeks.
But at some point I had to start dealing with it. I was scheduled to go to Paris to meet with my lawyer, to brief him on what I’d said and for him to educate me on what would happen next. Up to this point, beyond Dave Brailsford and my family, I had not disclosed to anybody what had happened during my 48 hours with the police, but that changed when my entire statement was leaked to L’Equipe. This was a legal document that was supposed to remain confidential until the case was presented in court. But there had been leaks about the ‘Cofidis affair’ from day one, and L’Equipe was better informed than the lawyers involved.
Cedric Vasseur, one of my teammates, had been falsely accused of taking cocaine. The urine and hair samples he’d given when arrested with Gaumont at the beginning of the year had tested positive, yet anybody who knew Cedric well knew that he didn’t do cocaine.
While Vasseur was fighting this allegation, he also claimed that one of his statements had been forged – which seemed ironic, given that the police were investigating a sporting team for fraud. Cedric was eventually cleared.
It soon became clear that I was going to have to leave France. The French tax office was pursuing me, and it was inevitable they were going to freeze all my assets at some point – not that I had many. My bank accounts were drying up and my house was unfinished and the property of a Luxembourg company. I didn’t really have anything else. There were a few watches, lots of books, CDs and DVDs, clothes and shoes.
My house was only a month away from being completed, and yet now I had no money to complete it. I faced the harsh reality that I was going to have to sell it, so I made a big sign with my phone number on it and stuck it in the window. It symbolised, perhaps better than anything else, the scale of my downfall.
My life was like a burning fuse, but there was no bomb connected – it was just going to fizzle out until there’d be nothing left.
19
JUDGE DREAD
No human authority can encroach upon the power of an investigating judge; nothing can stop him; no one can control him.
Honoré de Balzac
My first meeting with the Paris-based judge in charge of the Cofidis affair, Richard Pallain, was on 20 July 2004. Judge Pallain was a fit, health-conscious middle-aged man, who nibbled on big bars of chocolate, while massaging a stress ball.