Minutes before the rain fell and I attacked. The peloton can be seen ominously on the horizon.
You might think, after everything that happened, after the bitterest humiliation, that I would have wanted to quit professional cycling. In fact, the opposite was true. I grew to love it more than ever. I realized how lucky I was that I had a second chance. I wanted to make up for wasted time. I owed it to myself and to the idealistic, romantic kid I’d once been.
That was why, racing alone through the pouring rain, 30 kilometers from a Tour de France stage finish line in Montjuic, I still believed.
The Tour peloton was chasing me, but I was still riding faster, clinging onto my lead. Time checks, encouragement, and expletives came through my radio earpiece from Matt White, my Australian directeur sportif, at the wheel of the team car following in my wake.
Minutes before the rain fell and I attacked. The peloton can be seen ominously on the horizon.
Television helicopters hovered above, flying low enough to send litter scurrying across the road, the rotors deafening me as they swept overhead. Screaming Catalan cycling fans were crammed onto the hillside. Press cars, race commissaires, and media motorbikes wove around and about me. The pain in my legs and my lungs gripped me, my face tightening with the strain, as I neared the top of the final climb.
It was intense; it was excruciating.
It was wonderful.
—
I have lived in Girona in Catalunya for a few years now. In the past, many other professionals—Lance Armstrong, Bradley Wiggins, Floyd Landis—have also based themselves there. Even so, I never expected a Tour de France stage to start there. Stage five of the 2009 Tour, however, did, tracing a 182-kilometer route south to Montjuic in Barcelona, using roads that I trained on day after day. The Tour was in my backyard.
During the winter, prior to off-season training rides, the handful of us living in Girona often met in a café on the peaceful Placa de Independencia. This was only a couple of hundred meters from where the Tour’s team buses were now lined up and where, overnight, the Tour’s sprawling start village had sprung up, taking over the city center. Those gray, cold winter days seemed a lifetime ago.
It was a hot morning, and there were thousands of people milling around. I couldn’t distinguish between the pavements, roads, or car parks. The juggernaut of the Tour owned them all now. The biggest circus in cycling had come to town, and I was one of the performers.
Nicole and I sat in the start village with Brad and his wife Cath, their kids running circles around us. The energy levels of Brad and Cath’s son Ben, a Garmin racing cap perched on his little head, reminded us of our one-year-old terrier Zorro.
At the same time, the “performer” bit, fueled by Nicole’s prompting, was playing on my mind. The following day we would ride to Andorra and climb to the ski station at Arcalis, the first of three Pyrenean mountain stages. The previous week of racing had been very demanding; in the team time trial we had ridden out of our skin to finish second. I’d gone particularly deep that day, making myself physically sick and being unable to eat for almost seven hours after we crossed the finish line. It had already been torrid, and horrifically hard—and there were still eighteen days of the Tour remaining.
Nicole didn’t care about that. “Should we dedicate our afternoon to Tour viewing?” she asked. “You have to promise me you’ll try and win. It’s your home stage—you have to try!”
“Of course I will,” I said indulgently. “Just for you.”
Then I set her straight. “Of course I’m not. In fact, if everything goes to plan, you won’t see me once. A sprinter will win, and we’ll all have a relaxed day.”
Ben tugged at his mum’s sleeve. “Mum! I need to pee,” he said. Brad put down his coffee cup and got to his feet.
“I’ll take him,” he said. “Come on, Ben, let’s go find the toilets.” He climbed onto his bike and set off, Ben sprinting through the journalists, VIPs, and hangers-on in his wake.
—
An hour and a half later, I was back in that world of pain, teetering close to my limits. The peloton was racing hard, lined out on the climb exiting Sant Feliu, at the start of a corniche road familiar from those winter training rides, that twisted relentlessly for the next 25 kilometers.
In the off-season, I would struggle up the climbs and gingerly tackle the damp descents. Now, with riders cursing and spitting all around me, after just 2 of those 25 kilometers, I was already close to my absolute maximum. We were going much faster than I thought was possible on roads I knew so well. With a speeding peloton attacking each twist and turn and change in gradient, they took on a new, far more menacing dimension.
Matt and the team car were far behind us, as the peloton snaked around the jagged coastline. Instead of tactical advice or information crackling over the radio, for the time being there was only silence.
As an athlete, it’s amazing how focused it’s possible to become when you’re managing your body close to its limits. As I balanced between maximum effort and total collapse, every corner, every change in gradient, engraved in my memory from training, suddenly became more detailed than I would ever have thought possible.
Yet in the ebb and flow of the race, it was difficult to tell whether I was moving up through the peloton or whether the peloton was sliding backward around me. At times like these—when you’re “on the rivet”—the riders become desperate, clinging onto the pace by their fingernails, fighting, scrapping even, to claw themselves back into contention.
Soon, the cream rose to the top. Alberto Contador, the Schleck brothers—Frank and Andy—and Lance Armstrong started appearing in these moves, a clear sign that the peloton was now close to breaking point. Such riders show their cards only if they sense the race entering a critical phase.
I knew that the only way to escape the grasp of the peloton now would be through strength and will. Buoyed by the excitement of home advantage, any ideas I’d nurtured of taking it easy were now a distant memory. I just hoped Nicole was watching.
I couldn’t suppress the romantic kid, the teenage boy who’d raced around the country parks of Hong Kong, pretending to lead the Tour de France, only these days I was a born-again cycling geek racing in the world’s biggest bike race. The thirty-two-year-old battle-hardened pro sighed in resignation. He had no choice but to take a backseat as the big kid came out to play.
Another move slipped clear, and the remaining strong riders at the front of the peloton surged forward again in one last effort to chase and reel it in. We hammered on the pedals again in desperation. But it was plain to see—everybody was fucked.
Perversely, now—with everybody beyond their limit—was the moment. I had lactate building up through my body—legs, arms, shoulders—and my heart rate had been over its controllable threshold for more than twenty minutes. Yet there was a good chance that if a strong move went clear of the peloton, it might just make it to the finish line in Montjuic.
The fittest men in the world had cooked themselves, and I knew it was now or never. It was time to go.
—
When you take on a lone attack in professional racing, you have to commit and show utter conviction. There are no half measures. So I changed up through the gears, used the power of my body weight to crush the pedals, and attacked with everything I had. My body, screaming at me to stop, was overruled.
After about thirty seconds of effort, I looked under my arm and saw that nobody was following me. I switched into time trial mode, controlling my power so that I could continue for the next quarter of an hour, until a decent gap formed and hopefully an elite group of riders, capable of sharing the pace, were bridging up to me.
The reality was that my attack backfired. Everybody was so wrecked and so happy to see me go that they relaxed. Only two other riders, two of the strongest French pros, Sylvain Chavanel and Stéphane Augé, broke free. But I knew that however hard we rode, three of us were not going to get to Barcelona ahead of a pursuing peloton.
Behind us, the peloton regrouped. One by one, the riders dropped during those crazy thirty minutes on the corniche reattached themselves to the back of an ever-growing bunch. They would take a breather, snack on something, have a drink, talk tactics. Once rested, tactical decisions would be made based on the race situation.
All our efforts would probably be for nothing, yet at the same time we were live on television, our sponsors and the world were watching, and we were now under obligation to race. So we had to plow on. But we were in a kamikaze attack with close to zero chances of success. I was furious with my impetuosity, pissed off for allowing my emotions to lead me into such a hopeless situation.
The gap came down to two minutes, and it began to rain. Now my confidence ebbed away. I started to drop behind on the descents and in the corners. For some reason, my ability to handle my bike on the slippery Catalan coastal roads had deserted me. I prayed the peloton would reel us in and put us out of our misery rather than prolonging the agony.
But cycling plays with the mind. One moment you can be in a pit of despair, the next, spirits lifted by some barely perceptible positive sensation, buoyed by optimism. Thirty kilometers from Barca, the rain started to fall more heavily than it had all day, and as the downpour intensified, I began to feel replenished.
We still had a minute’s lead. There was one more climb, followed by a descent into the suburbs of Barcelona, and then just 15 kilometers through the center of the city. As we tackled the last hill, I drifted behind my long-time companions and, instinctively, launched a massive attack.
The TV motorbikes drew alongside, and the helicopters buzzed overhead. The sky grew darker and the rain came down, yet I was in my element. I knew that if I stayed clear over the top of the last climb, then, as a lone rider using the full width of the road, I would be able to take time back on the descent.
After that, I’d just have to ride on a wing and a prayer.
—
It was eerie, deserted, and dark coming off that final hill. I felt serene as my pain subsided and I rediscovered the bike-handling skills that earlier had deserted me. Ahead of me, as I sped into a corner, one of the race motorbikes wobbled and then slid into the gutter. All it would take was one little patch of oil or dirt washed across the road and I’d be on the ground, too.
Now the radio came to life, and Matt White’s excited voice crackled in my earpiece.
“Dave,” he told me, “you’ve taken time on the climb, you’ve got over a minute. Astana are controlling, they’ll play it safe on the descent. You know what to do.”
Now I was committed again, racing into each corner with a caution that only just outweighed risk. Once I’d made it through upright, I would sprint, stamping furiously on the pedals, until I was back up to speed.
As I headed on alone, into central Barcelona, I became more and more aware of the sheer number of people everywhere. The noise was loud, very loud, and I felt the whole of the city willing me on.
Matt (aka Whitey) was yelling now. “Dave, mate—you’re on a stormer, they can’t bring you back. You’re holding them at over a minute. It’s chaos back here.”
Ten kilometers remained. Ten kilometers of long, broad boulevards, stretching ahead of me, glistened in the gloom. Now I felt Catalan, as the crowds willed me on, helping me through every corner, shouting me back up to speed in every sprint and urging me not to slow down.
My earpiece crackled again. “Fuck me, Dave—you can do this! There are crashes everywhere behind, the teams are at their limit to bring you back. DON’T FUCKING SLOW DOWN!”
Five kilometers to the line and still, there I was, forty-five seconds ahead of the Tour de France. Now it became a straight pursuit: David Millar versus the peloton, in the biggest moment of my career since my comeback, with the world watching, my mum biting her nails at home in London, Nicole, my fiancé, barely able to watch in a bar in Girona, both of them surrounded by friends, the anxious texts flying back and forth.
But inevitably, I was tiring. I had fought to keep my speed at 50 kilometers an hour on those never-ending boulevards, but my body had stopped listening. My cadence ebbed, as the strength seeped out of me. The seconds tumbled like dominoes.
Matt wasn’t throwing in the towel though. “Thirty seconds, Dave, thirty seconds—fucking amazing, mate. You’re so close! DO NOT GIVE UP!” he bellowed. “Anything can still happen behind; you would not believe the carnage back here.”
But no matter how much I wanted to win, no matter how much power I wanted to generate, I couldn’t do it. Even the thousands of Catalans who lined the streets, imploring me to fight on, couldn’t help me. I wasn’t in control anymore; now it was just a matter of time until the soaked and swearing bunch swept past.
I rode into Placa d’Espanya and was faced with the magnificent spectacle that is Montjuic. Momentarily, I was taken aback, but the sight gave me a final snap of energy, as I rode alone up the steadily biting gradient, the peloton now eyeing my back wheel.
I swung right as the road climbed to the line and battled to lift my speed, but I could hear them all now, emptying themselves in their effort to get past me, to surge ahead to the line, just a kilometer farther ahead.
Then, they were past me, swamping me and spitting me out.
But they were red-eyed, vacant, broken men, who looked as if they had fought their own battle, just to catch me. It made me smile: there were only forty of them left in the front group, and I knew they’d been pushed to the limit.
As I exited the back of the front group, my body and mind shut down. I can remember one or two pats on the back, a couple of compliments on my ride. Maybe the day hadn’t been wasted. I was getting respect from the guys whose lives I’d just made hell.
I was awarded Most Aggressive Rider of the Day, generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day and, rather wonderfully, sponsored by Coeur de Lion (Lion Heart), a French cheese. There was a trip to the podium, a little trophy, and a lot of handshakes.
People rarely remember lone breakaways—only when they succeed, perhaps. It was a mad move on my part. But cycling is mad, beautifully so. The beauty, suffering, grandeur, and panache are what make it special.
But that day taught me something else, too: the manner in which one loses the battle can sometimes outshine the victory.