On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  I have no doubt that, one day, this book will get published because Avril Millar is a force of nature. In fact, the home page of her website (avrilmillar.com) boasts just that turn of phrase, credited to George Bernard Shaw: ‘Be a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’

  She is just sixty, and has a long and varied career to her name as a very successful CEO of significant businesses, and latterly as someone whose advice is sought at the highest levels in the City. She is a deep thinker, with considerable verbal energy, firmly held beliefs and a broad vocabulary.

  She is also the mother of the British cyclist David Millar.

  She’d rung me up one July when she’d heard of a terrible crash on the Tour de France in which her son had been caught up. Could I tell her that he was all right? I promised to find out. Her voice had been edged with fear. She was his mum.

  I put down my coffee. Through a window at head height, I occasionally caught a glimpse of a pair of heels or a booted ankle walking past at street level. It was one of those London basement rooms that you look down on as you pass: quiet, warm places.

  Cocooned in such comfort, she tells me about their shared past, David’s and hers. She begins to recall how she experienced, as a total outsider, her son’s complete (and completely traumatic) immersion in the British cycling scene. Her account, it struck me, might help in my roundabout quest to discover the values at the heart of the country’s changing relationship with cycling. As soon as she started to talk, I knew that she had spent half a lifetime amused, appalled, delighted and despairing of the hidden world that she had opened up so casually to her son.

  It had all started with a simple phone call to the High Wycombe Cycling Club. This was, in itself, already an act of mild desperation. After her divorce from David’s father Gordon, the summer holidays were characterised by a child-swap arrangement. Her daughter, Fran (of whom, more, later), would fly to Hong Kong to be with her dad for a few weeks. And David, in his early teens, would return to England to be with Avril. As the long weeks dragged by, sometimes she found herself at a loss. She didn’t know what to do with him. Perhaps, she thought, cycling might offer a welcome distraction. And that led her to trying to find a club for him to join.

  The voice on the other end of the line explained to Mrs Millar what to do. ‘The best thing is just to turn up on a Tuesday night. It’s the Longwick Ten.’

  That’s exactly how Avril remembers the instructions. She laughs.

  Her softish Scottish accent is peppered with a surprising number of profanities. Maybe it’s just me being naïve, but I’m always a little shocked to hear people’s mums talking like this.

  ‘When people are in cycling, they say things like that. And you’re left thinking, “What the fuck is that?”’

  After my experiences with Ron Keeble and others, I know just what she means. ‘I totally agree with you. If it’s not the Longwick Ten, it’s the Pocklington Challenge.’ (I had been to an extraordinarily long prize-giving dinner at a cycling club in Yorkshire. The Pocklington Challenge was still embedded in my memory.)

  She laughs again. ‘Tossers!’

  But that’s far from being her final word on the subject. ‘So there’s this place called Longwick. But is that the start? Or the end of it? And what is a time trial? And how does the whole thing work?’

  Back then she went along, though, making sure to leave work early enough to get David to the start line in time.

  He, too, had no idea what he was about to experience. Sitting on his saddle at the start, his bike held by a volunteer, he turned round, as the seconds counted down and confessed to the man, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Just go as fast as you can for as long as you can.’ And with that, a young David Millar was pushed off into an exhilarating, uncertain future, one which even now continues to throw up twists and turns and high drama. That day, needless to say, he broke the course record.

  They settled into a routine. Avril would buy all the newspapers on her way to the time trial and sit ensconced in the car, while her son ‘did what he had to do’. It was almost as if she were complicit, encouraging her son to indulge in some hidden, filthy practice.

  At first she didn’t know what to make of the cheery enthusiasts and volunteers who kept the High Wycombe Cycling Club ticking over. She’d remembered driving past them before, years ago, with a seven-year-old David in the back of the car. They’d lodged in her memory; or at least the sight of a group of men and women standing around in a lay-by in wellington boots and kagouls, carrying clipboards or holding bikes. At the time, she had genuinely wondered who on earth they were and what they thought they were doing. Was it a protest? A hunt? Were they ramblers? Should she report them?

  It was only in 1994, when she drove her seventeen-year-old son to the same lay-by for the start of the Archers junior road race, that she realised what that first sighting had been about.

  And now she too, unconsciously, has started to play their game. She has started to assume I know what she is talking about.

  She says, casually, ‘He won the Archers that year.’

  ‘The Archers’. I make a mental note to look it up.

  She is on a roll now. Nostalgia, once it gets uncorked, is hard to squeeze back into the bottle. Very soon, Avril Millar had been totally won over by this disparate band of cycling folk, with whom ostensibly she had nothing in common.

  ‘There was a very strong preponderance of people who had ridden their bikes for years. And their fathers before them had ridden their bikes. And bike riding was in their DNA. It’s what they did. The concept of getting up on a Sunday morning and going to ride forty miles just seemed so utterly normal to them and it seemed so utterly bonkers to me. There were people there who were steeped in it. And then there was us. Not a clue. But it was great fun.’

  It was a welcoming, homely, non-judgemental world that must have seemed a very far cry from the sharpness and clamour of her life in business. It was a form of therapy, not least for David, for whom it lent a structure to his trips back to visit his mum. But she, too, could see the purifying, wholesome delight in the sport.

  ‘It had the nature of going to a working men’s club. The sense of it felt like that. Many years ago there used to be all these reading rooms up and down the country especially for miners, so that people could educate themselves outside their working lives. That’s what these things felt like. It felt like they were saying this is good for the soul.’

  But David was crossing a boundary already. He had moved quickly through all the gears at his disposal, and wanted more. His legs spun too fast for British roads. It’s an innocent arc that I was, by now, beginning to see replicated in the biographies of so many British riders. You start because it’s fun. You get good. Then you win races. You discover there are more and more races, most of them overseas. And then, and only then, does it dawn on you that this could be a career. So, you start to turn your back on your peers. But the truth is you’ve already left them behind.

  He was enrolled in the ‘Southern Centre of Excellence’, which he details in his book Racing Through The Dark.

  ‘In my mind’s eye,’ writes Millar, ‘I imagined a smart building with a lab and a gym, white-coated technicians, a bank of cutting-edge technology and pages of data and test results. It was actually Ian Goodhew’s living room.’

  ‘It was hysterically funny. That is how it was.’ Avril remembers the ramshackle trips to race in Belgium, squashed into the backs of cars. These brushes with the Continental scene were the loosening of the admittedly slight grip that British cycling held over David Millar. His soul had been hijacked, for better or worse, by the lure of the Continent.

  Later on that day, after I have left West London and Avril Millar behind me, I sit shivering in my car, watching my youngest daughter playing football on a godforsaken patch of ragged astro turf. The rain is pelting against the windscree
n.

  I am put in mind of what Avril has told me about her evenings at Longwick, huddled in the warmth of her car, occasionally looking up from behind her newspapers to see if her boy had started yet.

  While her words are fresh in my memory, I dial David Millar’s number. He picks up the phone in an Italian hotel room. In the background I can hear his Canadian teammate Ryder Hesjedal laughing at pictures from a 1997 edition of Procycling that the pair of them have been leafing through.

  ‘We’re cycling fans too, Ned,’ David tells me.

  I tell him that I have spent the day interviewing his mother, a fact he takes in his stride. I am not certain that I would want journalists interviewing my mother about my childhood. In fact, I’ll rephrase that. I am certain that I wouldn’t want journalists interviewing my mother about my childhood. It speaks volumes, I conclude, about their trust for one another that he is not remotely fazed by my disclosure.

  I wonder how he remembers it all, as I squint through the raindrops at my daughter’s team conceding yet another goal, and turning, shoulders slumped, back to the centre circle. How did he remember those early inductions into the secret world of the cycling clubs?

  ‘It was quirky. That sense of being an outsider. I was young enough not to care. I just wanted to race. I signed a clipboard on a lay-by and paid fifty pence. That was brilliant.

  ‘I had nothing in common with the people at High Wycombe Cycling Club. Neither age, upbringing, nor education. And yet we all shared a common eccentricity. We loved cycling. We shouldn’t shy away from using the word eccentricity.

  ‘When I went to race in Belgium I instantly fell in love with it. I thought, this sport is actually part of the national identity here. Whole towns used to shut down for a junior race. That’s when I was awoken to the fact that the grass was greener, and that it really was oddball and small time in the UK.

  ‘Once I got to eighteen, and I realised I wanted to be a pro, that’s when I thought I have to get out of here now. There was a massive gulf. It was much bigger than the English Channel.’

  I turned the ignition key once and flicked the wipers. My windscreen cleaned itself of the blotchy rain to reveal a clutch of kids listening, knock-kneed with cold, to some point their teacher was making, presumably about defending.

  David Millar’s words chimed with what Avril had told me earlier that afternoon. His mother understood. She saw something in the boys’ eyes, when they returned from these forays overseas. Ravaged, but radiant.

  ‘They’d come back shadows of their former selves, but fired up to the hilt, because they had been there, and they had smelt it. They had smelt their future.’

  Avril helped him realise that future. She bought him a car, and packed him off to Picardie.

  ‘He drove off in a battered Ford Escort, not a word of French, we gave him some money and he drove off to VC St. Quentin.’

  She thinks about it for a while. ‘It’s almost biblical in its immensity. That would never happen now. You’d be horror-struck.’

  But he had to go. ‘Frankly, what did Britain have to offer? He’d fucking hated it.’

  I remind David Millar of the year when we first met. It was that infamous Tour of 2003. It was the Tour that, for me, produced my ‘yellow jumper’ moment, but was packed with intense memories, too, none richer than when he was declared the winner of the final time trial.

  I had interviewed him on live television, I remember the occasion clearly. Of course I did not know at the time what has subsequently become clear. He was doped. Or, as his mother puts it, ‘He was well and truly in the midst of his own horror story then.’

  If truth be told, Millar had been a bit tricky to deal with all the way round France that summer. He was the only British rider on the race, and we had pursued him with the weight of a nation. It wasn’t that he was evasive, but we weren’t half persistent.

  ‘A quick word for ITV, Dave.’

  ‘Just one line for TV back home, David, please.’

  He had done his duty by us, but had made it clear that our Britishness was of no great heft.

  Had he loathed the association with his ‘homeland’? A decade later, I can ask him outright.

  ‘I was French. At that time, it meant nothing to me. I had separated myself so far from it all.’

  And a year later, he was busted.

  It’s worth noting that not everyone buys into Millar’s tale of redemption. He himself freely uses the term ‘Marmite rider’ to describe his status in the eyes of the cycling public.

  There are those who wonder if the whole truth has really emerged. There are those who wonder if any of it would have come out if he hadn’t been caught in such flagrant circumstances. There are those who would rather he had never been allowed to ride again.

  There are also riders, British riders, who did not dope, and find it hard to wipe his slate clean. One British pro told me that in 2004 Jaguar had promised him a free car. Given that he was surviving on the minimum UCI wage, a new set of wheels would have been a significant bonus, unaffordable any other way. But they’d also promised one to David Millar, and when news of his disgrace reached Jaguar’s marketing people they got cold feet, and ordered the withdrawal not only of Millar’s car, but of all the cars they’d promised to British cyclists.

  This hurt. Why, asked this rider, should he have to bear the consequences for someone else’s dishonesty?

  These are not easy questions to answer. Millar has spent a long time facing them, and will continue to do so for as long as he has a public profile in the sport.

  I was speaking at a dinner in the winter, talking about his 2003 Prologue, and my memories of the drama of my first ever day reporting on the Tour de France. David Millar sat to my right, as I spoke, and quite suddenly interrupted me, mid-sentence.

  ‘I was doping, Ned.’

  It rather took the wind out of my sails.

  David Millar moved back to Britain. That much was inevitable.

  In his autobiography, he outlines the about-face that this involved. ‘I had always sworn I’d never return to live permanently in Britain, yet now it was my port in the storm and I was thankful for that.’

  Avril Millar, with a glance at a photo of her children, recalls how close he now was, but how distant her returning son had become.

  ‘He cleaved very tightly to his sister. Fran was the person to whom he turned. She had a flat round the corner from here, and he went and lived there. But he was drunk for that first year. I barely saw him. He was ashamed and embarrassed and upset. He was just a mess.’

  Fran Millar is, in her own way, a significant player in the British cycling scene. With her erstwhile business partner James Pope, they founded a business called Face Partnership some ten years ago, when Fran was still in her early twenties. Alongside PR and agency work for riders, they also established a series of bike races, both on the track and the road that have proved highly successful. Fran went on to work for British Cycling and subsequently Team Sky as head of PR. Over recent years, her influence has grown within the organisation. She now has a job description that encompasses pretty much everything: logistics, PR, admin, budgets and riders’ contracts.

  The last time I had any significant dealings with Fran was in Chartres on the 2012 Tour de France. Bradley Wiggins had just clinched the overall win. It was the moment of history to which the race had been building for a month.

  We were at their Campanile hotel, waiting around to film Dave Brailsford raising a glass to his team, when suddenly Fran received an email from ASO, the Tour organisation, reminding her that the next day tradition dictated that the winning team should hand out champagne to all the other teams on the race. This would be done as the convoy of support vehicles trundled along the roads towards Paris. Champagne flutes would be passed from car to car, all courtesy of the winning team.

  But nineteen bottles! Fran had none. Other teams might have come prepared. But no British team had ever won, so therefore no British team had ever had to deal with th
is eventuality. It was late. It was Saturday night. All the shops were shut.

  I offered to help. Fran handed me a Team Sky credit card, whispered the PIN number to me, and I set off in the car to beg, borrow and buy at exorbitant prices, all the bottles of bubbly I could find in Chartres. It was a very cycling moment, somewhere between grandiose and two-bit.

  I got them, though. And the Tour had its fizz the next day.

  Fran Millar is right at the heart of an organisation to which her brother will always be denied access. Team Sky’s recruitment policy specifically excludes him on the grounds of his doping ban. But there it is. It’s a curious situation for both of them. It’s curious all round, according to Avril.

  ‘I know that the people he would have loved to be working with and riding with are the people sitting on the inside of Team Sky. When he gets to ride with them [Team GB] at the Worlds, he loves it. He just loves it.’

  And then her voice is edged with the toughness she must at times have called upon as she tried to refocus her errant son. This is where she sounds like a force of nature.

  ‘But he can’t and so that’s that.’

  Millar’s affection for the British was rekindled during his rehabilitation. It became apparent that he was dealing with people whose duty it was to pass sentence (British Cycling were charged with the implementation of his two-year ban), but not necessarily to judge; the French had done that bit for them. There was an avuncular innocence about the panel that had been assembled to hear his case, as if they were dealing with a particularly nasty murder in a charming Cotswold village: this kind of thing just didn’t happen to chaps like us.

  The voice on the other end of the line grows a little indistinct. It might be the connection to Italy from my South London car park. Or it might be that even now these things don’t tell themselves easily.

  He’s remembering that confession. ‘Sitting in that hearing explaining to them that this was where I’d been. It had been eight years. I’d gone as a kid and come back as a broken world champion. And that was because I’d been out of their hands.