As his friends retire one by one, David Millar knows it will inevitably be his turn one day.
But the end of Michael Barry’s career felt more poignant than most for David.
Like many of their generation, the two friends had shared experiences darker than they had bargained for – David very publicly, Michael in secret.
And so, as the embers of 2012 and Barry’s career flickered, their training rides took on an even more reflective feel…
MOST MORNINGS START the same way these days: Archibald wakes up at 7am, my wife and I feed and change him, then we go down to breakfast where I have a coffee before messaging Michael Barry (unless he’s beaten me to it). ‘Biking?’
About an hour-and-a-half later, I’m setting off from the house to the road where his route from Girona meets mine from Cornella. It’s a nice start for both of us, and although we live almost 20 kilometres apart, we both live at the top of hills, so those first few minutes are fast and invigorating and, somehow, almost without fail, we seem to always meet around the same point. This is remarkable, as I’ve become rather laissez-faire regards my departure times in my more mature age; we must both be living the exact same amount of laissez to our faire for it to work out every time.
It is a one kilometre dead-straight stretch of road where we tend to meet. I can see his catlike physique with its professional, piston-like pedal stroke approaching. It’s a sight I’ve grown used to and one that always puts a smile on my face. More often than not, it is me who does the U-turn and we head off inland, deciding where we’ll go as we pedal.
Yesterday was the first time Michael wasn’t in his trade team kit. Retirement from racing has arrived, and with it the need to be sponsor-correct at all times on the bike. It was strange for both of us. We stopped at our regular café and, as we sat down, Michael said, ‘It’s odd to think this is all cycling will ever be for me from now on. I like it.’
‘I suppose on the bright side there aren’t many people in Toronto who’ll be able to drop you. Well, at first anyway,’ I replied.
It’s less than two months until Michael and his family leave Girona, the home they’ve made over the past ten years, and return to Toronto. It’s his childhood home, but it will be the first time he’s lived there in almost 20 years.
This is happening to more and more of my friends. I was one of the first to turn pro out of all of us, and so have seen more come and go than most, but it’s only now that I am so near the end of my racing career that I feel every retirement more personally. I know I’m an old pro because every time I come through the following caravan in a race I seem to know each directeur sportif as somebody I raced with, an old guerrier of the peloton. In 1997, each directeur seemed so old and scary. I suppose I’m old and scary now.
Michael and I used to always talk about the long-ago past (Michael’s a natural raconteur, and I’m sure I’ve heard many of his stories at least three times) or the immediate future. Our racing was never a subject we needed to talk about. Until now that is.
Now all we seem to talk about is what happened to us and the sport, what we lived through and the mistakes we made. I try to help him come to terms with it all. It’s important for Michael that he can ride with me at the moment because I’m the only person that he can speak to who has been through what he is going through and come out the other side.
It’s a lifetime ago that we were teenage boys racing around our favourite roads, dreaming of one day being in the Tour de France – me in Hong Kong while Michael was in Toronto. Now it breaks our hearts to imagine having to tell those boys what they would end up going through, and I suppose we wouldn’t tell them even if we could. We may have been through the mill but, for better or worse, it’s made us who we are.
That is probably what is hardest to explain to people; they only see us as old professionals, the guys who doped, who cheated. That’s true – that is who we are and we did do that – but I know how innocent we once were, how the dream was all-encompassing, powerful enough to transport us to a foreign land and a very foreign world.
There’s not much of that innocence left, but the older we’ve got, and the further time distances us from our doping, the more we’re able to rediscover the dreams we once had. The difference is that now, with age and experience, our dreams come with memories.
Cycling has taken us all over the world. We’ve lived in different cultures and somehow picked up different languages, made a multitude of different friends and seen some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. We’ve pushed ourselves beyond what we ever thought was possible, be it freezing down mountain passes in snow and rain thinking we’re going to be shaken off the bike from shivering so much, with hands too numb to even find the brake levers, let alone pull them, to racing through desert plains in 50-plus degree heat, convinced passing out from the heat would be nicer than melting. And that’s just the weather.
We’ll miss the racing. We’re racing cyclists after all. That feeling of being in a peloton of professionals where you know you’ll all make it round that corner at 80 kilometres per hour side by side. Or the adrenaline buzz you get trying to position your sprinter in the final few kilometres of a grand tour stage, waiting for gaps to open, willing them to open, then squeezing through shouting at each other, ‘Go! Go! GO!’ Then there’s the focus before a prologue, knowing there is no margin for error, having the ability to hide from the wind while balancing the need for speed with the limitations of your body and reconciling the fact that a crash could happen so easily even though you’ve imprinted every corner into your mental map.
The crashes we won’t miss. There are more now than there once was; every race will see somebody breaking bones. Michael has been operated on twice this year: the first in February when he broke his leg and his elbow, then in August when he broke his arm. I broke my collarbone in March. We’re getting too old for that kind of shit.
Yet what I think we’ll miss most is the camaraderie. Grand tours are the best for that, especially a good old-fashioned Giro d’Italia where we spend almost more time in the team bus than we do on the road. We get to know each other so well and share such extreme experiences, from unbridled euphoria to the dark depths of fatigue-induced depression, that there’s an intimacy about it all which is hidden behind joking and piss-taking.
As cyclists, we’re inherently loners. I wasn’t a team-sports player growing up; it simply never appealed to me. I much preferred going out alone on my bike for a few hours and imagining I was Miguel Indurain at the Tour de France or Maurizio Fondriest attacking on the Poggio. So to find myself years later on the brink of retirement, realising I’ll miss the team spirit most, is a surprise.
Then there’s the doping. Most of my peers did it at one time or another. It was part of the sport back then, and contrary to the generations before who had also done it, we are the ones that live with the public knowledge that we did it.
The cleaning up of the sport has meant that we have found ourselves being confronted with our pasts and having to accept and admit what we did. This wasn’t easy. It took a police arrest to get me to do it, and it took a federal investigation in the United States for Michael to do it.
It was, and I hope it will remain, the hardest experience of my life admitting to having cheated through doping. It was also the making of me. It has given me a purpose to everything I do, and the responsibility I feel towards cleaning up cycling has made me a better person. I regret massively that I ever crossed the line, and I feel anger towards the state of cycling back then that it could have happened to me, and so many others to whom doping had been such a disgusting thing.
Too many of us doped. Some were bad guys, but most were good guys who made the wrong choices. Then there were the special few who never crossed the line. Unfortunately there are not many of them left in the sport to tell us about their experiences.
These are the things Michael and I talk about now on our rides. The joviality is gone for the time being as we try to reconcile our pasts with the sport’s future. I’ve been through this for years now, and so has Michael, although his has been locked behind closed doors; the exorcism has just properly begun for him.
The sport has changed through our hard work these past few years. It has been the regret of our experiences that has fuelled it, and our knowledge of how it happened and how to prevent it that has made it possible. If Michael and I arrived from Toronto and Hong Kong now, we would have a career that would have matched our youthful idealism. Others will get that chance now, and I’m very proud to have contributed to making that a reality.
I enjoy riding my bike now more than ever, and that is mainly due to Michael Barry showing me that a bicycle is more than just a racing machine. I’m going to miss those morning ‘Biking?’ messages.
David Millar was born in Malta in 1977 to Scottish parents. He got into cycling while living in Hong Kong in the early 1990s and turned professional for a French team in 1997. He has won stages and worn the leader’s jerseys in all three grand tours. Arrested for doping in 2004 and subsequently banned for two years, he became an anti-doping advocate on his return to the sport and has been a member of the WADA Athlete Committee since 2008. His bestseller Racing Through the Dark was published in 2011.