by David Millar
Yet he can be, and often is, very funny. He has a natural desire to provoke, like the naughty boy who lives and breathes to annoy adults. Much of this aspect of his personality is clear from his dandyish dress sense, as his sartorial taste definitely complements his quirky nature. But I have always really liked Jonathan. He’s an interesting man, and when I met him again he was in the process of building a professional cycling team.
I’d put Benny Johnson – my young protégé who’d briefly lived with me in Biarritz – in contact with JV. Benny was now based in Nice and, although back in Australia for the winter, was in search of a team for the next year. On my recommendation, Jonathan took Benny on board, but also asked, cryptically, what I’d be doing in 2008 and said that he’d like to talk to me at a later date.
This had all seemed a bit strange – I didn’t give it much more thought. After all, I was hoping to be signing for one of the bigger teams in cycling when my Saunier Duval contract ended – not a small, slightly kooky, argyle-clad outfit, filled with American kids and managed by a man who had nothing to do with the European establishment.
But there was JV, alone in the crowd, a little out of place, hanging around at the Tour de France presentation.
‘Hey, Jonathan – I didn’t know you were going to be here.’
‘Ah, Dave – how are you? Well, y’know. It wasn’t really planned.’
Typically, it felt like we were meeting for the first time, even though we’d known each other for ten years.
We carried on making small talk.
‘Thanks for sorting Benny out,’ I said. ‘He’s a real talent, but he’s just not had the right break. I think your team will be perfect for him.’
‘Yeah, he seems real smart, I think he’ll fit in,’ JV nodded.
‘Sooo, uhhh – listen,’ Jonathan said, ‘come with me. I want you to meet somebody. His name is Doug Ellis – he wants to start a Tour de France team. Let’s just say he has the means.’
I followed JV across the foyer and there, standing on his own, equally out of place, was Doug, a lean, tall, personable and friendly American, yet with nothing about him to indicate wealth or power.
We got chatting and, as it turned out, Doug didn’t have an invitation for the presentation. I had a spare ticket, so I gave him one. Our meeting that morning was very brief, yet it fuelled a curiosity in me about what JV was planning. But it would be months before I learned that JV and Doug were deadly serious in their aspirations.
When I’d started out on the road towards a cycling career, I’d never ever imagined that the Tour would one day start in London. So it was an emotional moment when the London start was fully unveiled in the Palais des Congrès that morning. The presentation also marked the end of Jean-Marie Leblanc’s reign as director of the Tour. Jean-Marie was honoured on stage as he handed the reins to the incoming director Christian Prudhomme.
As Jean-Marie left the stage and walked back to his seat in the front row of the auditorium, he stopped and shook my hand. Afterwards, he told me he did it so that everybody could see that he supported me.
But not everybody felt so forgiving.
Afterwards, while mingling with officials from the Tour organisation over canapés and champagne, I needed to pop to the men’s room. But in the warren of corridors, I got a little lost and then stumbled across a separate reception for representatives of the London start and their guests, including some British riders.
At first I was pleased to see so many familiar faces, but I quickly sensed that I wasn’t welcome there. I was still the pariah – in fact, the event had never been mentioned to me. As that realisation sank in, I felt a flush of embarrassment and left. It was a harsh reminder that I had a long way to go before I would be forgiven.
The case that Judge Pallain had put together with the police over the previous two and half years had finally been handed to the Nanterre prosecutor. The hearings began in November 2006 and took five days.
There was no jury, but three judges, presided over by Judge Ghislaine Polge. We were in the number one court of Nanterre, one of the most important courtrooms in France. There were ten defendants, seven of them cyclists from the Cofidis team, charged with ‘acquiring and possessing banned substances’. We all sat at the front of the court facing the judges, our lawyers seated behind us.
Over the course of the five days we were called up one by one to stand in front of the judges and answer their questions. All witnesses that were involved in the Cofidis affair were questioned. It was very drawn out; on one day we were in court for over twelve hours.
I told the hearing about the culture at Cofidis. ‘Get results and do what you have to do,’ was how I described it. I detailed my stay with l’Équipier in Tuscany, and explained how I had learned to inject EPO. ‘Everybody pushed me on the Cofidis team,’ I said. ‘It was torture.’
On the final day, the prosecutor presented his recommendations for sentencing and said: ‘When initially reviewing the case I questioned whether David Millar should even be here. Fortunately for the court, he has been present, as he’s given us an articulate point of view that has been valuable to the case as a whole.’
After all the stress, time, and money that the affair had cost me, I had in the end simply been seen as a ‘point of view’. It was the icing on the gâteau of justice française.
Paul-Albert had asked to give his closing argument first as he needed to leave. He had never interrupted the progress within the court, considering the best policy was to simply stay quiet and let everybody else make a show of themselves. He had told me that much of the effect of the closing argument was down to presentation.
Instead of standing up at the lectern, he had a table moved out and put at the front of the court so he was almost on the same level as the judges. He then gave an eloquent and mostly improvised discourse to the whole court. It was, to use a word he’d introduced me to, ‘brilliantisme’.
And that was that. Later that day I left the court in Nanterre for the last time. Shortly after the New Year, three years after the first arrests in Paris in January 2004, the sentences were announced.
I was acquitted, while many of the others were given suspended sentences of three to six months. The soigneur, Boguslaw ‘Bob’ Madejak, from whom the whole case originated, was sentenced to a year in prison, nine months suspended.
The court was damning about the team itself, and also found Cofidis SA and Cofidis Competition guilty, saying the proceedings had demonstrated that the riders ‘must absolutely obtain a result or risk seeing their contract not renewed and losing all hope in cycling’.
Finally, it was over. At last, I could move on.
We loved life in Girona. Waking up to blue skies was invigorating and refreshing and the Catalans were friendly and welcoming. But as the season loomed, training, first because of the court case and then because of a crash, was not going well.
Christian Vande Velde and I were becoming firm friends, although I began to doubt his fondness for me on our first training ride of 2007, when we suffered a miscommunication exiting a roundabout and I came tumbling down very heavily on my right leg.
The muscle was badly damaged and there was nothing for me to do but rest for three weeks. It was also the last time I didn’t wear a helmet in training. Ironically, Nicole had given me a hard time over not wearing a helmet just as I was leaving the apartment.
Ten minutes later, I was lying on the tarmac wincing, with Christian standing over me.
‘Damn, that’s some strong voodoo Nicole has,’ he said.
Meanwhile, JV and I had started to correspond more as it became clear that his team was going to happen. Yet it seemed like such a gigantic leap. I couldn’t quite grasp what their vision was and it took me a good couple of months before I could finally put into words what they wanted to do. Without that, I couldn’t commit to it, let alone convince others.
They wanted to create a Tour de France team that was clean and that would offer a vehicle for riders to reach the
top in cycling without ever encountering doping. It would be a team that riders, fans and the media could believe in. It would aim to give back to the sport what it was missing: trust.
The most important way of achieving this was to create an internal, yet independent, anti-dope-testing programme. This would offer an insurance policy for the team, allowing its riders to be tested even more rigorously than the authorities whose responsibility it was to test professional cyclists.
This internal programme would not only test for banned substances, it would also create a blood profile for each cyclist. This profile would allow those responsible for the independent testing programme to monitor for the effects that the undetectable banned substances would have on the cyclist’s blood values. In other words, if it was still impossible to find the cause, then they would find the effect. It was a first generation ‘blood passport’.
This worked as a deterrent in that it would be extremely difficult to dope and not be caught. If you signed a contract with the team you would be fully aware that you were committing to being more controlled than your competition, so immediately the contracted rider would be buying into what the team was about.
This was a strong psychological tool. In doing this we were taking a proactive stance in preventing doping. There would be no ‘ostrich politics’ – the management and sponsors were making it clear that they did not want doping to take place and that they’d do everything in their power to stop it.
I had explained to the anti-doping agencies that, as a young athlete, I had given up on the sport’s authorities. It was so easy for us to dope if we wanted to, and it was so prevalent around us. In fact, I’d never had an ‘out of competition’ anti-doping control before 2006. At the time I was doping, there wasn’t even an athlete’s whereabouts system, so even if the anti-doping controllers wanted to test me away from a race they’d have very little hope of finding me (and none if I didn’t want them to). There were no repercussions to face if they couldn’t find me. This bred contempt for the system, such as it was.
Contempt for the system and resentment of its inadequacies were often the first step towards doping. Knowing that others were getting away with it – and knowing how they were getting away with it – fuelled cynicism. Faced with doping all around you, it became increasingly difficult, and then impossible, to respect those charged with prevention, detection and punishment.
And then what – who or what were you left to rely on? A good apple in a bad barrel will more often than not be ruined. The people of influence in professional cycling were too often bad apples.
It was the hypocrisy that was the hardest thing to live with. To hear the biggest, most influential names in the sport say, ‘Doping? In cycling? But everything is fine!’ was laughable. For a while, I had been one of those people – this is what’s easy to confuse with the oft-cited ‘omertà’. Instead of saying nothing they would simply lie about the gravity of the situation.
There’s no doubt that, after a few years of the blood tests that were introduced after the Festina affair of 1998, there was enough knowledge and data to understand exactly what was going on. If a team boss wanted to, he could analyse his riders’ blood test results, his TUE (Theraputic Use Exemption) certificates, or could find out who his private coach or doctor was and whether he was acting suspiciously.
Yet few ever did and most would claim complete shock and incomprehension when one of their riders failed an anti-doping control or found themselves implicated in a doping scandal. Team bosses didn’t want to know what was going on; worse, they refused to admit they had the power to prevent what was going on under their very noses.
What Jonathan and Doug wanted to do was to change this mentality. They wanted to demonstrate that a team manager and his sponsor could assume responsibility for their actions. They implemented their internal anti-doping programme as soon as the team entered the professional ranks, only three years after JV had created the original junior team in his hometown, back in 2004.
The goal was now to take this attitude to the Tour de France and in doing so change cycling for the better.
The Slipstream dream excited me so much. It gave me an opportunity to implement everything I had learned from my own mistakes and use it to help and develop others.
It was Jonathan’s less than orthodox thinking that made it possible for me to be a part of it. I was the first big-name professional he approached, which – considering that I was an ex-doper – seemed like madness, in the light of what he was trying to achieve.
Only JV could have the chutzpah to think that signing an ex-doper as the flagship leader of a ‘Clean Team’ could work. But he was right – he knew the world of professional cycling, he had been as its mercy and had left the pro scene a disenchanted young man.
Jonathan had made his own mistakes, he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and had made decisions that he will always regret. More than anything, it was this sense of regret that drove him to make his team different from any team that had gone before. In many ways, I was to become his muse.
As I became more enthused about the Slipstream project, I contributed my own ideas. One of the things I’d learned from my time with British Cycling was how valuable a central hub is. Until recently, almost all professional cycling teams had a ‘virtual’ existence. The main office and team HQ, where all the equipment is stored – bikes, wheels, spare parts, clothing, food, bottles and vehicles – will be in one location.
Sometimes that will be close to a sponsor, as with Cofidis, whose team HQ was near Lille. If the team is run by one person, who has guided it through several different guises, then it will usually be found near that person’s home. For Roger Legeay, that means Paris and for Jonathan Vaughters, Boulder, Colorado.
Yet the riders and racing staff have no ties with this hub. Maybe they’ll pass through once or twice a year, sometimes not at all. Supplies for the riders are simply dispatched from the hub to each race, wherever that may be.
This works well on a logistical level, but it creates detachment on a psychological level and the riders – left for too long to their own devices – feel all the more like hired mercenaries. They may meet once or twice a year as a semi-complete team of riders and support staff for training camps, but the rest of the season just wait for the email with the travel info that will take them to the pick-up point for their next race.
When most riders are on one- or two-year contracts it is easy to see how there is no sense of loyalty or understanding of the responsibility each rider has towards the team as a whole. The biggest teams on the pro circuit are made up of a hundred people, something that most riders are unaware of. When a rider dopes they put all those hundred jobs at risk because in modern cycling many teams will not survive a doping scandal.
That detachment from the team’s beating heart only fuels the possibility of doping, which was why I recommended to JV that our team should have a central hub in Europe, where we obliged as many personnel as possible – staff and riders – to live.
This would also serve as a massive advantage when it came to managing the riders. The team would be able to assume responsibility for their performance, providing coaching and training sessions, nutritional and medical support, and the latest in technological and scientific advances. It was one thing to prevent them from doping, but we also had an obligation to offer them the resources to make them the best athletes they could be.
For our European programme of racing, the logical location for this central hub was Girona, where the majority of American cyclists already based themselves during the February–October racing season. The team would remain registered to its Boulder office in order to keep its American licence and origins, and a core team of staff would live and work there, but the majority would be based in and around Girona.
The logistics were complicated and it took a few months to map it all out. But we needed to move forward and sell the idea to others – riders, race organisers and eventually
sponsors. Until it could stand on its own two feet, Doug was underwriting the team’s financial requirements and, in doing so, giving Jonathan and I the freedom to create our dream team.
I was juggling excitement about the future with my disillusion about the present. Away from Slipstream, other relationships were causing me stress.
I’d had a difficult time at the early season Saunier Duval training camp and had become increasingly isolated from the team. By the time I got to the first races, I was desperate to show myself. Starting 2007 badly was the worst-case scenario for me because I was hoping to garner some good results to boost my value when it came to contract negotiations for 2008, in the hope of paying off my debts.
I had barely made a dent into my gargantuan IVA with the salary I was on from Saunier Duval. My first races of the year were a joke, but then I started to feel better before Paris–Nice, the biggest stage race of the early season. Apart from a couple of stress-relieving drinking sessions, I’d taken very good care of myself.
Because of the leg injury, I’d been put on a different programme, but this separation was symbolic of my situation within the team. I had come to see how helpless I was in making any difference in the anti-doping battle if I didn’t have the complete support of those in power.
Away from racing, I was coming out as an anti-doping activist. Since our first meeting, Andy Parkinson from UK Sport had thought of a good use for me – as the keynote speaker at the UK Sport anti-doping conference in London, which took place the week before Paris–Nice began.
I’d given interviews and held press conferences, but I’d never spoken publicly in this way before. I was very nervous but decided that the best thing I could do was simply to tell my story, and to try and get across what I’d learned, in the hope that my experience could be used to support anti-doping.
Thankfully, it was a big success. It was a full house and everybody seemed genuinely interested to hear what I had to say. My performance was far from polished but I managed to get my message across. Afterwards, as we mingled over drinks, I spoke to a lot of delegates.