The Racer

by David Millar

  Sure enough, Ryder came into his own the next day in the first big mountain stage. He went with the first attacks on the first mountain and was in the break all day, dropping out of it deliberately in the final in order to wait for Andrew so he could help him. In the space of twenty-four hours he went from wanting to quit on a relatively easy stage to sacrificing his own chances of a stage win in order to pace Andrew the final kilometres, in the process moving Andrew from fourth to third on general classification.

  When I got on the bus and saw Ryder for the first time since the stage start it was clear he was a different man from twenty-four hours earlier, his exhaustion of the previous day a distant and foreign memory. He embodied the cliché ‘back in the game’. That evening in the room he was telling me how he was going to rip the race to pieces the following day, just for fun. Which is what he did, in inimitable Ryder fashion: from the back, to the front, through the front, off the front, then a series of counter-attacks against himself. Full beast mode.

  Ryder’s day out ripping the race to pieces and setting up Andrew for the Criterium du Dauphiné win was a big boost for the team, and a career-defining result for Andrew. The euphoria of the win was slightly diminished by the fact that we faced an eight-hour bus ride home. At least it was in our bus. As a treat we got to stay in a motel en route in order that we could get some decent sleep. Little did I know this was going to be the last good night’s sleep I’d get for a week.

  Back Home

  Nicole and the boys had stayed in Annecy the last couple of days of the race, deciding that going into the high mountains probably wasn’t the best idea in the world. The camper van was to be dropped off on the Monday morning then they were heading back to Spain where I’d be at home to welcome them, which was a first: normally they were always at home waiting for me.

  The damp squib of a bus trip home got wetter when I received a call from our cleaning lady telling me our house had been broken into. We were still three hours away when I got this uplifting news. I called Nicole to tell her, and found out that her engagement ring and all her other jewellery were in the house, as she’d taken nothing with her on the trip, a very sensible thing to do at the time of her departure. Those next three hours were interminable. I started racking my brains, thinking of everything that was in the house that could be, and probably had been, stolen. The list was sickeningly long.

  Unusually the team bus took me right to my front door, another first, which made the whole thing even more surreal. Everybody on the bus shared my stress; none of us had ever had our houses burgled. There was nothing to be said: nobody knew what to say or do. I was prepared for the worst, yet couldn’t stop myself from hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as that.

  I dumped my suitcase in the driveway and walked despondently into the house. It appeared that they’d done a thorough job: everything had been turned upside down. I went straight upstairs to find where Nicole kept her jewellery. Everything important was in a small ring box sitting on top of an antique miniature chest of drawers she used as her main jewellery box. The drawers had all been pulled out, yet remarkably the small ring box hadn’t been touched. I daren’t believe it was possible. I picked it up and opened it, wincing, preparing myself for the worst.

  Everything was there. I couldn’t believe it. I sat on the floor, and thought, ‘OK, I don’t care about anything else, at least Nicole still has her ring.’ That didn’t last long. The more I looked around the house the more I noticed missing. All the computers with their countless photos had been taken, each computer being a back-up to the other, our internet having been too slow to upload to any cloud. They’d taken anything they could sell: TVs, cameras, sunglasses, that sort of thing. In other words, all the cool shit, the luxuries. I told myself, ‘It’s probably a good thing I don’t have TVs. I had too many sunglasses anyway. We have other photos of the boys. I’ve had worse shit happen to me. I can rise above this.’

  Then I remembered I had a safe in my gym that was to be installed in our new house. It wasn’t fixed down, yet stupidly I’d put my watches in there thinking it was a safe thing to do. I had a beautiful IWC Portuguese Chronograph that Mark Cavendish had given each of the Copenhagen Worlds team when he became only the second Brit to win the Worlds road race, engraved with my name, the race and date. Three other personal watches, one of which was my grandfather’s. I reverted to the feeling I’d had when looking for Nicole’s engagement ring. I went to the gym, not allowing myself to think the worst, hoping beyond hope the safe would be there in the corner where I’d last locked it shut.

  I opened the door and turned the light on. It was a mess. I used it as an office as well as a gym. The filing cabinet had been rifled, files and paperwork were strewn across the floor. I waded through it all, not caring. I could see immediately the safe wasn’t there. I kept looking for it, though. It didn’t take long for me to accept they’d taken it. I felt myself shrink, my head hang, trying to tell myself, ‘They’re only watches, you never wore them anyway.’ It didn’t help.

  I spent the next few hours tidying and cleaning up, trying to get the place as normal looking as possible in anticipation of the arrival of Nicole, my mum and the boys. The thieves had even raided the kids’ room – clothes and stuffed toys everywhere, as if the teddy bears had held a rave in the absence of their children, Toy Story on drugs and alcohol. I stopped being sad and sorry for myself and started getting angry. What sort of people did that to a kids’ room?

  The police came by and did their best impression of not being CSI. They were in and out in fifteen minutes, barely asking a question, about as useful as a chocolate watch. I can understand that: it’s not as if a robbery like this is top of their list of priorities, especially as they expect everything to be insured. Which is when I realised I wasn’t insured. I had let the insurance expire as I had presumed we’d be living in our new house by this point. That was unfinished, empty, yet fully insured. I felt queasy again.

  For the next week I had to endure people saying, ‘Well, at least the insurance will cover everything.’ Or, ‘It’s only stuff.’ Neither of which helped very much. I couldn’t sleep at night, continuously waking up thinking about something else that I needed to get up and look for in order to be sure it hadn’t been stolen, my paranoia growing ever worse as the days went by. It didn’t matter how unlikely it was that the thieves would have been interested in it, I still had to check. One night was spent going through Velo Club Rocacorba clothing (high-quality kit from our cycling club), checking it was all there.

  The theft of the Worlds watch from Cav affected me the most – it was what we had as a team to show we’d been part of something important. We’d always talked about the fact we’d wear them together, as a team, years in the future when we met up to remember that day. I don’t have anything else like that from my career. I constantly remind myself, ‘It’s only a watch. It’s only a watch.’ It doesn’t help, to be honest, much like the futility of telling myself ‘I am light. I am strong’ while racing my bike up a mountain.

  All of this meant that the rest and recovery period I’d anticipated and based everything upon during my three-week block of training and racing never happened. It felt like I barely slept for days following the Dauphiné. Which was possibly the worst thing that could have happened considering how tired I was by the final stage. Sleep was all I needed, yet I couldn’t manage it. I got more tired by the day. I knew I was becoming weaker rather than stronger; the weaker I became the more susceptible I was to sickness. This led to stress, which made me worry and find sleeping even more difficult; it was the most vicious of circles. Then it happened. My glands went up and I began to feel sick.

  Tour Preparation

  Being sick just over two weeks before the Tour de France is the nightmare scenario. It’s the most important race to me. I’ve based my whole season on being at my best from this moment on till the end of the year: Tour de France, Commonwealth Games, Vuelta a España, World Championships. That was my racing block; that was
where I would come into my own. It has almost always been that way in my life as a professional cyclist. I am a man for the second half of the year. I do what I have to do the first half, then do what I want to do the second.

  Falling sick at this point in the season meant even the most confident version of myself had doubts. I needed somebody to trust me, to tell me what to do.

  I’d been in a similarly sorry state leading up to the 2013 Tour de France, to the extent that for any other member of the team my selection could not have been justified. I wasn’t sure I could turn it around. Jonathan Vaughters, the team boss, called me and asked me to tell him what I thought with regard to my Tour de France selection. I remember saying, ‘Jonathan, if I’m not good enough I don’t want to go.’ To which he replied, ‘OK, David. Let’s speak closer to the time. I will trust you to make the right decision.’

  I went on to have a supremely average Tour de Suisse. (We had chosen Suisse instead of the Dauphiné in 2013, deciding it was a safer bet considering my lacklustre form. It’s a more predictable race than the Dauphiné, not quite as extreme in its racing or conditions. It’s perhaps not fair to say so, but it’s the easier option.) Much as I’d done in the past I used the race to overload myself. I was racing hard the first hour then taking every opportunity outside of my team duties to use the race as a training exercise. I finished exhausted but healthy, ready to rest, recover and regenerate. But, unlike this year, I didn’t return home to a ransacked house. I felt confident enough to call Jonathan and tell him I would be good enough for the Tour – and that was it, he trusted me. That alone gave me the extra confidence boost I needed.

  The Nationals (2013)

  Last year I spent five days at home before travelling to Scotland for the National Championships in Glasgow, on the same course that will be used for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The day of the race everything clicked: for the first time all year I could control the race rather than having the race control me. I was like a motorbike – over the four and a half hours of the race I rode like a man possessed. Alex Dowsett, Andy Fenn, Mark Cavendish and I made an alliance, essentially becoming a team, agreeing to race as such until we got to the final, where we would revert back to individuals to fight out the win. We knew it was the only way we stood a chance against the power of Team Sky, who’d dominated the previous few years due to their strength and numbers. This wasn’t out of the ordinary; the Nationals often ended up like this, the continental professionals having to unite their forces in order to stand a chance against complete teams. In the past these were domestically based, but Team Sky changed that – the continental pros now had to compete against their own.

  I’d only raced a couple of times in Scotland before. I relished the opportunity to race on home ground – some of my earliest memories are of Glasgow and I’ve rarely raced anywhere that has such a deep connection to me. Not only are most of my family from there, but the course even passed the university where my parents met. It felt like a home race, and I raced it as such.

  Being the Nationals it was anarchic, essentially a war of attrition. The course taking place over a relatively short, hilly circuit made it almost impossible to be controlled – if you weren’t riding aggressively at the front you didn’t stand a chance. After two of the fourteen laps, 90 per cent of the race were already out of contention. By the final lap there were only three of us left: Mark, Lan Stannard and myself. I knew Mark wouldn’t chase me if I attacked – not because of any alliance, but simply because we’re such close friends – not that it made a difference because each time I went, Stannard would bring me back. With two kilometres to go I was away and had a moment where I thought I might make it, but once again Stannard slowly but surely clawed his way back up to me, at which point it was a formality for Mark to win. I say ‘formality’; the fact that he had even survived the previous 185-kilometre onslaught displayed how much more than a pure sprinter he can be when he is on song.

  It was disappointing yet a relief to have finally turned a corner and be able to pay back the trust Jonathan had placed in me. It was also obvious the Commonwealth Games course was perfectly suited to me. Then and there I decided it would be one of my goals, perhaps my biggest, for 2014. Six days later I was fourth in the bunch sprint on Stage 1 of the Tour de France. The next day I was yellow jersey on the road, after the three sprinters who’d been in front of me on general classification had been dropped on the major climb of the day and were now far behind the race.

  Ryder came up to me on the descent and said, ‘David!’ He never calls me Dave, ‘You’re in yellow. You need anything?’ All of a sudden our roles were reversed. He didn’t hesitate. I said, ‘Sure I’m in yellow? Fuck, I reckon I must be. I’m OK, some bottles when the cars are back would be good.’ He gave me both of his, patted me on the back and told me he’d stay near me for anything I needed. I called on the radio that I was in yellow. To this day I don’t know why the team didn’t react and take control of the race. I think they were so used to me calling the shots that when it came to the moment where I needed them to call the shots on my behalf they didn’t know what to do. No order was ever sent on the radio to ride or behave differently. Only Ryder acted as if I was in yellow. It wasn’t until ten kilometres to go that I shouted at the team to start riding, at which point Charly, for the first time, ordered everybody to ride. It was too late; a small group had slipped away. We caught all of them, except one. He had one second on the line, meaning he took yellow, leaving me in second place. No big deal: it wasn’t that important to me (he writes, while quietly sobbing at the keyboard).

  The Nationals (2014)

  This year things aren’t quite as simple. Being run-down to the point of sickness two weeks before the start of Tour de France was far from ideal. I called the team doctors and told them what was going on – it had all the characteristics of being a classic fatigue-induced cold, with nothing to be done for it but rest. I discussed with team doctors whether I should go to the Nationals or not. I called Charly and told him everything – making sure I was totally transparent as I knew they were making the Tour selection – and I also wanted his opinion on whether I should rest up or go to the Nationals. We both agreed I should go. If nothing else it would give me almost a week in a hotel where I could rest up completely. If, once there, I felt I shouldn’t race then I should make that decision nearer the time. The primary objective was for me to recover and get healthy. The next day, Charly told me I was selected for the Tour. I didn’t realise how much of a relief this was; clearly that had been another factor that had been weighing heavily on my mind.

  The Jersey

  All the European National Championships are held the Sunday before the Tour de France starts. I don’t know why this is; they just are and that’s the way it’s always been for as long as I remember. They’re important races for all of us, no matter what country you hail from. Every rider dreams of one day winning and wearing their national colours for the following year – it’s one of the few opportunities we’re given to wear something different from our transient, often ugly, trade team colours.

  Joining our first cycling club will have been a seminal moment for many of us. Wearing their jersey for the first time will have affected us in a way we’d never experienced before – every club has its traditions and colours, displayed like a flag on their jersey; and each design has its own history. For me, like many other cyclists, it was the first time I felt like I’d become part of something – for some reason it felt different from any other club or team I’d been part of in the past.

  Those of us destined to become professionals are blissfully unaware that from that moment on our lives will be dictated by the cycling jerseys we wear. Before long we’ll be moving to a bigger club with better opportunities, then a regional outfit, and on to a sponsored team. From there, the next step is to the national squad. All along the way we dream of one day becoming a professional, of wearing the yellow jersey of the Tour de France, and maybe the rainbow stripes of World Champion
.

  It doesn’t matter what jersey you have as a junior or an amateur – you could even be a multiple World Champion at that level – it still doesn’t equate to the pride each of us feels when we pull the zip up on that first professional jersey. It’s a powerful flashback to that very first outing with our local club, and that feeling of being part of something.

  Then, over the years, it simply becomes team kit. We accept we are paid to be human billboards on bikes; it’s the only way we can race. Sometimes we get good kit; sometimes we get bad. We have no say, our houses and garages become swamped with it through the years. The value becomes lost through the accumulation.

  It’s for this reason the National Championships are important. The winner is awarded the National Championships jersey and is given an individual identity for a year – and, above all, a chance to represent their country and transcend the mercurial world of professionalism. Of course, we’re still representing our sponsors – only they become part of us rather than we part of them.

  Monmouthshire

  The race itself is different from all others we do. We race it for personal reasons; more often than not our team is perfectly happy for us not to do it – after all, if we win we are obliged to wear colours different from those of our sponsors. My team had a policy of not paying for expenses. I don’t think they were alone in this, because as far as they were concerned it was a race we did in our own time.