Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar

by David Millar

  Many said that, before, they had always seen the problem of doping as a black and white issue, but by the time I’d finished speaking they understood it was in fact grey. What surprised me was that almost nobody there had ever heard a doper’s story, let alone met one.

  One of the biggest sources of knowledge on doping is a doper. But the majority of guilty athletes never admit to doping, even when convicted, preferring to deny and then lodge appeal after appeal, rather than risk the career ruin that admission of guilt might lead to. Often, if they do finally accept their fate, they remain bitter and resentful, unwilling to help.

  I was an exception to that rule of thumb. At the lowest point, I had hated my sport so much that I was happy to be out of it, so in that sense the consequences of admitting to doping, while devastating, had offered liberation of a sort.

  Mine was a rare path, but one that fortuitously led to my total reform and a new-found passion in educating people on what, up to that point, had always been a hidden dark world.

  As relations with Saunier Duval grew trickier, I was kept going by my increasing passion for Slipstream. JV and I were talking more regularly and in greater detail, and we both knew that I would be joining the team. Even so, we still hadn’t discussed contracts, let alone money.

  The Friday before Paris-Nice began, JV invited me to dinner. I didn’t know at the time but he is something of a gourmand, so when I arrived at a beautiful little Michelin-starred restaurant in a back street in Paris, lugging my bike and bags with me, I was unprepared. The only saving grace, as I bumped into the furniture under the withering gaze of the mâitre d’, was that I was impeccably attired in the Paul Smith three-piece suit I’d worn for the conference.

  During the evening, we agreed that I would ride for Slipstream Sports the following year. We still didn’t discuss money or contracts. It was an old-fashioned gentleman’s agreement, sealed with a good bottle of wine and a handshake, which, considering what we were setting out to try and do, was quite appropriate.

  I won the Paris–Nice prologue, celebrating my victory only metres away from where I’d had lunch with Jean-Marie Leblanc on that summer day in 2005.

  Mum was at the race and Paul-Albert had watched on TV. Afterwards, he called to say how proud he was of me, of the comments I’d made in the post-race interview and of the high opinion the commentators had of me.

  Technically, I’d ridden the course perfectly, taking the hill easier than most, but then finishing really strongly. Even when my saddle broke, 3 kilometres from the finish line, I didn’t panic and came flying through the last corner, clipping the kerbs and barriers.

  I had the best Paris–Nice of my career, something that impressed Jonathan no end, as he knew that my winter training had been compromised and that I’d been somewhat occupied with other duties in the preceding week. He was doubly relieved as he’d feared that decadently wining and dining me less than 48 hours before the race had perhaps not been his smartest move.

  My last flash of form that spring came in the Three Days of De Panne in Belgium. I’d won the time trial there, nine years earlier, but this time I was well and truly beaten into second place by local hero Stijn Devolder. The up-side was that, after the race, I met up with Matt White as we were both staying in Kortijk until the Tour of Flanders, three days later.

  I’d known Whitey for years. He’d been on small fringe teams for the majority of his career, finally getting his big break with US Postal in 2001. Later, he joined me at Cofidis in 2004.

  He was one of those rare riders, a fully committed domestique, with no aspirations for victory or achieving results for himself. Matt knew exactly what he was paid for and that was to work for his leaders until his job was done. Once he’d done everything he could to support their ambitions, he’d save as much energy as possible, so that he’d be able to repeat the performance the next day.

  He was probably one of the best domestiques in the world. One moment his turn of speed would be ripping the peloton to pieces, as he set up his team leader, then 10 minutes later he’d be in the gruppetto, asking around to find out how his leaders were doing at the front of the race.

  But it is his charismatic personality that really sets Matt apart. He is a force of nature. Just having him in the vicinity raises your energy levels. Blessed with the classic Aussie dry wit that often reduces people to hysterics, he was also perceptive enough to notice if there was something wrong. He’s a good listener who always finds the right moment to come and chat; that ensured that everybody wanted to talk to Whitey.

  His love for sport – all sport – was almost comical. Able to hold an educated conversation with a fan of any sport, he also acted as coach and mentor to his wife, Jane Saville, an Olympic walker.

  This always perplexed me.

  ‘Whitey,’ I’d ask, ‘how can you coach Jane? You know nothing about walking . . .’

  ‘Dave, mate,’ he’d reply with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘It’s easy. Athletes are all the same – cyclists, walkers – whatever. They’re all insecure. You just gotta make ’em feel good; tell ’em to train when they need to train, and make ’em rest when they need to rest.’

  Then with finality, he’d say: ‘Yep – psychology, mate!’

  But God – he loved his cycling. It was his grand passion and he had expert opinions on everything and everyone. When it came to racing, he was a deadly serious, focused, elite athlete.

  The Slipstream project needed a directeur sportif who was fresh and would buy into the ethos of the team. But we simply didn’t know where to begin. Then it hit me – Whitey would be perfect. He was only 32 at the time and planned to continue racing for a few more years, but, with Jonathan’s consent, I set out to persuade him.

  I knew how important the directeur sportif’s role was because, in my experience, there are very few good ones in professional cycling. The role has become somewhat diluted over the years. In the old days, the DS would also be the boss of the team, and would double as employer/coach/manager/father, much as soigneurs would have been doctor/confidant/mother – as well as a masseur.

  These days the directeur is less of a boss than in the past. There are so many roles within a team that the directeur has little personal contact with the riders. There are coaches, psychologists, PRs, scientists, doctors – in many ways, the only time riders will actually interact with their directeur is in the pre-race meeting and over the short-wave radio earpieces that we use during the race. It means that one of the most important relationships within a professional cycling team has been lost.

  I wanted to try and bring that back and JV welcomed the idea. I knew that Whitey was perfect for it – I just had to persuade him. That night in Kortrijk, we had a few beers, got a little tipsy and I planted the seed in his brain. It would take me another few months of relentless persuasion before he came on board.

  Things were going from bad to worse with Saunier Duval. On the morning of the Tour of Flanders, I saw one of our riders clearly delay his appearance for a random UCI blood test, vanishing for almost 30 minutes before reappearing to have his blood drawn.

  His behaviour was very suspicious. I had registered the look of fear and noted his body language when he initially found out we had been selected for blood tests. That, combined with his inexplicable non-appearance at a race two weeks earlier, pointed to his use of EPO.

  His 30-minute disappearing act led me to an inevitable conclusion. If his hematocrit had been beyond the 50 per cent level, he would have been able to drop it back down below by hastily introducing plasma into his bloodstream, which takes at least 30 minutes. The whole scenario confirmed what I was finding impossible to ignore: some of my teammates were doping.

  A few weeks earlier, our a young Italian climber, Riccardo Ricco, had run amok in Tirreno–Adriatico. He then swaggeringly announced he would be attacking on the Poggio, the final climb in the marathon one-day Milan–San Remo race a few days later. Ricco was as good as his word and did not let the expectant media or fans down with
his ‘panache’ that day.

  This was extraordinary behaviour for such a young pro and was particularly suspicious as Ricco – who had failed hematocrit tests as an amateur – was renowned for constantly grazing the upper limits of the blood controls.

  Ricco was about as suspect as any rider I had seen since I first turned pro. He regarded me, the repentant doper, with such complete incomprehension that when I had tried to speak to him it was like talking to a brick wall.

  Although only 22, he was so adept with needles that, before big races, he would sit and inject himself in the team bus. ‘Just some painkillers,’ I was told. I’d tried to put a stop to this, but with no success.

  I had told Matxin and Mauro that he was highly suspicious, yet they said there was nothing they could prove, and that anyway, they’d heard he was a freak – maybe he was just ‘special’. In reality I felt that they didn’t care, so they turned a blind eye. The media saw him as the biggest, most exciting talent in cycling in years, the sponsors loved the exposure – why should Mauro and Matxin be concerned?

  Ricco’s arrogance and the episode at Flanders had tipped me over the edge. I contacted the UCI saying that I had suspicions about doping practices within my team, and that I wanted them to be aware of this. They told me they were looking into it.

  But there were issues. Mario Zorzoli, the UCI’s chief medical officer, is a good friend of Mauro Gianetti. I am not suggesting that this affected Zorzoli’s work, but it was indicative of a wider conflict of interests. The UCI’s positioning, as both promoters of cycling and guardians of its ethics, has always been controversial.

  Even though it was obvious that the team was teetering on the edge of systematic doping, and even though I had also made it clear to Mauro what I thought, nothing happened.

  Any suspicions I had became evident to the wider world at the Tour of the Basque Country a couple of weeks later. The Saunier Duval riders sent to the Basque race dominated the event in a manner reminiscent of the notorious EPO-fuelled performances of the 1990s.

  It pissed the peloton off. My peers were confronting me, asking me what was going on, saying it was ridiculously obvious that the team were doped up to their eyeballs. I looked like a fool and I was embarrassed that I could do nothing to stop it.

  Because they did nothing, I’d given up on speaking to Mauro or Matxin. Instead, I wrote a long letter to UCI president Pat McQuaid, following up conversations we’d had and telling him that something needed to be done.

  . . . I agree with what you said about sanctioning team management – I do think they are changing now but only because their livelihood relies on it, not for any real ethical reason. They HAVE to be more proactive, they have to sit down face to face on an individual basis with their riders and tell them not to dope – this is something that doesn’t happen.

  Teams need to be held responsible for the actions of their riders. I know the directors and management say this is not possible, I beg to differ. For the moment riders have consequences for their actions, teams do not. Whether this means short-term suspensions of teams from racing or big fines I don’t know, but consequences are necessary.

  Remove injections of any sort and half the battle is won, in my opinion. We do not need to inject ourselves with vitamins and sugar and amino acids to finish a three-week stage race, that is bullshit. I am proving it and am happy to be an example. I finished the Tour tired, but my health was fine. It should be considered a bad thing to inject oneself, not a necessity.

  Around the same time, Christian Prudhomme, director of the Tour de France, called me, asking me what the hell the team was up to. I told him what I knew and explained there was very little I could do, that I’d tried everything I could.

  Then I wrote another long letter, this time to both Prudhomme and McQuaid, asking that they get together and speak to Gianetti, saying that their combined forces would surely stop what was going on.

  . . . the current anti-doping system is being cheated by the riders with the will to do so, and, without a vast amount of money, resources and cooperation from teams, this will not be changing in the near future.

  I had no problems telling both of you what I knew [about Saunier Duval] but it also makes me realise how hard it is for somebody within a team to make a difference. I don’t think there is anybody else in the peloton with my background trying to make change happen as much as I am – yet I cannot do anything in my own team! That is very scary and should be a lesson to all of us. I cannot do anything without you . . . all of us working independently will not do much but make noise. Working together we can make a difference, and force change.

  The sport is changing for the better, but not enough and not definitively. I fear that there is simply a calm before the storm for the moment. If fundamental cultural changes do not take place, I see it all flaring up again in two to three years, and then we’re all at the end of the road . . .

  But in 2007, the UCI and ASO, the Tour’s parent company, were arch-enemies. They were locked in a bitter feud, fuelled by a power struggle over who controlled the sport. Lost in the midst of all this was the struggle to combat doping.

  ASO was only prevented from forming a splinter group, thus removing the Tour de France and all its other events from UCI jurisdiction, because of a Brussels Directive and intervention from the French government. My gripes with Saunier Duval were an irritant in the middle of all this. But by flagging up my concerns about the team, I was walking on thin ice.

  Even though the team’s attitude frustrated me, I was desperate to be selected for the London Tour start and I knew I had to be discreet. At the same time, my good relations with the UCI and ASO, and an ever-improving profile within the media, meant that, in truth, the team couldn’t simply bench me. But I didn’t want to risk not being at the Tour so decided that, in the short term at least, I should keep my head down, ride out the remainder of my contract and put all my energies into Slipstream.

  But on my return from racing in the Tour of Georgia in America, Mauro called me telling me that I had to ride the Tour of Romandie. The Swiss race had never been on my programme and was, I felt sure, going to derail my build-up to the Tour. He also wanted to speak to me, he said. I feared the worst, thinking that I was going to be fired or told that I wouldn’t be selected for the Tour.

  In fact, Mauro was very sympathetic and I saw another side of him. He understood what was going on, he said, but there was so little he could do. The riders were pushing the limits but he couldn’t just suspend them from racing for that, because there would be legal repercussions from the suspended riders and the team would be thrown into disarray.

  When he told me that he’d heard I’d spoken to the UCI and ASO, I didn’t really know what to do or say. I just sat there, understanding that nothing would really change and that I was being appeased. I realised too that I was powerless.

  I crashed badly in Romandie, almost replicating my injury from the start of the year. From then on, my Tour de France performance was up in the air. I knew my form would be a long way short of what I’d hoped for.

  I tried to disengage myself from Saunier Duval. I knew that I’d done everything I could. I was completely open with Mauro about Slipstream, thanking him for believing in me and for giving me the opportunity to make my comeback, while explaining that Jonathan had made me an offer that I couldn’t possibly refuse.

  I think Mauro was happy for me, I genuinely do. He completely understood my reasoning and wished me every success. From that moment on, our relationship was much better. I gave Saunier Duval everything of myself when it came to racing, but my head – and heart – were elsewhere and I think this suited them just fine.

  JULY 2007

  As I type this I am travelling towards France, through a tunnel under the English Channel. I am leaving my homeland, a man at peace, a state of mind I feared I would not be experiencing this evening.

  It had all started to get to me, the whole Tour de France in England thing. I was overwhelmed by the who
le experience. I’m not used to being so in demand. It was not something I was very comfortable with.

  As soon as stage one – from London to Canterbury – started, I felt relaxed. The amount of people watching matched – maybe even surpassed – the numbers watching the prologue in London. It was wonderful, and seeing them all made me realise what I had to do.

  The first time I ever saw the Tour de France was in 1994 when it last visited England. I travelled down to Brighton with a friend to watch the race. We arrived over four hours before it was due to pass and got our position on the barriers down on the seafront, where we’d be able to see the race go past twice.

  There were so many people out that day, and so much waiting around, but it was all good fun. Late that afternoon, the race came past. Three riders were off the front with a big advantage as they arrived on the finishing circuit to compete for the win.

  The breakaway came flying by, then we waited nervously, clock watching, for the bunch to come into sight. Finally the motorbikes came into view, but there was no bunch, only a lone rider. It was Chris Boardman.

  He’d counter-attacked on the climb when the peloton had entered the finishing circuit and came by on his own. Seeing a Brit out there, ahead of the peloton, sent everybody wild. He ended up finishing ahead of the bunch and taking fourth place, even jubilantly punching the air as he crossed the finish line, all very un-Boardman like. But I remember how much it had made everybody’s day, seeing a home rider putting on a show. It’s something I’ve never forgotten.

  As the peloton left London in front of huge crowds, those memories made me realise that I needed to put on a show too. I was driven by pure emotion, but I was also very calculating about when and where I made my initial move. I only attacked once, so that goes to show that I got it right.