The Racer

by David Millar

  If you get that first kilometre wrong there’s little chance to remedy it – because of the short distance of the event you’re given no time to recover – so in an ideal world you ride a prologue as an exercise in accumulation: lactic acid should build in a steady curve over the duration of the race, peaking out as you cross the finish line, not after one kilometre. At my best I was able to hit almost 15 mmol of lactic acid at the end of prologues, which meant I was blowing up as I crossed the line. It took a lot of training, recon and discipline to be able to time an effort that precisely. For many years it was my speciality, if you can call nuking yourself to the point of collapse at the end of a bike race ‘special’ – well, it was my speciality when I won; it just sucked when I lost.

  I can’t do that any more. My body doesn’t allow me to go so deep. I say ‘my body’, but I’m not sure if it isn’t my mind playing a strong part in it. It’s a strange thing that, even after all these years of training and racing, I can’t tell whether it’s my mind or my body that’s in control. Sometimes it feels like they have to work in perfect unison; other times it’s clear to me it’s my mind making the difference – others still, it’s my body. There have been plenty of races where I’ve been a mental milkshake, not possessing a gram of motivation or desire, and yet my body has been so strong that I’ve been forced into action. Equally there have been times when I’ve done everything right, am super-motivated and fit, race-ready, and my body has simply said, ‘Yeah, not today, thanks.’ I fucking hate it when that happens. Everybody would say, ‘It’s in your head, David.’ Well, thanks for that pearl of wisdom, super-helpful. Why did nobody say, ‘David, it’s your body, it had a bad day’? That would have made much more sense to me.

  Of course, if somebody said to me now ‘It’s in your head, David,’ I wouldn’t get so defensive. I can accept that now, but that’s because my body is weakening. For the first time ever the two are in perfect unison. I don’t have the same confusion that I did when I was younger, about what’s affecting what, and how my body and mind are both in a descending spiral, dragging each other down. Finally, after all these years, they’ve lost their first love: time trialling.

  The Dauphiné

  Nicole and Archibald are in the following car of the Dauphiné’s first-day time trial. I’d been feeling good in training and held a little hope I might get a reasonably respectable result – top ten was ambitious, anything in the top thirty would have satisfied me. I got seventy-fourth. That puts me just inside the first half of the peloton. I decide to take that as OK. It isn’t reasonably respectable, more like decidedly average, which is better than terribly shit.

  The week is better than that first day. We have a summit finish on Stage 2 and my fitness is good enough to see me through the day without issues, to the point where I am able to use the final climb as a training exercise. This is effectively how I am treating the whole race. I am covering attacks in the first hour, then working for our team leader Andrew Talansky the rest of the time, always in my role as road captain. This is exactly how I treated the build-up of the Classics campaign, only this time I’m getting fitter more quickly.

  For the first time since Flanders I am feeling in control of things again. I just had to get through the week without any issues and now I’ve completed a big three-week block. The recovery period I’ve planned to give myself following the Dauphiné will see my body assimilate the workload, rebuilding itself into a state of full race fitness, ready for the Tour de France onwards. A lot of riders race Dauphiné with this attitude. Although the Dauphiné is very important for physical preparation, and a prestigious race in its own right, the final results don’t carry much relevance regarding performances at the Tour – to the point that it’s often said that if you have a good Dauphiné you’re likely to have a bad Tour, and a bad Dauphiné means a good Tour. If you happen to perform well, everybody will say, ‘He’s ready.’ If you go like a bag of shit, everybody will say, ‘He’s clearly training for the Tour, he’ll be ready.’ In other words, a win-win situation. There are exceptions to this rule, but it is a fairly accurate generalisation, and one that I’m always surprised people don’t pay more attention to.

  Having Nicole and the boys at the race has been magic, especially knowing it will probably be the last time they’ll ever see me race as a pro. My whole family is planning on coming to Glasgow for the Commonwealth Games in August, but that will be a different experience, it will be a one-off. The Dauphiné is a race that has been around for decades, and will no doubt be around for decades more. I like to think that one day we’ll all go back there together with shared memories, or at least photos.

  There were two highlights. Getting to the bus after a particularly grim day in the heat to unexpectedly find Nicole and the boys waiting for me. All my disdain for the conditions disappeared. It reiterated where I found true happiness in my life these days. The second was riding to the start with Archie one morning between all the parked-up buses, the two of us getting cheered by teams and fans alike. Some folks even knew his name. ‘Allez, Archie!’ seemed so strange after so many years of hearing ‘Allez, David!’ Here I was riding next to my two-year-old son at a bike race and he was getting cheered for the very first time, while for me it was one of the last.

  In typical Dauphiné fashion the final stage is a beast. They’ve always had a habit of doing that, it’s one of their trademarks. I’ve never been a big fan, especially when at the back end of a three-week block of training and racing. I am semi-resigned to my fate before we even cross kilometre zero.

  As a team we decide to engage super-offensive mode. Our leader, Andrew Talansky, is lying in third place overall behind Chris Froome, with Alberto Contador leading. Head to head against those two he doesn’t stand a chance; Contador’s team, Tinkoff, is weak while Froome’s team, Sky, is strong. This means that Sky has to light up the race right from the get-go, putting Tinkoff under maximal stress in the hope they’ll explode and leave Contador isolated without teammates early enough to force him to use up his own strength to defend his position, while Froome marks him until the last climb and attacks the moment he sees him weakened. The stage is mountainous, but not long at 130 kilometres. All this points towards anarchic racing, especially when everybody knows Tinkoff are going to have trouble defending and Sky are going to be offensive. Andrew agrees that he is better being part of the attacking than sitting behind at the whim of Contador and Froome and their teams, because when Contador and Froome decide to battle it out among themselves it will be a battle royale between the two of them – nobody else will be able to match their fire power, not even Andrew, who is the next best in the race. Andrew would be left to fight a new battle among the collateral damage inflicted by the two ahead. That would more than likely see him slide down the classification.

  Fortunately Ryder is on one of his missions this final day, so our super-offensive tactical plan involves him single-handedly ripping the race to pieces. He becomes a one-man wrecking ball for three hours. A group of twenty-three riders breaks away on the first climb after only twenty kilometres – Andrew and Ryder are there. It doesn’t take long until the gap goes up to 3:20, meaning the thirty-nine-second deficit Andrew had on Contador before the start becomes a 2:41 advantage before even half the stage is done, mainly thanks to Ryder driving the pace, not expecting help from anybody. That’s what Ryder can do when he’s in the mood: his only objective is to make sure that Tinkoff and Saxo use up their domestique arsenal in order to defend their first and second places on general classification from Andrew.

  As expected, Tinkoff are in deep trouble. They can’t control the race and the gap keeps getting bigger. At this point Froome is forced to go on the offensive and orders his team to take control, but not in the usual manner. They attack en masse, Froome plus three teammates. Meaning, they isolate Contador completely: he has no choice but to follow them without hesitation, knowing he can no longer rely on his team to bring them back.

  I can see all this happening be
fore it happens, and call on the radio to tell the guys to get ready. I know the moment Sky go my race will be over. I have nothing else to contribute to the team, my three-week block is complete, and I’ve overloaded myself to the point of exhaustion, which is exactly what I want. I don’t need to bury myself to finish when I know it is no longer benefiting me long term. Now I needed to recover. As Sky and Froome attack, the peloton is ripped to pieces. I don’t even fight it, I drift back through the convoy until I get to our team car. I lean in through the window and tell the directeur sportif, Geert, that I’m spent and am getting in the car. Immediately I tell them to radio ahead to the car behind Andrew and Ryder to make sure Ryder gives everything he has for the next forty kilometres, as it is of the utmost importance that Froome uses up his teammates as quickly as possible in the pursuit. That will leave Froome and Contador to do the work themselves.

  This works like a dream: the three Sky riders chasing the Ryder-led group only take a minute back before exhausting themselves, and the two leaders have to go head-to-head. But then they start bluffing each other, neither wanting to help the other. It gets to the point where they are almost at a standstill on the road. Eventually, Contador takes matters into his own hands, leaving Froome in his wake, but the damage has been done. Ryder eventually pulls off, having ridden himself into the ground. That is the cue for Andrew to begin the ride of his life. He doesn’t ask anybody for help; he sits on the front and begins a time trial to the line, his only objective to make sure he gets to the finish line forty seconds before Contador. Although Contador eats into the lead, Andrew crosses the line 1:06 ahead, meaning he wins the general classification by twenty-seven seconds. It is an incredible and unexpected day of racing, textbook in its execution and, of course, impossible without Ryder having been so selfless and Andrew being gutsy enough to attempt it in the first place.

  Andrew has become the future of the team. Being an American in an American team he has assumed the mantle of Great Hope for the Future, and rightfully so after his results from his first two years at Garmin. Andrew is a nice, if at times strange, guy. At twenty-six he is entering his prime, a great talent, but a demanding guy and not a natural leader. He has a legendary temper. He’s one of the few people who I believe do actually ‘see red’ when losing their shit – to the point he can’t remember what happened. He’s like Jim Carrey’s character in Me, Myself & Irene.

  Fabian

  Ryder and I had been rooming together for the week. He’d finished the Giro just the week before the Dauphiné had begun. He’d had a tough time there, all due to the fact that the team had once again proved its new-found team time trialling incompetence by crashing in the first stage – the crash was serious enough that two of the team broke bones and were out of the race.

  The crash happened near the halfway point on a dead-straight section of road. The team was lined out in classic team time-trial formation, travelling at full speed. Dan Martin was in fourth place, moving up the line, readying himself for his next turn on the front when he hit a drain in the road. I don’t know how, but he lost control and went down like a sack of shit. Fortunately the guy right behind him was slightly off the wheel and managed to get round him. The other three didn’t stand a chance, they all went careening into him. It’s spectacular to watch in the replays. I spoke to Ryder before I’d seen it. His description, in hindsight, was quite accurate: ‘We got car bombed.’

  The thing is, there had only been eight of them left when the crash happened. The ninth man, Fabian Wegmann, had been on a creeper and had been dropped a couple of kilometres earlier. When that happens in a team time trial you hate yourself, no matter how much you’ve given and how helpless you were to prevent it; you can’t help but beat yourself up. So you roll along in a sad slow state, pitying yourself for being crap, riddled with guilt for letting your teammates down, waiting to be caught and humiliatingly passed by another team … all the time trying not to look at all the fans at the side of the road. It’s rather demoralising by any standards, yet at the same time it’s a massive relief to have freed yourself from the head-kicking you’d been receiving. So that’s what Fabian was up to when he saw in the distance ahead the team cars pulled up in the road.

  This in itself would have been a bit of worry, but not something he would have overly concerned himself with. Maybe there had been a mechanical or a puncture. When he got closer he’d have seen a teammate on the floor – ‘Ah, shit, that’s not good.’ He’d have started to wonder what had happened, hoping they weren’t badly injured, but probably also thinking, ‘Well, at least I have somebody else to ride in with.’

  He’ll have then seen another body on the floor, another at the side of the road, and another trying to get back on his bike: ‘OH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO.’ At that same moment somebody in a team car will have seen him and thought the same thing, only instead of ‘NO’ it would have been a ‘YES’, and radioed to the guys who weren’t in the crash, now probably 500 metres up the road, ‘FABIAN IS HERE! HE’LL BE THE FIFTH MAN. GO, FABIAN, GO!’

  So poor Fabian had to face the fact he was now going to have to get what was left of his head back in the game and endure another fifteen kilometres of horrible suffering, knowing this time he wasn’t allowed to be dropped. It made a bad situation worse: the four who had survived were now totally reliant on a rider who they knew was in a bad way. For a professional cyclist that is probably the worst turn of events it’s possible to experience. Being dropped from a team time trial early on, thinking your race is done and the suffering is over, only then to find half your team splattered across the road and realise you’re now the most important man in the team. Poor, poor Fabian. The team chaperoned him to the line, losing nearly three and a half minutes in the process, effectively destroying any hopes Ryder held for overall success. His Giro was scuppered on that first day. He did well to keep his head about him and have a good race, but when he arrived at the Dauphiné he let the disappointment hit home. I spent most of the week being his roomie-psychologist.

  Ryder (2)

  Riders share rooms at nearly every race – mainly because there are so many people on a bike race that there aren’t enough hotel rooms; and, more importantly, for organisers and teams it’s a damn sight cheaper. This is not so much the case these days, as there are more hotels and bigger budgets, but, like many things, what was once a necessity has become a tradition. For the majority of pros the thought of rooming alone fills them with fear. Even our loner sensibilities have their limits. Personally, I’m a big fan of being on my own, and would almost always put my hand up to be the ninth man (who gets his own room) when on Grand Tours. Everybody is fine with this, as I’m always up so bloody early compared to everybody else – nobody likes a roomie who wakes up at the crack of dawn.

  Ryder is the exception to my single-room rule. It’s a much more enjoyable experience sharing the events of a day with him. Ryder’s slight insanity helps me feel sane, and I’m sure he thinks the same of me. This is often the case in a team: we find the teammates who we are compatible with, because sharing a room together for what can be a month at a Grand Tour means you need a certain chemistry from which you both benefit. You get to know each other well enough to read when things aren’t going so well, which is when having a good roomie is most important. It can be an emotional roller coaster being a racer, not only because of the extreme nature of the sport, but also because we are pummelling our bodies so much that at times it has a negative effect on our minds.

  At the Dauphiné it was my turn to keep Ryder’s head above water. On Stage 6, the Friday, he was ready to pack it in and go home, his mind was completely shot. He was convincing himself he was useless and needed rest. There was no doubting he needed rest, but it became my job to persuade him he wasn’t useless. He sat in the very last position of the peloton for most of the day. I had to keep dropping back to talk to him and make it clear he was not going to stop. We needed him for the final two mountain stages over the weekend, whether he liked it or no
t.

  In that situation the only thing you can tell a rider, not just Ryder, is that they have to survive the day. There is never any point in telling them that they’re going to be fine and it’s all in their head – that’s a surefire way to have them lose what little will to live remains. So that’s how I was spending my Friday in the race: making sure my roomie stayed in the race.

  It was a massive relief when we got through the feed-zone at the halfway point and he didn’t stop, because it was my biggest fear he’d quietly pull over and step off the bike there. As we approached it I dropped right back and rode next to him in order that he could see I knew what he was thinking. He wouldn’t stop in front of me, because when we do quit a race we try to do it in a way that none of our teammates can see – it alleviates the guilt a little. I knew Ryder wouldn’t even attempt it if I was present.

  Once we get through the feedzone we find ourselves committed to making it through the stage, because if we’ve been feeling shit since the start of the stage the only thing we think about is the team car that will be sitting at the feedzone. We know that if we give up, we can climb in and fall asleep while being driven to the hotel, far away from the race. It can become an all-encompassing objective, like an oasis in a desert. Once it’s passed we know if we stop we either have to get in the team car with the directeur sportif, or, worse, the broom wagon (literally that, the final vehicle in the race convoy, a bus with a broom tied to it, signifying it’s cleaning up the stragglers). Nobody wants to be swept up by the broom wagon and endure that loser-cruiser trip to the finish before shamefully disembarking like a captured deserter.