IT WAS PROBABLY the fact that David Millar was only a month older than me that grated. If I’d not played so much Sensible Soccer on my mate’s (also called David) Atari ST and had done some proper training instead, then maybe I, too, would have been capable of winning the prologue time trial at the 2000 Tour de France, and with it the yellow jersey.
Having accepted that football-themed computer games had scuppered my Tour dream, I even bought one of those ‘It’s Millar Time’ T-shirts the following year, printed and sold via Procycling magazine by his sister, Fran – now at Team Sky where she has the improbable job title of Head of Winning Behaviours – and, with my dad, I went to the prologue of the 2001 Tour in Dunkirk in the hope of witnessing Millar do it again. But he crashed, and could only limp home, 110th.
I was a fan, although there was something quite odd about being a fan of someone my own age, as opposed to the Greg LeMonds, Sean Kellys and Sean Yateses who’d occupied my bedroom-wall space in the years before. Turns out I was just getting older, and the possibility of ever riding the Tour de France – ha! – had irrevocably passed me by.
I first met Millar in Copenhagen, where I was then living, at the 2001 Tour of Denmark, which he won. I asked him for a photo with me, and when I went to have the film developed I found that I’d forgotten to put one in the camera. It makes me laugh now when cycling magazines print that photo of a young Mark Cavendish with Millar at the Isle of Man Cycling Week in 1999. Cavendish looks such a fan – just like I would have done in that non-existent photograph.
Years later, when I’d become a journalist, I remember thinking what a lonely figure Millar seemed to cut at the start villages of the 2006 Tour – the first after his doping ban – rarely, it seemed, in the company of his new Saunier Duval teammates. He appeared only too aware that doping was still rife, and he was right: the Puerto doping affair had blown up at the start of that Tour, and in 2007 his Saunier Duval teammate Iban Mayo tested positive for EPO.
In 2008, Millar’s saviour – not to over-blow it – came in the form of a fellow former doper called Jonathan Vaughters, who was a former teammate of Lance Armstrong. Vaughters’ Garmin team – the rest of us discovered later – was a safe haven for reformed characters, and an environment in which they and young, clean pros, could coexist without pressure or recourse to banned substances, which was exactly what Millar needed. And he thrived, winning stages of all three Grand Tours and gold in the 2010 Commonwealth Games time trial – riding for Scotland – during his time with Vaughters. And it’s with the Garmin team that Millar will bring the curtain down on his career at the end of the 2014 season – now married, and with two children, he’s older, wiser, happier.
Until 2004 – when Millar would admit to having used EPO to help him win the 2003 time-trial world championships – British cycling had been ticking along, as it always had, with just flashes of brilliance and success. An overall victory at the Tour de France seemed about as likely as a French one – or rather the first French one since 1985, when Bernard Hinault had won his fifth and final Tour. And while, ahead of the 2014 Tour, Great Britain has now won two, the French attendent toujours.
In 1984, it had been ‘Millar Time’ part one, when Scotland’s Robert Millar (no relation) finished fourth overall at the Tour, and won the King of the Mountains jersey in the process. In the years that followed, starting with Chris Boardman’s Lotus-bike exploits at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British cycling success had pretty much revolved around, and been measured by, Boardman and Obree’s battle of the bikes on the track and then, in Boardman’s case, his time-trial exploits on the road.
When the wins came, they were usually in time trials: ‘the race of truth’ that was the staple diet of British racing cyclists. Sean Yates won the stage-six time trial at the 1988 Tour, Boardman the prologue at the Tour in ’94, ’97 and ’98, and then David Millar took the opening-stage time trial at the 2000 Tour in Futuroscope, and was time-trial world champion by the end of 2003.
The French sniffed and shrugged: so the Brits were good against the clock. There were few signs that British riders were ever going to amount to much more than that.
But Millar shrugged off that stereotype, embracing French culture and the life of a European-based professional bike rider. He lived the life he believed a pro was meant to lead, and when the French police searched his apartment in Biarritz and uncovered empty EPO syringes in 2004, he lost everything, including his self-respect for a while. His journey – and it is a journey – is documented in marvellous detail in his 2011 autobiography, Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar. Unlike many of his caught colleagues, Millar came across as genuinely repentant in the aftermath of his confession. He joined the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Athletes Committee – a position of responsibility that he very much enjoyed – and he also became very much the go-to guy in the wake of any subsequent doping bust in the pro peloton. Still is.
When he made his return to competition, Millar demonstrated that he had the potential, and the actual ability, to feature in Brailsford’s grand track plans by winning the 2006 British individual pursuit championships. If only British Olympic Association (BOA) rules of the time hadn’t prevented him from ever competing in the Olympics again.
But his heart was in European road racing, and he returned to the 2006 Tour riding for the Spanish Saunier Duval outfit, before moving to Garmin in 2008.
In April 2010, I sat down for an interview with Millar at the Château Hôtel Mont Royal in Chantilly, where the Garmin team were staying, the evening before Paris–Roubaix.
At that time, I was just on the brink of leaving Procycling magazine to join Cycle Sport and Cycling Weekly, and the piece eventually ran in the Weekly as part of a preview for that year’s Tour de France, in which eight Britons were taking part; this was the most since the 1968 Tour, when a ten-man squad had included Barry Hoban, Arthur Metcalfe, Hugh Porter and Colin Lewis.
Millar was already having an excellent season in 2010: he won the time trial at the Critérium International in March, and then the overall classification in the Three Days of De Panne through a planned, methodical execution, just ten days before our interview. He admitted that he was racing more aggressively than ever, taking more chances as he felt he had little to lose because his Garmin bosses didn’t have the same expectations of him. Ironically, he was going better as the result of a lack of pressure.
‘It’s [now about] passion – trying things,’ he told me. ‘I’m not scared to try racing the way I have lately any more.’
You could almost hear the mindset-switch on stage six of the 2009 Tour de France, between Girona and Barcelona, when a lone Millar gave it everything to hold off a speeding, hungry peloton, only to be gobbled up with just over a kilometre left to go.
As we chatted in the hotel bar, Millar was as candid as ever about his return to the sport more generally, too, calling himself ‘lucky’ to have gone through – or come through – everything he did. ‘That’s why I work very much in the anti-doping world; I want to do that because I feel very strongly that it’s a horrific practice and affects you in very deep ways,’ he admitted. ‘And it’s cheating, and it’s wrong, and it shouldn’t happen. But I did it, and it’s made me the person I am. It’s actually made me a better person than I was before. It took that much for me to sort my shit out. For me it’s ended up working a treat, but it’s been a horrible way to do it.’
He explained that, looking back, he found it difficult to even recognize his 23- or 24-year-old self, and that now, at 32, he felt like a very different person.
‘How you handle things is how you become. But we’re not taught how. You have to make your own mistakes. Mine was big enough to force me to actually look at myself. But, for many people, their mistakes are not big enough, and it turns them into a ****,’ he said, really enunciating the last word, which I couldn’t help thinking he’d used entirely legitimately, such was the passion and purpose behind it.
‘That’s what happens to most people: they turn into ****s,’ I heard Millar say again. I hadn’t really expected the word to be used a second time, although French appeared to be the language of choice surrounding us, and our fellow patrons would have understood only if they’d heard the word chatte, used in its very worst form …
Then he said it again: ‘And I was well on the way to being a ****, so I’m kind of glad I’m out of that.’
A not insignificant number of his compatriots – both members of the cycling press and the public – had made up their minds that he already was a **** once they discovered Millar had been doping, and he was forced to face the backlash when he left his home in France to live in Manchester, closer to those involved with British Cycling, who perhaps knew him best.
‘The ironic thing was that I was most hated by the British press, villainized by the UK, and yet I went back there and realized that it was my home,’ he said. ‘It was much easier where I lived in France, in Biarritz. The French have been the most forgiving, and most empathetic, through it all. That was one of the most wonderful things about it: how supportive everyone in Biarritz was. Random people – people I’d never spoken to – came up to me and asked me if I was OK. So it was odd that I ended up leaving Biarritz and the people who had supported me. I came back to the UK, where I was the Antichrist.’
Having been born to Scottish parents in Malta, and having grown up both in England, with his mother, and in Hong Kong, where his father lived after his parents divorced, Millar had previously described himself as being ‘international’ – or perhaps ‘nation-less’ would have been the better adjective. ‘Wherever I lay my hat …’ and all that. ‘I do feel more Scottish now,’ Millar said. ‘But when all the chips were down, I really realized who my friends and family are, and what my nationality is. And that’s British, too, but my roots are in Scotland. It’s easy when you’re young and cocky and brash to think that you don’t have any roots, that you don’t owe anything to anybody, whereas now I’m very aware of my background and very proud of my roots. And that’s why the Commonwealth Games means a huge amount to me, and why I’m aiming at it this year.’
There was no ban on him riding in the Commonwealth Games, which allowed Millar to win time-trial gold for Scotland that October in Delhi, where he beat England’s Alex Dowsett, who’s now a pro with the Spanish Movistar squad. As for Team Sky, the new British team had started that season, but Millar, persona non grata as he was, could never be a part of it, such was – and still is – their policy of not signing former dopers.
‘I’d love to be eighteen now, coming through the new system that is in place now,’ Millar said, referring to British Cycling’s then-new academy programme, and young riders’ opportunities to stay with the same core of managers and coaches by potentially turning pro with Sky. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I went through, the way I did it.’
After our interview, on my way out of the bar, I bumped into journalist and writer Jeremy Whittle, who’d been my editor at Procycling a few years before. He was there at the hotel to talk to Millar about Racing Through the Dark, which Millar genuinely wrote himself, but with a guiding hand from Whittle, with whom he’d been friends for some years.
On 27 July 2004, in Procycling’s London office, Jeremy Whittle answered a call from his friend, David Millar, to say that he was ready – ready to do an interview with Whittle about having doped. When? Immediately, if Whittle was able to. Millar was in town, and could meet as soon as Whittle could get to Leicester Square.
As he was both editor of the magazine and the cycling correspondent for The Times, this was an ideal opportunity for Whittle to kill two birds with one stone – if he could find a photographer at such short notice. Pete Goding, now an established, and extremely talented, sports and travel photographer, went on his first ‘proper’ shoot that day. Day-to-day, he was the picture editor on both Procycling and Real Homes, and would set up various shoots for them. But as this Millar interview was also for The Times, the pressure was on.
‘I remember Jez grabbing me and asking if I could do it. It was going to be my first national newspaper job, and a picture editor at The Times told me beforehand that they were after a nice portrait of Millar, but there actually wasn’t much of a brief other than that,’ says Goding. It was a Tuesday, he remembers – or, at least, the metadata from his camera reminds him – ‘and there was this beautiful light over Leicester Square’.
Photographers notice such things; this one was set to go far. Goding and Whittle pitched up in a taxi and found Millar in the foyer of one of the hotels overlooking the square. Whittle did his interview, and Goding then had just five or ten minutes to come up with some decent shots. ‘I sat him outside, on the square, in the shade,’ says Goding. ‘I didn’t know him like Jez did, but I think I had met him briefly once before somewhere, although it can’t have been at a race because at that point I hadn’t actually been to one before.
‘And he was pretty affable. He clearly wasn’t happy at the time, and had just been going through everything with Jez, so I was aware of not wanting to be too obtrusive; it wasn’t exactly a “smile to camera!” kind of moment. But we got some good pictures, and I sent them across to The Times. Originally, they were going to put the piece on the back page, but then it got bumped to just inside, which was a bit gutting, but then when I saw how huge the picture they used actually was, I was over the moon.’
Almost a decade on, Goding jogs our memories with the set of photos he took that day. Millar’s in a light green T-shirt, which says ‘Fullerton BMX Squad’ on it, and the silhouette of a BMXer pulling a radical jump underneath. Below that it says ‘Your ass is grass!’ – a little inappropriately somehow, given the gravity of the situation.
He’s in blue jeans and his hair’s cropped short. He’s wearing a yellow Livestrong bracelet, too. They’d been friends, Armstrong and Millar – brothers-in-arms, two among many, in a culture that all but embraced doping – but they wouldn’t be friends for much longer. A tourist-friendly red phone box in the background serves to complete the set of primary colours in the photo.
‘And it was beautiful light: this beautiful light on an almost empty Leicester Square,’ Goding reminds me. ‘It really was quite atmospheric.’
Whittle, meanwhile, had got close to Millar in the previous years since he’d turned pro in 1997. The atmosphere in the hotel foyer, though, was strained. Millar’s sister, Fran, was there, too.
‘We sat there talking for about an hour, but it was all very depressing, and he looked very rough; exhausted, as though he’d been clubbing for a week,’ remembers Whittle, which may not have been overly far from the truth. ‘He was staying in London with Fran, who was really looking after him and defending him, as he was very vulnerable and frail, and she looked as though she’d rip my head off if I said the wrong thing. I was really worried about him.’
Whittle had first seen Millar earlier that season at the Paris–Nice stage race, in March.
‘He had a goatee, and this was around the time that he called [former Cofidis teammate] Philippe Gaumont a “nutter”,’ recalls Whittle, after the Frenchman, who had admitted to doping himself, had named Millar as one of the riders who was calling the shots when questioned during a police investigation into suspected drug taking at the Cofidis team. Gaumont died, aged forty, from a heart attack in May 2013.
Millar had denied everything back then, but Whittle admits that he wasn’t so convinced.
‘I distinctly remember standing outside this café, having a coffee, and having this really awful feeling that he was lying to me; knowing that I really liked him, but that he was lying to me, and that he was definitely doping. And I was thinking, “That’s why he’s grown a beard, because a beard’s about guilt, and he’s hiding his face” – all this metaphysical stuff!’
Whittle saw Millar again a couple of months later at the Football Association’s headquarters on Soho Square in London (the FA has since moved to Wembley Stadium), where he and Welsh star Nicole Cooke – the then reigning Commonwealth Games road race champion and winner of the 2003 UCI World Cup – were being presented at a press conference as the two great hopes of Great Britain’s 2004 Athens Olympic road-cycling teams.
‘As he describes in his book, he thought it was all behind him then, that nothing was going to happen and that the French had lost interest,’ says Whittle. ‘And then the drugs squad arrived in Biarritz in June – what was it, a week before the Tour?’
It was the evening of 24 June, a date that must be seared in Millar’s mind. It was just nine days before the start of the Tour in Liège, in Belgium, and there were only seven weeks to go until the start of the Athens Olympics, where Millar was set to be one of Team GB’s stars.
There was an ironic connection to the massive success that was to visit British cycling in the years to come in that it was British Cycling supremo Dave Brailsford that Millar was dining with at a Biarritz restaurant when the French police swooped. Yet there was a happy ending for British Cycling in that a repentant Millar would eventually return to the national squad and help pilot the young lad he’d posed with for a photo on the Isle of Man in 1999 to the rainbow jersey of world champion. When Mark Cavendish won the men’s road-race world championships in Copenhagen in 2011, it was a dream come true not just for him, but for a number of people on the team and behind the scenes at British Cycling, as well as legions of fans of British cycling – small ‘c’ – who’d had to wait forty-six years for a British rider to repeat Tom Simpson’s feat of 1965.
But in 2004, cycling simply carried on without Millar, who was nevertheless a great embarrassment to British Cycling at the time. As per the UCI’s rules, they were the ones who had to dish out the ban – two years, post-dated from the day he was caught, which put him in the running for riding the 2006 Tour. It also took him out of the running for the Olympics – the 2004 Games, of course, but also 2008, 2012, 2016 … Under a British Olympic Association bylaw, introduced in 1992, as a convicted doper banned for over six months, Millar was prohibited from ever representing Great Britain at the Games again.
However, in April 2012, the BOA life-ban was judged by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to contravene WADA’s World Anti-Doping Code, reopening the door for Millar and 100-metre sprinter Dwain Chambers – handed a two-year doping ban in 2003 after testing positive for the anabolic steroid THG – to return to the Olympic fold for London 2012.
Both athletes subsequently took part, but was it right that the likes of Chambers and Millar could ‘use up’ highly sought after Olympic spots that could otherwise have been filled by athletes who had never turned to drugs? Certainly, until then, Millar had never expected to be able to.
‘The question as to whether he should ever have been allowed to take part again is really difficult to answer,’ admits Whittle, and then relates a story, the crux of which turns out to be that we’re all human and that the reality of human relationships doesn’t necessarily tally with faceless rules and bureaucracy.
‘After David’s book was nominated for the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, I was with him for the awards evening, and we had high hopes,’ Whittle says. ‘I still think it was the best book that year – and I know I’m bound to say that, but I do.’
Millar’s book didn’t win – the prize went to the football book A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke, by Ronald Reng – but Whittle believes that Millar’s BOA ban, heading into an Olympic year, could not have done the book any favours in the judges’ eyes.
‘What was funny was that that same evening, after the awards, we went to this do in Knightsbridge, which we probably weren’t supposed to go to, at the Royal Thames Yacht Club. We walked in, and Gary Lineker was there, and Seb Coe – the then chairman of the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games – and [BOA chairman] Lord Moynihan.
‘As soon as David walked in, there was this kind of draw of breath; it was like a saloon in an old western when the music stops playing,’ Whittle recalls. ‘David was the family’s black sheep, his arrival heralded with a bum note on the piano.’
At one point, Millar went and introduced himself to Lord Moynihan.
‘It was funny to watch, as David’s something like six foot three, while Lord Moynihan used to be a cox,’ Whittle points out, but says that within fifteen minutes the two of them were as thick as thieves.
Chambers, although he apologized for having used steroids, was, says Whittle, ‘ostracized and alienated and cast out – never really accepted again’.
‘But should David have been allowed to ride at the Olympics again? I don’t know, but at that moment when he went over to Lord Moynihan, it had been to the sound of another drawn breath, and I remember Lord Moynihan saying, “Lovely to meet you,” and they proceeded to get along famously. That would have been in November 2011, and the ban was lifted in spring the following year.
‘But it’s easy just to string people up and hang them, rather than talk to them,’ Whittle says. ‘I remember in 2006, before David started racing again, that he went to do this talk for UK Anti-Doping in Russell Square. I arrived just as it ended, and was waiting to meet him at the bar. And he was shaking; I thought he’d burst into tears. Then a few delegates came up, to tell him that they’d learned more in his fifteen-minute talk than in their seven years, or whatever it was, of working in anti-doping.
‘David’s experience is valid in the history of British sport, and in the understanding of doping, and will be seen as a lightning rod for change,’ says Whittle. ‘He’s been effective, and provoked debate.’
Millar retired at the end of the 2014 season. For better and for worse, he leaves a lasting legacy in British cycling’s history: yes, he was a doper, but he was also one of the people key to helping clean up the sport.
And what’s next for him? For now, only he knows the answer to that, but the clock hands will likely come around to ‘Millar time’ again.