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

by David Millar

  Meanwhile, Slipstream had signed almost all its riders, securing three of the biggest names in American cycling – Christian Vande Velde, Dave Zabriskie and Tyler Farrar. I’d played a big part in securing their signatures. In fact, I’d spent hours persuading all our bigger names to come to the team.

  It was a labour of love for JV, Doug and I. We didn’t follow the usual route of bouncing numbers back and forth to agents. We wanted whoever came to the team to understand what we were about. I loved this and became our chief persuader.

  Our first get-together was in Boulder, Colorado, in November 2007. There was immediately a different vibe from any cycling environment I’d known before. Everybody was excited, from the young bloods getting their big break to the seasoned campaigners like myself. We all felt that we were part of something different.

  I finally signed my contract during the camp. We’d agreed financial terms months before, but, more importantly, I also became a part owner of the team. This was rare in cycling, and demonstrated how the relationship between Doug, JV and myself had grown over the previous year. It also meant that my money was where my mouth was, and we thought this to be very important, given how much of myself I was putting into it all.

  We had a blast in Boulder. Our recruitment strategy had worked well and we were all slightly different from the usual professional cyclist and, paradoxically, our individualist maverick personalities knitted together well. As most of us came from the English-speaking world, we had a cycling culture that was different from the traditional one. This was new-world cycling – there was to be no more old-world mentality.

  It was an attitude that carried us through that first year. From our garish orange and blue argyle kit to our complete transparency with the media, we stood out. At one of our first races, the Tour of California, I even shared my room for two nights with a journalist. Fortunately, he was a cool guy and we talked as much about music and books as we did about cycling, but it wasn’t exactly conducive to resting during a stage race. Visiting the restaurants of one of our sponsors, Chipotle, for appearances and signings in each of the towns the race visited wasn’t the best move for post-race recovery either, but we were on a steep learning curve.

  The Tour of California was our first major outing as a team and we were dominant. Christian and I both finished in the top three, Tyler spent a day in the race leader’s jersey, and we won the teams’ classification. As the year went on, we proved to be good at hitting our objectives.

  Young Dutch signing Martijn Maaskant rode to a superb fourth place in Paris–Roubaix, we won the team time trial stage on the first day of the Giro d’Italia and Christian took the coveted Giro leader’s pink jersey. It was a massive result for Slipstream – our first Grand Tour and we won the first stage and put an American into the lead. The result was the perfect example of the mixture we had created of science and spirit.

  But on the day, what made it possible for us all to implement that blend was Matt White. He had been on the steepest learning curve of all, having been thrown in at the deep end from the beginning of the year. By the start of the Giro, Matt had learned an unfathomable amount and was already capable of doing his job better than 90 per cent of the directeurs sportifs already in cycling.

  The rousing speech he gave us before the Giro’s team time trial remains one of my most memorable sporting moments. We were inspired, and I’ll never forget us congregating after the finish and congratulating each other on the perfect ride. We all knew that we couldn’t have gone any faster and, even though we had to wait another 45 minutes before we were confirmed as the winners, we didn’t care what the result was as we had nothing to reproach ourselves for. It was an amazing feeling.

  It was my first experience of the Giro and it was easily the most physically demanding Grand Tour I’d ever done. I wasn’t exactly on top form having peaked for the very start of the year, yet on the sixth stage I found myself in contention for the win. I had nothing planned that day and, in fact, was so relaxed that I’d missed the peloton rolling out from the start, because I’d been chatting to Max Sciandri in the start village.

  I tagged on to the very back of the bunch and was perfectly happy to just sit where I was and make my way to the finish, with as little exertion as possible.

  But that day my legs felt magical. I was so fluid that I couldn’t feel the pedals, so I decided I’d make my way to the front of the peloton. When I got there, the attacks had already started, and the next thing I knew, I had broken clear with four others. In total, we rode in the break for 180 kilometres.

  I felt in control the whole day. When it became clear that we wouldn’t be caught before the finish line, I weighed up my options and assessed the other riders. I planned to control any attacks in the group and win in a sprint.

  But the others in the breakaway knew that, if we finished the stage sprinting, I was the most likely to win, so one by one they attacked. Each time, I chased them down, and reeled them in, but the acceleration to shut down the penultimate attack caused something to go wrong with my chain.

  As we were inside the last 2 kilometres, there was no time to change bikes, so I couldn’t do anything about it. The final attack came under the ‘1-kilometre-to-go’ flamme rouge. As I sprinted after the move to close it down, my chain snapped. I ground to a halt, while the others rode on to contest the stage.

  I knew what had happened instantly. Anger coursed through me. In one furious movement, I was off the bike, standing in the road and, in a red mist, hurling the bike powerfully over the crowd barriers.

  The bike went arching through the air into the Italian countryside, while I was left standing like a lemon in the middle of the road, live on TV. I was so angry. I knew how rarely the stars align like that and I was furious that victory had been taken away from me because of the rarest of mechanicals.

  People may love Italy but I hated the rest of that Giro. Every day my loathing grew, particularly as we travelled more kilometres in the bus, transferring to and from stage starts and finishes, than we did racing on the bike. The Giro made the Tour seem a civilised affair and the Vuelta feel like a holiday camp.

  After the race ended, our grand plan was to go straight to altitude in St Moritz and then to the Pyrenees, first to recover and then to train. JV was a big fan of altitude training and he was convinced it would give us a significant advantage at the Tour. He was right.

  I was flying in the Tour’s first few days, finishing second in the time trial by only a second (on the day, I was actually a distant third, but the winner was Stefan Schumacher who tested positive and was later wiped from the results).

  My form only really lasted for the first week, but meanwhile Christian developed into a Tour contender, finishing fourth in Paris with little support from the team. It was a strange experience for me. I’d gone from the team’s big name and hope to an also-ran, while watching Christian race against the best and finally take control of his fate. I wasn’t jealous, but I wished I could have been him. I would have loved to have experienced that.

  Christian had come to Slipstream after a spell as a deluxe domestique on the CSC team. His father had been a pro rider and he’d grown up among the biggest names in American cycling. He was freakishly talented, and had turned pro in 1998 on Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team. For a while he was touted as ‘the next Lance’, but he suffered from high expectations and repeated injuries, not to mention the somewhat unhealthy environment of pro cycling during his first years as a professional.

  The US Postal team wasn’t known for nurturing riders and it wasn’t long before Christian was jettisoned from the team. His battle back to the top had been a long and painful one and his attitude had become that of a worker. He didn’t see himself as a winner any more so to see him rediscover himself at the Tour was emotional, and I was very proud of him.

  There was a real togetherness about Slipstream. Everything was so different from how it had been for me in the past. We all got on so well and had so much fun, and,
most importantly, we shared a mother tongue. Since turning pro at 19, I’d never been on a team where we spoke English, yet it had never occurred to me how important this was.

  Sharing a common first language felt like such a luxury. Communication was so much better. It didn’t matter that we were American, Australian, Canadian, Scottish and Kiwi – we were English-speakers in a foreign world, and it proved to be a very powerful bond between us.

  I think we were respected for bringing a breath of fresh air to a stagnant arena. We never took ourselves too seriously and demonstrated that being clean didn’t mean bring boring or worthy; in fact, quite the contrary, we were fun and interesting.

  As I relished racing with Slipstream, Saunier Duval finally fell into the abyss. Predictably enough, it was the precocious Ricco who led the way. This time he didn’t get away with it and both he and Leonardo Piepoli tested positive after winning Tour stages in the Pyrenees. There was little joy in watching their downfall, only satisfaction in knowing they’d been caught.

  On the morning that the police turned up at the start village to arrest Ricco, our team bus was parked alongside theirs. As we watched the mêlée, all of us had something to say about him, except Christian who just stayed quiet. At first I didn’t understand him, but then I realised why. Christian was angry.

  Ricco represented a lot more than just another doper to Christian. He represented every doper, every cheat that had ever ridden past him and crushed his own hopes.

  When he was younger, Christian had been discarded, written off for not living up to expectations, without anybody truly understanding the reasons why he couldn’t compete. Things were now changing but Christian would never get back the lost years of his professional career.

  The more she learned about my old life, the more Nicole was thankful that we’d met when we did. Often, when I was in my cups, re-telling some anecdote from the past for the umpteenth time, she’d shake her head in disbelief.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she would say, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t know you then.’

  Nicole much preferred the Hayfield-living, clapped-out Mazda-driving, penniless me to the Biarritz-based, Jaguar-wielding, fashion-victim playboy. She found even the thought of it ridiculous.

  ‘You were such a dick, David!’

  My feet are always on the ground with Nicole.

  It was down to her support and belief that I’d made my comeback so quickly and to such a high level. She was strength personified when it came to supporting me. But being a professional athlete’s partner or relative is not easy because we live very selfish, goal-oriented lives.

  Although we’re often at home, we are rarely actually there, our heads being wrapped up in whatever our next sporting objective may be. At times the self-absorption is taken to the point of obsession. Life boils down to the cycle of racing, training, eating, resting, dieting.

  And if one of those functions isn’t going well, the subsequent neurosis leads to misery. The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away. Nicole is good at keeping me in the real world. I can have my bubble, but it’s not quite as small as it once was.

  In the old days, I had always yo-yoed between the obsessive and the cracked. I never found balance. I even convinced myself that’s how I was programmed to be and that in order to get the best out of myself, I had to live that way.

  But when I met Nicole and saw how hard she worked every day in London, I realised that balance was possible. She worked like a maniac when I met her, but she knew what the real world was about and she couldn’t believe how easy we had it as professional cyclists.

  We get paid to compete in sport, we get paid well, we often enjoy public acclaim and we live in beautiful places. Competition is tough and there are sacrifices, but in many ways we don’t have to work that hard.

  Nicole loves sport. She dreams of being a successful athlete, and possesses the work ethic and competitive spirit to have reached the top, if she’d had the raw physical talent. She never lets me forget how lucky I am and the good fortune I have had to live my dream.

  I spent three years telling Nicole we’d never get married. I couldn’t understand why we needed to. We loved each other and would always be together – why ruin it by getting married? Marriage made no sense to me and I was passionately against it.

  I wondered if that anxiety was rooted in my parents’ divorce. But Nicole’s parents are divorced too and yet she is a strong advocate of marriage. In the autumn of 2008, I realised that I was making no sense. If I knew we were made for each other then I should stop being, as Nicole would say, ‘a dick’.

  Whitey accompanied me as no-nonsense moral support when I went to the jewellers to pick up the ring. A week later Nicole and I travelled back to England to visit her family in Henley-on-Thames. I planned to ask her when we were there.

  It was ironic that on the way to Henley, the ring tucked safely away in my jacket, Nicole told me that she was no longer bothered about marriage. Later on that evening, after I’d asked her dad’s permission, we went for a walk.

  I finally plucked up the courage to ask the question and then to offer her the ring.

  Nicole looked puzzled.

  ‘David – really . . . ?’ she said.

  Jonathan Vaughters and I had long wanted to sign Bradley Wiggins to Slipstream, but he hadn’t wanted to change his professional team in an Olympic year. So we had to wait until after the Beijing Games in 2008.

  I didn’t know Brad that well at the time, but we had always had conversations and I felt that we were closer than most in the peloton. In truth, this had only ever been due to our shared nationality. We didn’t have a relationship outside of cycling, but this wasn’t unusual. There were many riders that I got on with well in the peloton, yet had never hung out with off the bike.

  Our bond had been formed in 2007, on three memorable occasions. The first came when we’d found ourselves climbing the Ventoux, side by side, and had both removed our helmets, as a mark of respect, as we rode past the Tom Simpson memorial. Later that summer, at the Tour de France, our teams had been staying in the same hotel when the police had taken his Cofidis team into custody after one of its riders, Cristian Moreni, tested positive.

  Brad was mortified by the Moreni affair. That evening, we had chatted for a while, and the next morning I gave him one of my Saunier Duval T-shirts, so that he didn’t have to wear Cofidis-branded clothing on the way home. Then, over a beer, as the season ended, we had one of our deepest conversations about my past and our futures. I was looking forward to having him as a teammate.

  That November, Brad and I flew out to Boulder to join the team for our annual ‘bonding’ week. We began to spend a lot more time together, and got on even better than I’d expected.

  He was good company, very funny to be around, but I felt he had something of a chameleon-like personality: a strong desire to blend in and tell people what he thought they wanted to hear.

  His ability to observe and assimilate was best displayed in his phenomenal ability as a mimic. He had us in complete hysterics most of the time. He is a born entertainer. When he’s had a few drinks, Brad morphs into his Liam Gallagher persona, an act that bears little resemblance to his real self. It’s funny watching him trying to be edgy and cool, when he’s one of the straightest people I know.

  Brad is a very dedicated, driven, self-obsessed and ultimately, sensible man – he wouldn’t have achieved the success he has achieved if he wasn’t. On form, he is a superb rider, but the talk in his own book of nearly becoming alcoholic during his post-Beijing Olympic comedown doesn’t add up for me. He is too controlled for that.

  Brad looks after number one and that’s one of the traits that makes him so successful. But I think he sometimes takes advantage of the admiring and respectful reaction to him.

  When we signed him, he was one of the world’s best prologue riders and a possible future contender for the Classics. Contrary to what JV would have people think, we had absolutely no i
dea he would become a Grand Tour contender or challenger in anything but the flattest and most simple of stage races. We never expected that he would one day finish fourth in the Tour – as he did in 2009.

  Brad’s quirky personality was perfect for our team, and his approach fitted the way we operated, because he is very professional and dedicated. His ability to nail objectives is remarkable and comes from years of controlling variables and targeting one-off events – such as the Olympics – on the track. After many years of underachieving in road racing, he was finally beginning to show signs of development. We planned to bring it to fruition.

  Just as we were getting ready to move on with the Slipstream project, my sister started calling me more often, asking hypothetical questions about setting up a professional team. By 2009, she was working closely with Dave Brailsford, acting as his right hand as he worked towards his dream of putting together an elite European team.

  Prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, SKY had sponsored what was to become one of the most successful British teams in history. The Brailsford-led track team took over the Olympic velodrome in Beijing, winning the majority of gold medals on offer, as Brad, Chris Hoy and Vicki Pendleton became household names.

  Sponsoring Team GB was a masterstroke by SKY and, buoyed by Olympic success, they were quickly infatuated with cycling. It offered the perfect marketing tool for them, a mass participation sport that reached a massive audience. As SKY’s interest grew, Dave used his influence and the track team’s success to lever the sponsorship he needed in order to create his Tour de France team. Fran was now effectively drafting the blueprint for this and I offered her and Dave as much advice as I could.

  Dave’s vision was more Formula 1 than professional cycling, but they had to learn an awful lot very quickly, and had to grasp the fundamentals of what was effectively a completely foreign sport. Track cycling and road racing are completely different beasts.