There was a cure to my loneliness, which was to leave the apartment. As soon as I went out and about in Biarritz, I discovered I had a lot more friends than I’d had a month earlier. People came up and congratulated me.
I was no longer simply, “Daveed, le coureur.” I was now “Daveed, maillot jaune du Tour de France.”
Biarritz felt like home. I was getting to know so many people that I’d have never met before. If I was out at night, I no longer had to queue to get into restaurants, clubs, or bars. I was being called to the front and given VIP treatment. I loved it. I didn’t really see any problem—I could see what was going on and knew that it was predominantly bullshit, but I still enjoyed it.
I had many nocturnal friends—the owners and staff of cafés, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs—people with whom I was great pals after nine at night, but never saw during the day. Some of them became best friends. I even gave Jean-Claude, the owner of Biarritz institution Le Caveau (a gay club that in winter had the most amazing Sunday night cabaret shows), a yellow jersey on his fiftieth birthday. This was the same nightclub that, only a few weeks earlier, had refused me entry.
Even so, I was still uneasy in my own company and spent as little time as possible in my apartment. I was beginning to think that maybe this was just the way of life for a pro cyclist, or at least for me. I couldn’t balance my life—it was split, separated. I was either the obsessive professional cyclist or a Biarritz social butterfly. When I was the social butterfly, I’d have no contact with anybody in the cycling world. I would disappear and be impossible to get ahold of. The reverse would be true when I went back to obsessive pro cyclist mode; there was no crossover. The only person who could get ahold of me in both worlds was my sister.
August 2000, Biarritz. The town hall held a cocktail reception in my honor; I gave the mayor one of my yellow jerseys.
In the aftermath of the Tour, thinking that I should rest so I’d be good for the Sydney Olympics that September, I had turned down several criteriums—lucrative exhibition races in Holland, Belgium, and France—in August. Despite that, I didn’t see myself as an Olympian. This, remember, was long before British cyclists dominated at the Olympic Games. To me, the only thing that really mattered was the Tour—the Olympics were simply a footnote.
Nonetheless, I knuckled down and started to ready myself for Sydney, even though it held no real goal for me. I knew deep down that the course didn’t suit me, as I’d stand little chance against the favorites in time trials over 30 kilometers. I didn’t possess the power needed to compete against the older guys in those longer time trials. I was more excited about the prospect of going to Sydney, meeting other athletes, and hanging out with the British team.
I trained hard, despite my pessimism about my chances of winning a medal, but I lacked focus, and this became apparent once I’d arrived in Australia. I was sent to the holding camp on the Gold Coast, 1,000 kilometers north of Sydney, but was devastated to find that there was only a skeleton team of athletes and staff there. Everybody else had already left for Sydney. The time trial was scheduled for the penultimate day of the Games, and I was to be held for as long as possible in the holding camp so I could train on quieter roads, far from the chaos of Sydney. I was crestfallen.
There were other truths to face up to. I’d become a regular user of sleeping pills, something that had begun in the last week of the Tour when I was in a similarly excited state of mind and couldn’t sleep. I was forced to go to the British team doctor for more pills, and it was only then that I realized how removed my world was from that of other athletes.
At Cofidis, I was seen as a “good” boy, somebody the team doctors trusted implicitly, but now, talking to the Team GB doctor, I felt that he didn’t trust me, or my habits. In a way he was right not to—I was a Tour de France rider, and we were all tarnished by our sport’s reputation. Even though I was clean, I was a walking example of how troubled and confused my sport had become.
I took it for granted that I could just ask for sleeping pills and that I could be trusted to use them correctly. I’d learned my lesson the year before with my roof-jumping incident and now used them only to help me sleep. But it wasn’t easy to get what I wanted from this doctor, and it annoyed me. Because I didn’t dope, I believed I had the right to do anything that wasn’t doping—that was how the Cofidis team doctors treated me, and also how I’d learned to survive in recent years. In the buildup to the Tour I had even learned to inject myself so that I could carry on with récupération at home, in order to recover properly and train harder. I was not a doper, I told myself—I just injected myself to recover and needed pills to sleep.
I knew it wasn’t good to need sleeping pills, but my sleeping patterns had become so chronically bad that at times I relied on them completely. I had even taken Rohypnol on occasion, when my insomnia had become unbearable and untreatable with Stilnox. Sitting down with the Team GB doctor, I realized this wasn’t normal behavior. Yet such was the culture of my pro team that it was seen as completely normal—pills were even offered before I would ask for them. With Team GB, I felt like I’d entered a different world, a naive and uneducated one, far from the harsh realities of the European professional scene. It woke me up: I was clean but already corrupted by the world I lived in.
At the same time, I was wobbling, melting down, becoming a problem. I demanded to be sent to Sydney as I was going stir-crazy in Brisbane. I argued that I’d be better off staying in the Olympic Village. It was a bad idea. When I got to the Village, I was even more manic. I was too excited and barely touched my bike. I chose not to ride in the road race as I had been training only for the time trial, which was three days later. I watched the road race, then that evening, when I couldn’t sleep, left the Village and went into the center of Sydney to the after-party. Obviously, everybody knew that I shouldn’t have been there, but nobody said anything. Looking back, I think it was quite obvious that I was a little unhinged. The time trial came and went, and I got fourteenth place—not exactly what was expected, but precisely what I merited. Afterward, I started a forty-eight-hour bender.
The next day, I met my mum, my dad, and some friends who had come to watch the Games, and had a drink with them. At one point, my dad took me outside to speak to me in private, telling me he was worried about me. I didn’t really understand what he was worried about. I recognized I was in a manic state, but I wasn’t going to tell him about the realities of the world I was living in.
The bender continued right through to the closing ceremony. I borrowed a loudspeaker and ended up on the Australian team bus to their post-Olympic party. At that time, I had more friends on the Aussie team than I did on the GB team, so being with them made sense. I didn’t sleep that night and wandered back to the Village the next morning to find the British team buses waiting and Jez Hunt and myself the only two athletes not on board. I ran and got my bags, but Jez decided he didn’t want to go back to the UK and didn’t get on the bus.
The European pro cyclists had made a bit of a name for themselves.
—
When I got back to England, I shut myself away at my mum’s house and didn’t get out of bed for twenty-four hours. I didn’t want to go back to Biarritz, and I didn’t want even to look at my bike. I’d turned my phone off and intended to keep it that way for a while. I couldn’t think about going to the World Road Championships, yet instead of telling the team, I just put my head in the sand and waited for them to find out through some other channel. I’d closed down. I’d pushed myself to the breaking point and was now in a depressed mood, one that would become increasingly familiar in the coming months.
Dad was so worried about me that he flew over to the UK from Hong Kong. It was a bit of a wasted trip for him, because after a couple of days I started to feel better and couldn’t really understand why I’d been so down in the first place. I didn’t know why I was so manic-depressive and I convinced my dad that I was fine, as I didn’t really know any better.
After more time in the UK, Biarritz, and then Hong Kong, far away from the world of cycling, I headed off to Australia in November to keep a promise I’d made to Stuey O’Grady. I’d told him, at both the Tour and the Olympics, that I would head down to Australia for a criterium in November, in a place called Noosa Heads.
Noosa had become a legendary party week, incorporating one of the world’s biggest triathlons and an hour-long circuit race in which the pros and local riders mixed it up. Unexpectedly, it was one of the most fun weeks of my life, as Stuey proved once again that he is in a different league when it comes to burning the candle at both ends.
Stuey is one of the greatest cyclists of his generation. His career to date spans five Olympics, and he has achieved success in most of the biggest races in cycling. During all that time he has always been the same ball of kinetic energy: a moody bastard at times, but one of the funniest at others. He is one of my most loyal friends, and we sealed our friendship in Noosa that week. We have been very close ever since, through the best and worst of times.
On the first night in Noosa, I met a girl called Shari. Within a week, we’d fallen for each other and become an item. Because of that, I stayed in Australia for two more blissful weeks. I had come to the conclusion that I needed somebody in my life, and Shari seemed just perfect to me. Until then I had been too focused, lacking the energy for anybody else. Selfishness had worked to a point, but although I didn’t see it at the time, my falling for Shari was directly linked to my increasing instability. Love is blind as they say—even when it’s selfish.
Late at night, 2000, Toulouse. Stuey O’Grady showing his undying love for me.
It wasn’t the perfect situation. Australia really did feel too far away from Europe, but all obstacles seemed surmountable. We started planning her first visit to Europe. It got me through the next couple of months of training. I rediscovered my drive and got down to business, putting my worries behind me.
I stayed in Biarritz on my own throughout Christmas, shutting down my social life and living like a hermit. To remind me that I had another life, I started sticking photos on my living room wall, and, over time, this turned into a massive mural. I enjoyed my monastic existence, watching the transition in my body as training took me over. It was hard, but as soon as I started to get some physical condition and could feel progress being made, I loved riding my bike again. It was hugely gratifying to see the dieting and training had such quantifiable results as my weight dropped and my power increased.
Alain Bondue and I had bonded a lot since my success at the Tour the previous year. Until that point, I had been seen as “difficult.” Unlike some of the other pros, I wasn’t very scared of authority and had been questioning him since day one of my professional career. Also, Alain spoke English, which ensured that I’d always had a closer relationship with him than with anybody else on the team’s staff.
We had history. We’d fallen out over his handling of Gaumont and Vandenbroucke, and then when he’d sent me to a race on crutches, but I really liked Alain and saw him as one of the smarter guys in the sport. He had found me the place on my amateur team in France; he’d been there when I’d first met with Guimard and also when I’d signed my first pro contract. So our relationship was closer than that of most riders and their general managers.
At the brief December team get-together we’d had a late-night drinking session and put all our differences behind us. After that night and following my success in the Tour, I’d become his golden boy. It also meant that I was now the main man in the team: I started the 2001 season as leader of Cofidis—then the biggest team in France.
My monastic existence paid off after New Year’s. At the January training camp, I was on a different level from everybody else and was able to ride away from the rest of the team. I would often get back to the hotel well ahead of the others. I wanted to be ahead of schedule with my training; Shari was arriving a few days later, and I was sure that things would fall by the wayside during her visit.
We had a great time together, although by the time she headed back, there were the first seeds of discontent. Things weren’t as perfect as they had been in Australia, even though my feelings for her were undiminished. But it was the first time I’d been in love, and, as someone would later wisely point out, maybe I was more in love with being in love than with the object of my affections.
By the time of my first race, the Tour of the Mediterranean, I’d lost my training camp condition. I finished dead last on the first stage, but my strongest memory of the race is of a conversation David Moncoutie and I shared with L’Équipier.
“Moncout” and I were rooming together, and one day L’Équipier was in our room chatting. He may have been an old-school cyclist, with a different ethical stance than us, but he was also good fun and an asset to have out on the road during a race. He knew everybody in the peloton and was a brilliant road captain.
We were chatting away, when L’Équipier paused and then said: “You two are incredible. You’re never going to dope, are you?”
Moncout and I looked at each other.
“No,” we responded almost in unison. “I don’t think we are.”
L’Équipier seemed genuinely impressed, as if it was a stance he admired but fundamentally couldn’t understand.
He was from a hard-core world where doping was simply part of the game. He was a good guy who took care of the lesser riders and was universally liked, but he inhabited that parallel universe. Nobody within our team ever asked direct questions—doping wasn’t even a point of discussion within the team. Clean or doped, the sport shrugged off all the accusations of malpractice; the omertà—the law of silence—was as strong as ever, and there was no stance taken on anti-doping within the team. There was nobody there to tell us that we were doing the right thing, that we should be strong and believe in ourselves.
In fact, there was no anti-doping support or leadership whatsoever. The UCI and the team bosses considered their job done because the riders had signed meaningless charters pledging not to dope. Meanwhile, the dopers carried on doing what they were doing, while the nondopers raced alongside them.
Yes, there was the longitudinal blood testing and, by 2001, an EPO test that apparently worked. But the word on the street was that EPO was out of the body within three days, so the test served little purpose because EPO was used in training before races—when we weren’t tested.
Cycling had cleaned up in some ways since 1998, but only the French had radically changed their mind-set, and that was out of fear of the real consequences that now existed. An anti-doping law had been passed making it a criminal offense to dope in France. Arrest was a real possibility if you failed a doping control or were in possession of banned products.
There were only two French teams, those managed by Roger Legeay and Marc Madiot, that had managed to shift their mentality right across even their international riders, and those were the same two teams that had acted immediately after the Festina affair. Cofidis lived in a gray area; the team had some clean riders and some doped riders.
After Guimard’s departure, Cofidis had lacked a proper boss, and Bondue and François Migraine effectively ran the team. Migraine was a lovely man, but he was an accountant at heart, and he saw the riders only as names that accumulated points, and races as events that offered points. He was a fan, and he was playing the ultimate game of manager.
Bondue, the firewall between Migraine and the team, was too concerned about maintaining the influence he had. On the ground we had no real direction or leadership. We were made up of two types of rider, fonctionnaires, who were simply looking to maintain their contract and renew, and mercenaries, foreign riders, signed to score UCI points, make their bonuses, and guarantee a future bigger contract. At Cofidis, almost all riders had a bonus system of some sort based on UCI points. We were all driven to look after ourselves.
We were held 100 percent responsible for our actions. This was made clear on many occasions and was in keeping with how the sport as a whole treated the riders. If a rider was caught doping, then the buck stopped immediately with him. He would be fired and disowned as the management of the team expressed shock, disgust, and disappointment, while his teammates would be surprised and appalled that he’d cheated them. The team held zero liability, just like the UCI and the major race organizers.
Although cycling may have appeared cleaner from the outside, it was essentially as corrupt as ever. Nothing was being done to help the nondopers, to encourage or support them. Even the clean riders like myself and Moncout knew how easy it was to cheat the tests.
You would take some time away from racing, travel to Spain—or maybe Italy, where it was easy to obtain EPO—and turn off your phone to avoid an out-of-competition anti-doping control. You’d dope for the necessary period of time and then come back to racing, having given your body enough time to rid itself of the traceable banned drugs.
You didn’t even need a doctor to do this. There were stories of EPO being sold over the counter in Spain and of riders, without guidance, just injecting themselves, basing their techniques on hearsay and tips from others. It was all still a mess.
When I told L’Équipier, with conviction, that I wasn’t going to dope, I surprised myself a little. Perhaps a part of me wasn’t sure anymore. Did I really still believe that I could hold out?
I avoided thinking about it too much. Everybody knew that Moncout and I were talented, and we were also known for being strong-willed and for doing things our way. It had taken us both a long time to embrace injectable recovery and we were both quite fragile, yet we had survived our first four years as professionals. The only encouragement we got on a regular basis was: “Putain, vous êtes des premiers propres, ça c’est sur!” Shit—you’re the first clean riders to finish, that’s for sure!
We stopped enjoying that after about the fourth time we heard it.
Moncoutie came from a very provincial area of France. His parents worked for the post office. That was probably where he’d have spent his working life if he hadn’t been so amazingly gifted on a bicycle, particularly when it came to climbing mountains.
He has a tousle of dark hair and a wide smile, and lives in his own world. Material possessions, and fashion, seemed to have no hold on him whatsoever. He wore the same team-issue sneakers for about three years. His great passion was cartography. Quizzed on most areas of France, he could cite road numbers, distances, and place names.
In many ways, David was a bit of a hippie. He renounced chemical drugs and ensured that everything he took was homeopathic. If he did get ill, which he did quite often, he would be urged to take antibiotics. He’d take one pill from the course and pronounce: “Ça suffit” (That’s enough). This, of course, is exactly what not to do with antibiotics, but there was no telling him. He was infuriating.
Moncoutie’s racing style was to sit right at the back of the peloton, waiting for the road to climb. Once the field thinned out, he was left at the front with the strongest. Physically, he was one of the best climbers in the world, and therefore something of a loner. That was where we differed. I had lots of ambition, an absurdly loyal sense of duty toward my teammates—and I’d always finish a course of antibiotics.
Perhaps it was because we were both talented and stubborn that we’d escaped doping. We were young, and we were able to survive and, on occasions, excel. We’d still not even reached our physical peaks, dope or no dope; we were considered works in progress.
Yet what it eventually came down to was the environment you were in and the personality you had. For some, doping was almost inevitable, while for others, it was simply never going to happen, even if every single rider around them doped.
When L’Équipier asked us the question, Moncoutie and I seemed untouchable. For Moncoutie, it was unthinkable. Yet deep down I was beginning to wonder why I still felt so strongly about not doping.
—
Shari’s next visit came during the Circuit de la Sarthe, a small, but prestigious four-day stage race in France. The time trial fell on the afternoon of the penultimate day. I won it convincingly and took the race leader’s jersey. Shari arrived that night, so for once I had somebody to give the presentation flowers to.
Her visit coincided with the hardest stage of the race, which included a demanding finishing circuit. Lance, although not in contention for the race overall, had made it known that it was a stage he wanted to win. Rather than being worried about how tough this was likely to make the stage, I was excited.
But there was a problem—our team wasn’t strong enough to control the peloton during the race. Because of this we had no option but to fall back on one of the conventions of the pro scene—we struck a deal with another team to help us keep it together until the finale, when I’d look after myself. Our team directeur looked for a team that had no chance of winning and that wouldn’t mind making a bit of cash in hand.
As it turned out, there was a Polish team racing there that was perfect for the job. This was, and remains, a fairly standard practice in professional cycling, and ad hoc alliances—sometimes as a favor, sometimes paid for—have long been commonplace. We relied on a financially induced alliance that day.
As I’d expected, all hell broke loose on the finishing circuit. The first time up the steep climb, I was at the front and scanned the crowd to see if Shari was there, cheering me on. I couldn’t see her anywhere and so went back to concentrating on the job in hand. I followed the attacks going off the front, but I was, as expected, isolated and had no teammates to protect my position.
Lance was using his team to make the race as hard as possible and whittle the lead group down before he made his decisive move. With two laps to go the attacks started going again, and as I saw everybody suffering, I realized that I was on a different level. One rider was a hundred or so meters ahead—deciding offense was the best form of defense in this precarious tactical situation, I put my head down and sprinted across the gap, leaving the others behind.
Easter 2001, Biarritz. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Harry Gibbings!
The lone escapee was Nicolas Vogondy, a rider I knew quite well as we’d turned pro in the same year. As I reached his shoulder, I told him: “Nico—on y va.”
Lance had his team chasing hard behind us, but we kept putting time into them. With a couple of kilometers to go, Nico asked if I was going to let him take the stage, a done thing if you’re in the race leader’s jersey. But this was the last stage, and I wanted to win. I wanted Shari to see me cross the line with my arms in the air, triumphant.
I won the sprint from Vogondy, taking the stage and the overall victory. After the finish, I rolled back to the team bus, amid much handshaking and backslapping, proud as hell of a big win. More than anything I wanted to see Shari, but I still couldn’t find her. I assumed she was somewhere in the finish area and asked the soigneur.
“Shari?” He shrugged as he wiped the dirt from my face. “She’s gone for a look around the town.”
I was devastated. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, that it was cool she wasn’t interested in my racing, that I had no right to expect her to hang around at the finish line, but I was hurt.
After the podium presentation, I showered at a friend’s house, and that was when I realized how upset I really was. I just stood in the shower, letting the water wash over me. Finally, we got in the car and began driving down to Biarritz. Pissed off and confused, I barely said a word the whole way.
Harry was waiting in Biarritz, and we partied for most of the weekend, finally grinding to a halt late on Sunday night. On the Monday, I flew out to compete in Paris–Camembert, a one-day race in northern France, but I didn’t get to the hotel until late that evening. At the start of the race I felt terrible, but as it went on I got better and better.
Once again there was a hard finishing circuit, and before long there were only about twenty riders left. Moncoutie and I started attacking one after the other, taking it in turns to exhaust them. I kept attacking, then getting caught and dropped, then chasing back and attacking once more. My last chase back came with about 5 kilometers to go, but Frenchman Laurent Brochard was already clear and heading for victory. The rest of us were racing for second.
I looked around the group, picked Scott Sunderland as the fastest guy, and glued myself to his back wheel. It turned out to be a good call. Scott was the fastest, and gave me such a good lead out that I came around him in the sprint and took second. I won a ton of Camembert cheese and a shitload of admiration from Harry.
By the Tour of Picardie, two weeks later, Shari had returned to Australia. We were having problems again, and I was on the phone arguing with her even before the start of the first stage. I was so angry when I got to the start that I was first to attack on a long, flat, and windy stage—hardly the best tactic, yet my anger made it work.
I was off the front of the bunch all day with different moves and finally finished third on the stage. Never before had I raced in an angry mood, and I couldn’t believe how powerful it was. Now I understood why Lance used anger so effectively and why he hated the people he had to beat at the Tour. But I’m not very good at being angry—it wasn’t something that I was able to tap into at will.
More and more, I was proving myself as the leader of the team. I was a presence in all the races I started, but I was getting so wrapped up in what I was doing, and the team had become so dependent on my scoring points, that I hadn’t thought about taking it easy and peaking for the Tour.
I was going to every race and slaughtering myself. I needed somebody to tell me to take it easy, to tell me when to back off. After the Tour of Picardie, I rested for a few days, and then planned a big training block before my final pre–Tour de France racing program.
That training block was horrible. I did three six-hour days but felt rotten and had no idea how, only a couple of weeks earlier, I’d been so strong. But convinced I’d rested enough, I kept on training.
My only goal in my next race, the Bicicleta Vasca stage race, was to win the time trial. Once again, Lance was there, and he was aiming for the time trial as well. I wasn’t too confident as I’d suffered in the previous day’s mountain stage, yet I won, beating him into second place. I seemed to be the only person surprised by this result, and it was clear that I was no longer the young hopeful. Results were expected of me now—surprises were a thing of the past.
The classic Tour de France preparation race, the Dauphiné Libéré, in the mountainous southeast of France, came next. Although I’d felt terrible in training since finishing the Bicicleta Vasca a week earlier, I hoped it was simply a bad patch that I’d push through. The first indications at Dauphiné were that this was the case. After three days, there was a stage that climbed the less famous northern side of Mont Ventoux. I was surprised to find myself only a few hundred meters behind the front few riders as we went over the summit.
Christophe Moreau and I were riding together, and we attacked the descent like complete lunatics, catching up with the front group well before we got to the bottom of the mountain. On the road to the finish, more riders came together, but I won the sprint for third on the stage, which made me a contender. The next day’s stage was a 50-kilometer flat time trial. It was assumed that I’d win and take the leader’s jersey.
Sure enough, I took the leader’s jersey, but I was beaten into second place by Jonathan Vaughters, an American rider. Jonathan was only a couple of seconds in front of me, while the eventual GC winner Christophe Moreau was in fourth place, almost a minute farther behind. I was so tired on finishing that I wanted to go to sleep (in hindsight, not a good sign), but my result on the Ventoux and in the time trial had made me the man to beat for the general classification. It appeared I was coming of age.
Just twenty-four hours later, those illusions were shattered. Drained and completely empty, I was one of the first to drop behind on the day’s final climb. It was humiliating, as I had almost the entire Cofidis team riding on the front of the peloton, yet I could not even stay with the bunch.
I tried to act unbothered as the race convoy passed me, although I didn’t really understand what was going on. A few kilometers farther, I was immensely relieved to see a similarly wrecked Jonathan Vaughters crawling up the road ahead of me. Obviously, we’d gone a little deeper than most in the previous day’s time trial and failed to recover.
Two days later, unable to continue and totally exhausted, I quit the race. Yet instead of being rested in an attempt to recover for the looming Tour de France, it was decided that it would be better if I kept racing. So five days later, I was sent to the Route du Sud. I didn’t finish, getting unceremoniously dropped on the final mountain stage in what was my fifty-eighth day of racing since February.
I was wrecked and needed total rest, but I knew I stood little chance of recovering for the Tour. All I could do was rest up and gamble that I’d freshen up enough to come good for the Tour prologue.
The Tour’s Grand Départ was in Dunkirk, home ground for Cofidis, as their company headquarters was in nearby Lille. All the expectations were of my repeating my success of the previous year. Deep down, I knew I just didn’t have the condition. I was nervous and lacking confidence, and I hadn’t felt good in training for weeks. I couldn’t have been further from the mental state I’d been in a year before. I wasn’t ready, and yet I was pretending to everybody that I was.
Shari had arrived from Australia, and, in an attempt to keep me calmer and more relaxed, she came up to Lille with me. This backfired as I became even more stressed, thinking I had to look after her. I was resentful for not having been more assertive and doing what I wanted to do, which was to rest and not go to the Route du Sud.
But it was the same old scenario—I was blaming the team for not having seen what was happening and telling me to rest and relax. This had become a vicious circle, as I’d then blame myself for being so easily manipulated by the team’s needs. Behind my confident facade, I was in turmoil, feeling angry, scared, and desperate.
I did everything right for the Tour’s prologue. I recce’d the course more than anybody else, visualized and strategized my race, and made sure everything was perfect with my equipment. I was going to lose time on the fast sections, as my lack of top form simply wouldn’t allow me to develop the power I needed to go at the necessary speed. It wasn’t a very physically demanding course, and this meant my good aerodynamics and bike handling would compensate for what I lacked physically. But I had only one choice if I wanted to win: I had to take risks in the corners.
It was the first time Harry had ever sat in the team car and followed me in a time trial. I didn’t tell him beforehand what my tactic was—although I had discussed it with the team’s directeurs—so when I was literally touching barriers and clipping curbs, he began to regret his decision to follow. It was quite clear that I was on the ragged edge. Sure enough, on the last corner, I came crashing down at speed.
My whole left side was ripped to pieces, with deep cuts and grazes, bruising and muscle damage. I got up to finish, and immediately after I wheeled across the line I was fairly upbeat about what had happened—after all, I’d known what the risks were. But I hadn’t thought about the consequences.
Falling off in a time trial is often bad. They are high-speed crashes and, more often than not, cause much more damage than a crash in the peloton, where there is a little bit of warning, braking time, and some cushioning. But I’d never fallen off in a time trial before, and the next ten days were to prove what a dire mistake I’d made.
With so much damage to one side, sleeping was nigh on impossible without sleeping pills. It was not a good way to begin the Tour de France, especially considering I was already in a state of fatigue. Now I was starting the Tour’s road stages hoping only to survive. I no longer had to live with expectations or pressure.
The team, oblivious to my physical and mental state, told the media that I’d probably take a few days to recover from my injuries then I’d be able to fight for a stage win in the second half of the race. Meanwhile, the realization of what I’d got myself into was hitting home. I was starting the hardest bike race in the world tired and injured. I knew the team would not send me home or tell me, “Do your best and don’t worry.” Yet that was all I wanted to hear.
As the days went by, my condition got worse. By the fifth stage, I was the “lanterne rouge,” or last man in the classification, almost an hour behind the yellow jersey. By the end of the first week it was quite clear that I wasn’t getting better, although the team still chose to ignore this. I had never suffered so much in a race, and all I wanted was for it to be over. Yet the team kept telling me to hang on and that eventually I’d come good.
Funnily enough, if they’d just used a little reverse psychology on me, I’d have been much better, because I felt as if none of them understood what I was going through.
If I’d been told: “David, we know how much you’re suffering, so if you want to stop, then we will completely support you.” If they had said that, then I might have found a renewed desire to fight on.
The reality was that that wasn’t going to happen, because if I went home, the team stood little chance of winning a stage. The Tour had evolved into a complete disaster for Cofidis, the only ray of light being Andrei Kivilev’s high placing in the overall classification.
As the race arrived in the Alps, it was clear that I was going to be in for a tough time. Bondue and another manager came and saw me after another torrid day, and we discussed how I was doing and also what awaited me. Bondue knew that Shari was in Biarritz, and he asked if I’d like the team to fly her in so she’d be waiting in the Alps.
At the time, this was unheard of behavior from a pro team, as wives and girlfriends were still not really welcome. I thanked Alain and called Shari to ask if she’d like to come to the race. But she didn’t want to, reasoning that she didn’t want to watch me suffer as she’d already lived through the previous nine days with me. She was amazed I hadn’t already been sent home, and I don’t think she felt like being used as a pawn by the team. In a way, I understood, but I was still disappointed, and her decision to stay away weakened my resistance to quitting.
The next day’s stage was from Aix-les-Bains to Alpe d’Huez. I started knowing I wasn’t going to be able to finish. It was simply beyond me, and any fight I had left was gone. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Tour anymore. I’d grown to hate the suffering and the humiliation of always finishing so far behind the front of the race. Worst of all, I’d given up on my team sending me home or telling me they understood.
I’d let the team down, and, although there was a part of me that thought they should have been more caring, I also finally accepted I was a professional. It was my job to race; they weren’t my family, they weren’t my friends. They didn’t worry about me—I was paid to do a job. It was my responsibility to fulfill that expectation and to get results.
A few kilometers from the foot of the Col de la Madeleine, I said my good-byes. I battled my way to the front so at least I’d actually be starting the climb at the head of the peloton and not be seen to be throwing the towel in so obviously. I searched out Lance.
I spotted him and rode up alongside.
“Lance—I’m out,” I told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Shit, Dave,” he said. Then he looked at me. “You should have gone days ago, though. You all right …?”
“Yeah, just fucking over it. Good luck for today.”
“Don’t need luck, Dave! It’s a pity you’re not going to see it—I’m gonna destroy it.” He looked across and smiled. There wasn’t even the tiniest hint of doubt or arrogance in what he said: it was merely a statement of fact.
And he did destroy it—bluffing that he was struggling all the way to the bottom of the Alpe, before unleashing a shockingly vicious acceleration that left his closest rival Jan Ullrich stunned. It was classic Lance.
Meanwhile, far behind, I found myself alone on the Madeleine, a horrible 25-kilometer climb. That’s a long way on your own, as last man on the road in the Tour de France. I had a whole flotilla following me—team car, police escort, voiture balai, recovery truck, photographer, TV motorbike, and commissaire. It was a death march, and they were the hovering vultures. I made it over the summit and then pulled over at the side of the road, a few kilometers into the descent.
The flotilla pulled over with me, and the TV cameras and photographers got the images they were waiting for—a broken and distressed team leader having his race number removed before shamefully climbing into the voiture balai. It was about the most soul-destroying experience a cyclist can have. This was the Tour, the race you’re not supposed to give up.
I didn’t have to spend too long in the voiture balai. Jacky Dubois, one of our soigneurs, was waiting at the roadside in a team car to pick me up and take me back to the hotel in a slightly more dignified manner. But our hotel was at the finish on the Alpe, and we had to drive up the mountain behind the race.
At times, we were going so slowly through the crowds that people knocked on the window and called my name.
“Putain, c’est Millar …? Il a abandonné …?!” Shit, it’s Millar …? He’s given up …?!
After a while I just slid down into my seat and pretended to be asleep. Ahead of us, Lance obliterated the race, just as he had promised.
It was very quiet at the hotel, as if there had been a death in the family. When you have quit the Tour, nobody really knows what to say or do. I went to my room, turned on my phone, and started calling the people who mattered. My family and friends were all pleased it was over, as I had genuinely started to lose the plot in the previous days. While it was a massive relief, there was now also a gaping hole in my confidence. Everything I’d previously achieved meant nothing; all I was now was a pro rider who couldn’t finish the Tour de France.
The Alpe is pretty quiet on the evening after a Tour stage. The sun eventually drops behind the peaks, and there’s a chill in the air. The thousands camped out on the mountainside head down the descent, the brake lights of camper vans and people carriers illuminating the twilight. All that’s left is the race convoy, the clearing-up process, and some out-of-season hotels filled with weary cyclists.
Later that evening, the manager who’d been with Bondue after my torrid day in the Alps—I’ll call him “le Boss”—came to my room and asked if I’d like to talk. I was sharing with another rider, so we left to find somewhere quieter. We ended up in L’Équipier’s room. It was good to see him. He gave me a big hug, and I collapsed wearily onto the spare bed. It was just le Boss, L’Équipier, and me.
“Are you okay?” le Boss asked me.
“I’m disappointed,” I said, “but I just couldn’t do it anymore. There’s no way I’d be winning any stages in the final week. As soon as we started climbing the Madeleine I knew it was over. The last ten days have been so fucking hard—too hard.”
“The most important thing now is that you recover. Go home, see Shari, relax, and allow yourself to get better,” he said.
L’Équipier backed him up.
“David, there’s still a lot of racing left in the season; you’ll be fine, don’t be too disappointed. You’re talented—you just have to find yourself another goal now. That’s why we’ve been talking about the Vuelta.”
I was interested in the prospect of racing in the Spanish national tour. “That would be perfect,” I said. “I just need some rest now—I’ve been tired since May. I’m sure if I rest I’ll come back stronger than ever.”
“Well, we weren’t too sure about the Vuelta, but the race organizer will take us if you go,” le Boss added. “They seem very keen on having you lead the team there.”
I perked up. “Really? There’s a prologue there, isn’t there?”
“Yes, there is. In fact, it’s a time trial.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Thirteen kilometers, I think. That’s right, isn’t it?”
He turned to L’Équipier, who nodded: “Yeah, better for David than a prologue.”
“That’s perfect. So what races would I do in August? I’ll need a stage race. That’s the only way I can get good enough.”
“Well, we’ve had a look,” the manager continued, “and think maybe the Tour of the Wallonne Region and the Tour of Denmark. So you’d then have about three weeks till the Vuelta.”
“That’s quite a long time,” I said. “Are there no more races?”
“We thought you could go to Italy, stay with …” He turned and gestured to L’Équipier. “Stay at his place there. Get out of Biarritz in August.” There was a pause. “That would allow you to … prepare properly.”
Initially, I was a little angry that he suggested I get out of Biarritz, as if I couldn’t be trusted to behave. I wasn’t really in a position to fight, though, as all I was interested in was getting back to my best. What was now going through my head was the phrase le Boss had used: prepare properly.
I knew what that meant.
I looked across at L’Équipier.
“It will be perfect for you, David,” he said. “You’ll be part of the family—beautiful home-cooked Italian food, local dishes, amazing training, and there’s a guest room so you’ll have your privacy. We’ll make sure you start the Vuelta in the best possible condition. Nobody will be able to beat you in Spain.”
“So I wouldn’t race after Denmark?” I asked.
I thought the response to this would be a clear indication of what was going on, because normally the team would want me racing as much as possible before a major objective. But if I was going to be doping—taking EPO—then that would mean not racing in order to avoid anti-doping controls.
“No,” le Boss said. “You’d finish your racing in Denmark, then the two of you would recover and train. You won’t need to race, it’s better you arrive fresh.”
It was clear to me that I had understood the meaning of prepare properly.
As I took it all in, something shifted in me. I was being asked to go to Italy to take EPO. I would then go and win the Vuelta prologue, thus redeeming the team with the sponsor. It boiled down to professionalism.
I was weary—too weary to fight anymore. All that resistance—all the fighting I’d been doing, all the idealism that at first came so naturally and had slowly grown into a futile and isolating stance—was now behind me.
I had done well—bloody well—as a clean rider. I had stood my ground, done my bit, but now it was out of my hands. The team needed me to accept my obligations, and now it all made sense. The tired young dreamer had been waiting for this moment. The background noise of the struggle to fight doping finally subsided. I opened my mind and let it in.
I walked into that hotel room an anti-doper; I walked out of it a seasoned professional ready to do what was required of me. There was no torment or confusion in my mind. I now knew that in a few weeks I would be doping for the first time. It felt as if a massive burden had been lifted off my shoulders. I was now a professional through and through, with bigger responsibilities than my own personal belief system.
I headed back to Biarritz. Shari, my sister, and some other friends were there. They’d been planning on following me through the Pyrenees, but instead we just hung out and I tried to fix myself.
My body was a wreck. I had bronchitis and an upset stomach, and some of my injuries from the crash in Dunkirk had still not healed. I spent ten days off the bike and didn’t watch the Tour once. Nor did I tell anybody about the decision I’d made. There was never any question of sharing it.