by David Millar
Max recounts with pride his tale of driving a 1967 Mustang around the West Coast, as a 17-year-old toyboy to a successful woman in the movie business. But he missed Italy and cycling, and so left his family in America and went back to his beloved Tuscany to chase his dream of being a professional cyclist.
He became one of the best one-day riders of his generation and also proved his Englishness, winning two of the World Cup races that used to be held in England and taking a bronze medal in the Atlanta Olympics in the road race, in British colours.
When I told him that I was training again he asked if I’d like to come and stay with him in Tuscany for a while. I loved Hayfield but the training wasn’t ideal, so I made the first of what became bimonthly visits to Max in September 2005. Steadily, my strength and fitness was reawakened.
Max loves cycling. He also loves cars, watches, motorbikes, furniture, clothes, snakes, wine, food and women. But he loves cycling most of all. It was great spending time with him, and his excitement about my comeback was palpable.
Max had a beautiful Tuscan villa on the side of a valley, not far from Pistoia. He’d spent years renovating it, but had recently divorced. His wife and three kids had moved out, leaving him skulking around what was now a cold and dark empty house. I could see why he’d wanted me to come over. I nicknamed him Edward Scissorhands.
Max knew everybody in cycling and he said that he’d speak to a couple of teams for me. At first they were interested, but each time it would fall through. My last chance appeared to be with CSC, the team run by the Danish former Tour winner, Bjarne Riis.
Jean-Marie had asked Riis to consider me so I met with him in Lucca. Bjarne was very straightforward and as we chatted he asked me about my life before the ban. I told him, candidly, about life in Biarritz, living in the apartment.
He was shocked to hear this, stunned that I’d always lived on my own.
‘Who did your washing and cooking?’ he said. ‘That’s no way for a professional to live.’ I found his attitude – that marriage was a career move – amusing and very old school.
Then I told him that my dream was to make the Tour de France my comeback race.
‘That’s not possible on our team,’ he told me.
I understood. CSC had many good riders who wanted to be on the Tour team; it wouldn’t have been right to have me, fresh from a doping ban, walk straight into the team and take somebody’s place.
He also believed I’d be better building up to the Vuelta a España, which started two months after my ban ended. He was probably right about this too, but it didn’t fill me with the same motivation. I needed the grandeur of the Tour to make sense of it all.
My options had narrowed. If I wanted to start the Tour, the only choice I had was Saunier Duval. So we agreed to meet. I flew to Madrid and arrived at their hotel on the evening of the last day of the 2005 Vuelta. It was the first time I’d been to a bike race in fourteen months and it felt like home.
I’d been wrong to think I’d have teams chasing me. I was in absolutely no position to be looking down my nose at others. My life was now very different, but I still hadn’t fully understood that I no longer had the same status within professional cycling. Now I felt lucky to have just one team wanting me. I didn’t care who or what it was – I needed them more than they needed me.
The Saunier Duval team was run by Mauro Gianetti and Matxin Fernandez. Mauro, the manager, was a Swiss-Italian ex-pro who lived near Lugano, while Matxin, a Cantabrian Spaniard, was the head directeur sportif. Matxin had been an amateur cyclist but had started directing young and then worked his way up through the ranks.
In 2005, he was the youngest head directeur amongst the top-ranked teams of professional cycling, an impressive achievement for a man who had not earned his stripes racing with the pros. The two of them were entrepreneurs – their team was able to gain results in some of the biggest races and maintain a full complement of riders and a complete race programme on what was a shoestring budget. It was remarkable really.
There was another side to this success though. The majority of their riders were paid very little. These were the riders who didn’t quite make the cut with other teams, for one reason or another. In some ways, it was the perfect comeback team, because if a rider had lost ground, due to injury, illness or a doping ban, then the one team sure to take them was Saunier Duval. But such an environment was best suited to the desperado mentality, and many in the team – perhaps too many – had nothing to lose.
I knew this was the environment I’d be going into, but convinced that the sport had surely changed in my absence, I was confident that it couldn’t be that bad.
I told myself that I was worrying for nothing, that my anxiety came out of my past bad experiences. Anyway, everybody at Saunier Duval was incredibly friendly, much more so than Cofidis had ever been. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the natural warmth of the Spaniards but it was an unexpectedly welcoming team.
As I sat with Matxin and a translator in the hotel in Madrid, we agreed that the Tour de France would be my first race back. Then I’d tackle a couple of the big August one-day races before going to the Vuelta a España. This was more like it.
We agreed there and then that, in principle, I would sign with them. The money was less than I’d hoped for, but I was in no position to negotiate. I was tied to a two-year contract, which expired on New Year’s Eve, 2007. It wasn’t ideal, but I’d get to fulfil my plan of making my comeback at the Tour.
A couple of months later, Mauro and Matxin came to London. We signed the contract in the conference room of my law firm in central London. We had a drink to celebrate and then, with a hug and a handshake, I clambered into a black cab with the bike and clothing they’d brought for me.
It was a typically dark but cheery winter evening in London, with commuters and evening shoppers teeming through the West End. As the black cab began its stop-start journey back to my sister’s place in west London, I sat there with my head against the window, watching it all go by.
I felt no excitement or joy, just weariness. I stared at the bulging bike bag, with SAUNIER DUVAL emblazoned across it, crammed in alongside me.
It hit home. My comeback was really happening.
22
LA ROUE TOURNE
In January 2006, I left for my first training camp in two years and my first with a team other than Cofidis. I arrived at the hotel later than everybody else, so I hadn’t met any of my new teammates when I went downstairs for dinner. Walking into that dining room was nerve-wracking. I didn’t speak Spanish and I only knew a couple of the twenty-six riders. I had no idea what sort of welcome I was going to get.
But I needn’t have been nervous as everybody was enormously friendly. It was a very different environment from that of a French team, in which there was a clear hierarchy between both the riders and the staff. Everything seemed much more egalitarian among the Spanish.
I had grown so used to the permanent moaning within Cofidis that I believed it to be normal. It was refreshing to meet people who were happy with their lot and who worked above and beyond the call of duty, without resentment or complaint.
Despite my lack of Spanish, we managed to communicate well enough. Another of those in the ‘Last Chance Saloon’ was one of my old Cofidis teammates, Christophe Rinero. He’d won the polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey in the 1998 Tour but his career had spiralled downhill ever since.
I’d always got on well with Christophe. I could remember sitting on the balcony of an anonymous post-race hotel in 1999, chatting away with him. He was smoking his pre-bed cigarette (an old school habit amongst some of the Frenchies), telling me how much he’d just like to pack it all in and open a flower shop. It was pretty clear even then that he wasn’t cut out for it, yet he had kept plugging away.
Years later, while training in the Pyrenees, I bumped into him on the road. We ended up sticking together and tackled the Col du Tourmalet near the end of the ride. Once a strong climber, he was a shadow
of his former self.
At one point, as we worked our way up the mountainside, he said: ‘Do you know who has the record for this climb?’
‘I have no idea, Christophe,’ I replied.
‘Monsieur Rinero!’ he announced proudly.
I was stunned. ‘You have the record for the Tourmalet? Shit, Christophe – that’s crazy!’
‘Oui, I know! I was on my own, I attacked at the bottom, the 1998 Tour. Phewf! So long ago, huh . . .?’ That’s right, I thought to myself as we rode through the hairpin bends. Times have changed.
Christophe’s presence at Saunier Duval made things a bit easier. We could speak French together and we had a shared history. The other person who really helped me feel at home was Txema Gonzalez, a soigneur I’d known for ages. Txema was one of those rare friends in pro cycling who transcends team loyalty.
We’d never actually worked on the same team but had always hung out together. He spoke English and was a breath of fresh air. He loved his job but he didn’t live for it and had interests that went way beyond cycling and that he kept separate. He took particular care of me, knowing that I was perhaps a little more fragile than I appeared.
Heartbreakingly, Txema died suddenly in 2010 at the Vuelta a España while working for Team Sky. It was devastating news for everybody who knew him.
‘You’re only as good as your last race,’ they say. My last win had been the world title in 2003 – and that had been stripped from me for doping. I may have once been a Tour de France stage winner, but in a sense I was starting from zero.
But I’d promised myself that the comeback would mean something, so before Mauro did his first team talk, I took him aside and told him he should be vocal about the team’s position on doping. I’d learned that no matter how many ethical charters were signed, or how many doping controls were in place, or how extreme the punishments threatened, they meant nothing if the employers didn’t take a proactive anti-doping stance. It is also the responsibility of the team to prevent their riders from doping, yet this was something that people still didn’t really understand – especially team bosses.
I had seen it at Cofidis, where the team management had their heads firmly buried in the sand, considering their responsibility fulfilled if we signed a meaningless piece of paper promising we wouldn’t dope. Yet they allowed us to use whatever doctor we wanted and to race with incredibly suspicious blood values. If the rider was caught then it was his responsibility and the team would claim it had done everything possible to prevent it. In fact, all the team had done was protect itself. That was how the system worked.
I wanted to help the guys who were clean, I wanted them to feel that they were being supported. I wanted to hear Mauro say convincingly to his team that he believed in clean sport, that he expected his riders to be dope-free and that he would help and support them in the process. But it became clear that stating this hadn’t even crossed Mauro’s mind. It was a taboo – doping and anti-doping were bracketed together. If you didn’t talk about one, then you didn’t have to talk about the other.
Mauro did say a few words, but it lacked conviction. As I listened to him speak, it was clear the majority of those in the room didn’t really care or even find it valuable to hear what he said. I had hoped there would at least be a feeling of support towards Mauro and respect for him taking the stance, but there was nothing. It was an awkward and embarrassing moment that everybody wished hadn’t happened.
I’d thought that the majority would have been fervently anti-doping and vocal about it too, but this was definitely not the case. So I decided my best policy was to lead by example and be vocal myself. I made it clear that I would not be using any injected récup and shared my views and experience with anybody who would listen – especially the younger riders.
Once I got back home, after the camp had finished, I got in contact with the anti-doping arm of UK Sport. If I was going to make a difference then I needed to share my experiences with the agencies responsible for anti-doping. I’d realised that if I stood little chance of having any influence on my own team then I would stand little chance in the big pool of professional cycling. Maybe it was time to take a slightly different approach.
I was an open book when it came to talking about my experiences in doping but I hadn’t been contacted by any anti-doping agencies following my ban, which surprised me. Nobody had tried to tap into my knowledge and experience.
This seemed a wasted opportunity – having been through it, I knew more about the realities of how a culture of doping operated than most. Now that I was back on the comeback trail, I thought it was time for me to be the instigator.
I wrote a letter to UK Sport explaining who I was and why I was contacting them. Soon afterwards, they replied and I met with Andy Parkinson, who had recently become their head of operations. Andy was very receptive, and much more open-minded that I’d expected. We spoke at length and I was able to tell him both about the lessons I’d learned and that I was available to help them.
Andy told me he would give serious thought to how my experiences could be of benefit, but he was sure that I could help them. It was a first step in feeling that everything I had been through had some worth – that it hadn’t all been for nothing.
On my next visit to Tuscany, Max suggested that I should meet a good friend of his – Luigi Cecchini.
The Italian was one of the most famous coaches in professional cycling, but also one of the most controversial. His clientele was a who’s who of famous cyclists. Some, like Bjarne Riis, Tyler Hamilton and Jan Ullrich, are probably better described as infamous.
I was hesitant, so I asked Max if he would understand my new outlook on cycling. Max said that, before anything else, Luigi was a lover of cycling and that he’d be a good person for advice on how to train for my deep-end comeback at the Tour de France.
Having a coach who could tell me what I needed to be doing in training would make a world of difference. As for Luigi’s reputation, I didn’t think that I, of all people, was in any position to judge somebody on their reputation.
‘He’s a good man,’ Max said. ‘Judge him for yourself
So I did. At the time, I was training blind – I didn’t have a coach who was working with practising professionals and so had no comparison or performance objectives. I didn’t know how to quantify my training and gauge whether I was even capable of starting the Tour.
In terms of profile, both Cecchini and Michele Ferrari were at their peak in the mid-1990s, coincidentally the period when cycling was at its most EPO-addled (EPO was not fully outlawed until later). Back then, it was considered prestigious to be a client of either of these doctors but, post-Festina, modern cycling dictated that a relationship with either had to be kept quiet. This didn’t stop me wanting to meet Cecchini. In hindsight, despite everything, I was still naive.
I knew nothing about him, apart from his 1990s ‘reputation’. I’d read an article in a cycling magazine, back in the day, when he and Ferrari were feted for their God-like ability to create champions. But I felt that Max’s opinion of him was enough reason for me to give him the benefit of the doubt. In a way, I was treating him with the same open mind that I hoped people would have when they met me.
He was different from what I had expected, genteel and kind, and bore more resemblance to an upper-class gentleman than a sports doctor. He lived a few kilometres from Lucca in a gargantuan old villa. His son drove a Porsche and his wife owned the most expensive clothes shop in town.
His office was in converted stables, opposite the imposing main gates, and was crammed with cycling memorabilia. It felt like a sporting man cave, full of everything that the owner loved. There was everything he needed for running physiological tests and also a small TV, beside the desk, on which he watched all the races. A little later on, when the season was in full flight, I returned to find him sitting there, glued to the TV screen like a super-fan, looking out for his protégés.
Max introduced me in Italian. He and Cecchini
chatted for a bit then I told him, briefly, what I’d been through and why I was coming back in the manner I was. I told him that I believed it was possible to win clean at the highest level because I had already done it. I told him that this was the most important thing about my return to cycling, that I wanted to do it without injections and without doping, and I wanted my first race back to be the Tour de France.
He listened intently. Once I’d finished, he sat there in silence for a bit, thinking about what I had said, before responding in near-perfect English.
‘Well, David,’ he began, ‘I know you have a big “engine”. I have seen you race and Max tells me that you are different. I believe you can do what you want to do, and I think you are right to think you can win clean.
‘The sport is changing – I know, I see the blood levels. The Tour de France as your first race back . . .? This will be a big challenge, a very big challenge. You will have to train very hard and very well. It is possible, though. Yes, I believe it is possible.’
This was not an impulsive response – what he said had an air of authority. It was what I wanted and, more importantly, needed to hear. It was important too that he backed my clean stance. If we weren’t on the same page regarding that, then there was no way I could have even considered mentioning his name again – let alone working with him.
I did some tests out on the road, one hill climb, one simulated time trial, then Luigi started training me. There was never ever money involved and it was never even discussed. I’m sure I’m probably the only professional rider he has ever trained for free. We got on extremely well, and I never even got a hint of him being involved in anything to do with doping.
That was until the Spanish doping investigation, Operación Puerto, which implicated some of Cecchini’s clients, exploded in the build-up to my comeback race, the 2006 Tour de France.
I rode my first Tour in 2000 in the aftermath of the Festina affair; I made my comeback as the fallout from Operación Puerto spread through the peloton.