The Racer

by David Millar

  I remember being told by an older Italian pro back in my early years racing that he’d been advised by the legendary team manager Giancarlo Ferretti to marry and have children as soon as he could because it would give him a solid and stable home life, and therefore make him a better professional. Let me be clear that the only thing Ferretti was interested in was his rider being better on the bike, not being a wonderful family man; he wasn’t exactly known for his warm and loving heart. For many young professionals this has been something they’ve done, and many still do. Getting married young is almost de rigueur in cycling.

  There are a few reasons for this, I think: being madly, deeply, in love comes into it, I’m sure. But then there’s also the fact that the mentality of many professionals is one that is attracted to stability and normality on the home front. It offers the perfect counter-balance to the professional life. So, in a way, Ferretti had a point. Certainly his motives were somewhat self-serving, but he wasn’t exactly pushing water up a hill.

  I got married later than most professionals, which was mainly to do with me taking longer to sort my shit out than others. I had never been a big fan of stability or normality. I didn’t meet my wife until I’d totally burnt out the first part of my life and was at rock bottom. She was there when I began to reboot as a stand-up member of society rather than the twisted and damaged doper I had previously been. I was thirty-two when we got married, which is near retirement age in cycling years, and thirty-four when we had our first child, Archibald. In other words, I was totally off the back compared to my peers.

  In hindsight this was a good thing because, in contrast to the ascending performance spiral most racers enter when they have children, I had entered a spiral that was slowly descending. Everything that I had thought was so important seemed far less so, now that I had this little miracle in my life.

  I had always been the guy on the team up for anything. I had raced a crazy amount the previous years, I was one of the few riders who could be sent to almost any race and be relied upon to perform. I considered it my duty to always be there for my team and give them my all; that was my job and I would do it to the best of my abilities and be respected because I could be relied upon. I had become a bona fide jack of all trades and enjoyed it more than ever before. I couldn’t really imagine a time when I’d stop, and found it mind-boggling that any professional would retire from the sport when they were still physically capable of doing the job. Hearing of guys who were tired of being on the road and losing the drive to race wasn’t unusual, but it was a completely alien concept to me. Then I became a father and it all went pear-shaped.

  No matter how much we’re told having children will change us I don’t think we can ever prepare for it. I always presumed I’d be able to manage it, yet I had forgotten that presumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. In a nutshell, I gradually began to enjoy being a father more than I did being a pro cyclist.

  Being a pro cyclist is never a smooth affair. When we’re healthy and fit and motivated we’re able to revel in our job, the training is challenging, and even when the racing is stupendously hard it can be fun. From the outside people probably think it’s like that all the time. It isn’t. If it were I wouldn’t get annoyed when people say, ‘It’s not a job! You get to ride your bike every day.’ Somehow I don’t think professional cycling would exist if it was simply done for the fun of it.

  Most of the time we’re chasing form, living in constant pursuit of maximal fitness and ideal race weight, walking a tightrope between fuelling and dieting and training and recovering. It breeds neuroses. And that’s just the training. I’ve seen more than my fair share of pro cyclists develop eating disorders or overtraining syndrome. I’ve suffered from both in my time but, fortunately, having done it for so long, what was once a regime has become a lifestyle. But therein lies the problem for every older pro: finally, just as we begin to master our profession, we run out of time. Becoming a father at the end of my career put everything into perspective, when the last thing I needed in my life as a professional cyclist was perspective. The racer in me was much better off living in his little bubble, floating around unaffected by the world at large and all that went with it.

  When we are younger and at the foot of the mountain, like Tao Geoghegan Hart, we only care about one thing: and that is to climb the mountain. Everything else in our lives is there to aid us on our journey, we make choices that some would consider sacrifices but in truth are nothing of the sort. They are decisions, each one helping us further on our way – they only start to be thought of as sacrifices when things start to go wrong, because if you make it to the top then each decision will have proved to be the right one. Our perspective is narrow, and it is almost always completely selfish. I have seen it time and time again: the best pro cyclists have an incredible ability not to deviate from their own personal goal, nothing can interrupt them, they’re simply not affected by their environment. They only do what needs to be done in order to achieve what they’re focused on. I suppose this is the same with the majority of very successful people. Unfortunately, it does often make for quite odd individuals who start to live in a tunnel of their own making.

  I have no doubt I have been that sort of person in my life. I owe much of the success I’ve had to that type of behaviour. The problem I have now is that being a father has made it very difficult for me to be the selfish, crazy person I need to be in order to operate at my highest level as a pro. Over this last winter I’ve beaten myself up for not having the same drive I’m accustomed to. I couldn’t motivate myself to be the self-serving professional I needed to be. I presumed I’d just let myself go, and yet that didn’t add up because I’d never felt more in control of my life. So I must have been doing something right? I got myself into such a state of confusion that I came to the conclusion I needed to talk to the man who always has the answers for me: the psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters.

  Dave Brailsford was the first person I spoke to on leaving police custody in Biarritz in 2004. He was there waiting for me when I left the police station having confessed to doping after forty-eight hours locked up. Dave realised he couldn’t help me, so he flew Steve Peters over from the UK to spend a day with me, as he didn’t know what else to do. After the police, and then Dave, Steve was the first person I spoke to in depth about everything I’d done. We spent a full day together. I spent the morning answering his questions, and then the afternoon listening to him. He explained to me that the person I was and the life I’d lived – the circumstances I had found myself in – had resulted in the decisions I’d made, good and bad. It didn’t justify anything, but it was a massive help for me to be able to look back in a rational manner, to understand for the first time the hows and whys of my life up to that point.

  That has been something I’ve carried with me ever since. I’d only spoken to Steve twice since then, but both times I’d learnt things. He’d taught me to recognise the difference between my emotional feelings and my rational thought – something I’d been clueless about in the past – and I was suddenly able to see that many of my decisions had been purely emotion-based. Our relationship started with him helping me understand my past; since then it’s been about handling the present and preparing for the future.

  So, I trusted him, and he’d always made sense. This time around, in 2013, I explained everything I was going through, and asked him why I found it so difficult to do what in the past I’d found so easy. His answer surprised me in its simplicity: ‘David, you’re not the same person you were before, there is absolutely no point in comparing yourself to him. Your brainwaves and chemistry are no doubt different. It has been shown to happen with age, and especially fatherhood.’

  That’s that then. I’m old.

  Postcards/Killing Me Softly

  Now one of my biggest focuses when away racing is tracking down postcards to send to my sons. This is harder than it sounds as postcards aren’t found quite as easily as they once were. It’s become my thing, the team staff know to
keep their eye out if they get to a stage start or finish and have a bit of spare time, and the bus driver is now accustomed to me occasionally having the team bus pull up outside a shop that I have an inkling may sell them. It’s also a common occurrence to find me wandering around some random village or town the evening of a race in my team tracksuit postcard hunting. It’s bordering on obsessive behaviour. It’s probably the last bastion of obsessiveness in my pro cycling. I do it because I’ve faced the fact that my boys will never remember seeing me race, and yet this part of my life will be what shapes much of our futures. I thought the closest I could come to having them there with me on the races would be to send them postcards from every race I went to. This ended up going beyond that and becoming a ritual where I would send them postcards whenever I left home. It’s become something unexpected: a diary of my final years as a professional. Writing them allows me to stand back and see where I am in the here and now, but also where I have been, because I’ve already been to every race and place I send them from.

  Archibald has nearly a hundred postcards, and not many among them talk of me dominating the race. There are a small handful in which I get the opportunity to regale him with my exploits, but they are few and far between. During these last two years I’ve spent more time being made to suffer than making people suffer. I’m slowly, and softly, being killed off. I can see it when I read through all the postcards. The decline is apparent.

  Film (1)

  When I’m not hunting down postcards, or writing postcards, I’m thinking about film. There is a project I’ve been working on for a while – with the Scottish director Finlay Pretsell – making a film about professional cycling. Myself and Finlay both share a similar vision in wanting to capture what it’s really like in the modern peloton. On top of this, over the winter I’ve been involved as a consultant on the Lance Armstrong movie, The Program. On a slightly melancholic drive up Alpe d’Huez with the director Stephen Frears, and over the course of a subsequent two weeks’ shooting, I began to see how the world I lived in, and had grown up in, appeared through the eyes of an outsider. I began to see how much everything had changed. It was wholly weird, watching everything my generation had been through condensed down to its essence in order to tell the story in the simplest way possible. In many respects the time I spent working on that movie was more cathartic than anything else I’d done – but it was also like watching deforestation. Unlike books, this is what film does: everything has to be cut back. There are weeks, months, sometimes years of preparation, of writing, planning and filming; growing the forest in other words. Then, the moment the last tree is planted, the cutting begins. All that time and effort succumbs to the brutality of reduction. The bare minimum is left: you can watch a film and be totally convinced you have understood the story, then you read the book and realise there were a thousand other components.

  The Race to the Sun or the Race of the Two Seas?

  March, the final month of preparation for many, brings two key races used for the final polishing of form. In France there’s Paris– Nice, ‘the Race to the Sun’; in Italy there’s Tirreno–Adriatico, aka ‘the Race of the Two Seas’. Most people try to get on the Tirreno programme, which is perceived to be a better experience than Paris–Nice. This is mainly a weather-based preference, because more often than not the weather is properly shite at Paris–Nice: cold, wet and windy. To add insult to inclemency the hotels and restaurants are the bad side of mediocre; the final slap in the face being the fact we race it so hard, it can hardly be called a preparation race any more – it’s very full-on, borderline heart-explodingly intense at times. Post-race analysis of the previous years has shown that on occasions Paris–Nice has generated some of the biggest power files of the season.

  Tirreno, on the other hand, has managed to maintain some sort of decorum. The peloton is mainly made up of one-day specialists who are there to add the final touches to their condition. Normally the weather is good and the hotels are the better side of mediocre; compared to France, we eat like kings.

  This doesn’t mean Tirreno has always been my natural port of call come March; my career has seen me start a near equal number of times in each race. Although Tirreno would be the natural choice for any sane person I have always preferred Paris–Nice. For some reason I get some allergic reaction to Tirreno. Four times I have stopped it on the first or second day – once I didn’t even start – each time due to me developing some strange respiratory reaction which leaves me with all the symptoms of bronchitis. It’s an allergic reaction I only get in Italy. As my career has gone on I have learnt to use antihistamines and Ventolin when going there, but even then it doesn’t always prevent it. So, the horrors of Paris–Nice are more appealing to me than the risk of turning into a coughing and spluttering mess in Tirreno–Adriatico.

  So why on earth did I choose Tirreno–Adriatico for my final season? Well, that had more to do with film.

  Finlay and I had approached the UCI in the winter about using onboard cameras – essentially having our own camera motorbike in races to follow me and capture images that haven’t been seen before. Up to this point onboard cameras hadn’t been officially used in a top-level UCI race, so we were the first to gain dispensation for this and paved the way for the more widespread use of them. We were essentially the UCI test project. And Tirreno–Adriatico was the proposed stage. We had two more hurdles to overcome before being able to begin filming: the first was getting permission from the race organisers to film in their races; and the second, surprisingly, was permission from my team to allow me to do so.

  Big Money C***s

  The race organiser decides everything that happens within their race except the TV rights, which is dependent on the deal they have struck with the company that will produce and broadcast the images from the race. Most of the big races in France are owned by the ASO (the Amaury Sport Organisation) – they are part of a larger media group and have an exclusive deal with France Television who own, along with ASO, all images captured within their races. To the point that if you were sitting in a following car at the Tour de France you are not allowed to film or take pictures without having come to an agreement with ASO and France Television. This would normally be a very expensive agreement.

  This is one of the fundamental problems with professional cycling today: there is no revenue sharing between teams and race organisers. Each team is its own island within the sport. There is very little if any money coming in from outside of what the team itself can generate.

  Merchandising isn’t exactly the money-spinner it may be in other sports. Each team’s identity is changing on such a regular basis – new sponsors require the team they sponsor to adhere to their corporate colours and use their name, making it difficult for a fan to show loyalty and long-term affiliation when there isn’t really any of that on display in the constantly changing landscape of team identity. Why would you buy a jersey to show support for a rider or team when for all you know the next year that same rider or team will more than likely be sporting a new, completely different kit?

  Another big problem often forgotten about in professional cycling is the fact it doesn’t take place in stadiums or closed circuits but on public roads, so teams and race organisers can’t sell tickets, one of the reliable revenue streams in other sports. A few teams are now majority owned by bike manufacturers, but again this is financed out of their marketing budget and is at the whim of the commercial marketplace: if they stop selling enough bikes to fund their team they will simply shut it down or make it smaller. There is very little structure within professional cycling to look after the common good and long-term existence of teams. For this reason rider contracts are commonly short term, and the culture is a mercurial one; ultimately it’s in everyone’s interest to look after themselves rather than each other. Add to that the fact there isn’t a strong rider union and you find yourself understanding a bit better the reason why professional cycling is very much a dog-eat-dog world.

  Teams are
therefore funded by sponsors alone, or, more commonly these days, a rich benefactor, the ultimate example of this being BMC, which stands for Bicycle Manufacturing Company; or, as Ryder and I christened them after spending an afternoon sitting by a pool on a Tour de France rest day staring at their truck in the car park, discussing their existence: Big Money Cunts. They have one of the biggest annual budgets in cycling, around thirty million euros, courtesy of Andy Rihs, the billionaire Swiss owner who happened to have a bike manufacturer in his portfolio and so made it the title sponsor, something no other bike sponsor was capable of doing at the time.

  More than a quarter of the teams in cycling’s uppermost echelon, the World Tour, are backed by what are, frankly, billionaire fans. This isn’t much different from football, although unlike football there is next to no equity in a cycling team. You will put more money in than you take out unless you are benefiting directly from the increased brand awareness that a successful team can produce for its sponsor. So Andy Rihs was slightly ahead of the game, his investment having turned a relatively small bike company into a global player. Unlike other billionaires who will put one of their companies on the team jersey and in the team name but then hope to amortise their spending by bringing on another outside sponsor, Rihs went the whole hog, in for a penny in for a pound. It would appear he doesn’t see why anybody else should benefit from the significant sums he has personally chosen to invest in his passion. Fair enough, if you have the means.