Despite the problems we’d been having, I spent the winter of 2001 with Shari, in Queensland, in a rented house in Noosa. After everything that had happened during the season, I was looking for an escape. It became a winter of excess and indulgence, during which I lost my way.
I partied far too hard in Australia, and there was nobody to blame but me. During one particularly late night, I asked Shari to marry me. I had been thinking about it for a couple of months and had even had a ring made in Biarritz. I proposed to her one night when sleep proved impossible and when, for once, we were alone. It wasn’t romantic, but I believed that it was what I wanted to do. Amazingly, she said yes to my proposal, and we became engaged. Somehow, I thought marrying her would stop the bad times and leave only the good.
I had gone to Australia hoping to come to terms with the decisions I’d made, but instead, I became more isolated and mired in denial. Even if at times I wanted to, I couldn’t tell people I doped. Perhaps they would have understood, but I didn’t want to share because I was ashamed. As a successful athlete, I was held in some regard, which made me feel even more ashamed. My guilt over the deception crowded in on me, so then I’d launch into another bender, in a desperate effort to forget what I’d done.
My recklessness and excesses alienated most of the people I’d become friends with—and then Shari and I broke up. I returned to Europe in early January a shadow of myself. I was still at racing weight, even though I hadn’t touched my bike since the World Championships in Portugal, and I was so tired from sleep deprivation and emotional turmoil that I could barely walk between my flights when I transferred in Hong Kong.
As I sat there, between lounges, lost in transit, I realized that I blamed cycling for the mess I was in. I should have been more than a little concerned about the fact I was heading to our January training camp with no kilometers in my legs at all, yet I didn’t give a shit. I had no desire to ride my bike at all.
—
Because I’d become team leader, I was rarely, if ever, taken to task. So when we arrived in the south of France for the training camp, and I was doing only short rides because I was too tired to do more, it was accepted without discussion. By the third day, I was barely getting out of bed, and it became apparent that I was suffering from more than just jet lag.
After a series of blood tests, I was diagnosed with glandular fever. Told to rest, I headed back to London briefly and then returned to Biarritz. I’d spent only a few days there in the previous six months, but when I got back, it felt like home. Maybe the trip to Australia had opened my eyes, but I decided that after all the years as a nomad, Biarritz was a good place to put down roots. So I started looking for a house.
I had finished in the top fifteen riders in the 2001 world rankings, which had massively boosted my bonus scheme and placed me in one of the highest bonus brackets. I received a lump sum on December 31, 2001, and then would receive a major pay raise for 2002. I had more money in my French bank account than I’d ever had before.
My image contract was paid into Luxembourg, so I gave the Cofidis contact in Luxembourg a call and asked if they’d received my 2001 bonus. I was stunned to be told that I had been sent close to €400,000.
Cofidis had first started paying me through their Luxembourg holding company in 2000, but I had not known what to do with it. I repeatedly contacted IMG (who were supposed to be managing my financial affairs), yet IMG repeatedly failed to do anything with the funds. Eventually, I bypassed IMG and then opened a bank account. But because IMG had me sign my image contract as David Millar, it was fairly pointless. In order for it to serve any purpose, a holding company should have been created and been the beneficiary of the image contract.
The image contract, a ploy used a lot in sport, is really a tax-avoidance trick. Image contracts escape taxation through canny use of offshore banking. The culture that permeated cycling considered it a schoolboy error for a high-earning professional athlete to be taxed on his full income. That is what you’re told—by managers, fellow riders, accountants, and agents—so it’s hard not to start thinking it’s your right as a pro athlete to be taxed minimally.
I had trusted IMG to organize my affairs, just as Marc Biver had told me they would, yet I felt they effectively washed their hands of me the moment they had finished negotiating my contract. Nonetheless, I was contracted to pay them 10 percent of my principal contract and 20 percent of all other earnings (before tax) until December 2003. Now I understood why Biver had been encouraging me to win more points. After all, he received a percentage of everything I earned. He was the stereotypical cold-blooded sports agent. It seemed to me that he had completely played me.
Later, I was able to get out of my IMG contract. A London lawyer, Mike Townley, won the case, but IMG fought so hard that the decision was accepted only after they had taken it to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. I think I am one of the only athletes ever to win a case against IMG, and that is thanks to the skills of Mike Townley.
—
House hunting in Biarritz was fun. I looked at a few places, including Coco Chanel’s first atelier, a beautiful old apartment in the center of town. It wasn’t very practical, but it appealed deeply to the dreamer in me, and I adored the fact that she had started her fashion house within those walls. That was how I imagined things would be—I’d be a former Tour de France cyclist living in Chanel’s apartment in Biarritz.
Eventually, I saw reason and let go of the Chanel dream. Instead, I bought one of the oldest villas in the town, beautiful but derelict. It still had its original fin de siècle electrical fittings. I found a copy of a 1953 Vogue in the basement. I loved it.
I was still recovering from my illness, but I caught up with old friends in Biarritz and then made some new ones. Before long we’d created our own little group. There was Sabine, who with her mother owned the Ventilo Caffé; Loïc, a true Marseillaise who loved surfing so much he had moved to Biarritz and taken his flooring business with him; and Olivier, the owner of a restaurant called Le Lodge.
There was also Alain, a true Parisian who managed the Hermès shop in town. Alain had grown up in one of the less salubrious arondissements in Paris, but had started working at Hermès as a teenager. He had worked his way up to become head of the made-to-order section in the flagship Saint-Honoré store, before coming down to manage the shop in Biarritz.
We’d sit drinking coffee on the Grand Plage, and he’d occasionally say: “You see that woman …? Her bag’s worth €40,000.” Neither of us understood why somebody would buy such a bag, yet he’d help create much of the demand.
And there was also a young Australian cyclist called Benny Johnson, whom I’d got on with really well during my time in Noosa. He became my protégé and close friend. I wanted him to have somebody to guide him through the shit, even while I was up to my neck in it.
I was still ill, but after a month in Biarritz I decided it was time to get back to cycling. I needed a coach—somebody who could give me a program to adhere to. I’d been introduced to sports doctor Jesús Losa at the World Championships, although at the time and in subsequent weeks I hadn’t really thought much more about him.
Jesús worked for another professional cycling team, Euskaltel. It wasn’t difficult to find his number through a carefully chosen Spanish pro whom I knew, and, after speaking to him, we decided that I would go down to his offices in Valladolid to do physiological testing as well as blood tests.
Jesús was a cool guy, typically Spanish, warm and affable. He was married with two kids and trained athletes from all sports, although his preferred clientele was from cycling. Although he was the official doctor and coach for Euskaltel, he was allowed to keep his personal client base, and this included a certain number of pro cyclists.
At that first meeting in his lab, I underwent the usual physiological tests, to establish a baseline of my fitness and “engine” size. Given that I had been diagnosed with glandular fever, I was concerned, but Jesús seemed absolutely convinced there were no issues. We discussed training at length, and it was clear that he had an in-depth knowledge of sports science and pro cycling. Then I brought up the subject of doping.
I wanted to let my body get back to its top level on its own without drugs. More importantly, I wanted to win a road stage at the Tour de France clean. It was a strange attitude to have—after all, I wouldn’t have been having a secret meeting with a Spanish sports doctor unless there was a desire to dope (even if, back then, doping athletes wasn’t a criminal offense in Spain). Yet that first meeting revolved around my telling him I didn’t want to dope—at least not for the time being.
At that time, I didn’t consider myself a fully fledged doper. Yes, I had used it to great effect, but I didn’t yet see myself as one of them. I didn’t feel like I really needed it—maybe I’d made a mistake the year before. So I told Jesús that I would hold off doping for as long as possible. I had to prove I could win once again at the top level without drugs. I was definitely confused.
The practical side of the relationship was quite simple. I would pay him €12,000 a year for his coaching and expertise; any medical supplies I needed—legal or otherwise—I would pay for separately at the end of the year, in addition to the bonuses that Jesús had earned depending on the number of UCI points I had won.
The bonus system was lucrative for him and, I hoped, would keep him motivated. The downside to the bonus system was that it meant it was in his interest that I dope. I hadn’t really thought about that at the time; he seemed like a really good guy who understood my motivations. The thought of his encouraging me to dope seemed ridiculous.
When I got home, I put my head down and, with about six weeks before my first race, the Tour of Romandie, started training. By then, Jesús and I had formed a strong working relationship. His training was advanced and much harder than I was used to. With all of it based around power output and heart rate, I grew used to staring at the computer on my handlebars. Our disregard for my glandular fever had paid off, as I had not suffered once from any more symptoms.
The week after Romandie, I went to a weekend race near Madrid, the Clasica A Alcobendas. The format was similar to the Criterium International race in France in that there was a fairly straightforward road stage and then a mountain stage and time trial. I was surprised to be one of the strongest on the mountain stage, attacking on the final mountain to Navacerrada and dropping some of the best Spanish climbers.
My teammate David Moncoutie took the stage, and I advised him so effectively on time-trialing techniques that he managed to hold on to the leader’s jersey and beat me into second place overall. I like to think that I remain very generous when it comes to advising my teammates on time trialing.
The result gave Jesús and me confidence in what I could achieve. Although Jesús wanted me to prepare for the Tour de France on EPO, I decided I would use it only for the Vuelta. I felt like everybody saw me only as a time trialist, but, as a rider, I was so much more than that. But I had to prove it by winning a road stage at the Tour clean. If I won doped, then it meant nothing, I was very clear on that.
We decided I would go to altitude before the Dauphiné and prepare for the Tour the natural way. So I returned to Navacerrada, close to Jesús and also where many of the Spanish riders trained. It was miserable though, as one of my sporadic bouts of self-doubt settled on me.
Everything caught up with me: the concentrated block of training and racing in the previous months, my lack of Spanish and the isolation I felt being alone. I was cripplingly demoralized and could barely get out of bed. Worse, no matter which way I came back to the hotel, I faced a 12-kilometer climb at the end of each training ride.
One day, a spent force, I simply stopped at the side of the road and waited to hitch my way back up. But no vehicles passed for an hour, as if the gods were playing with me. Eventually, I crawled back up to the hotel, went up to my room, and climbed into bed in my cycling gear. I lay there for hours. I texted Jesús and told him I couldn’t do it anymore, that everything was shutting down.
Without telling me he was coming, he drove up to the hotel that evening and we had dinner together. His gesture meant so much to me. It was wonderful to have company—he explained that he wasn’t surprised I was feeling down.
“I work with so many athletes,” he said, “but it’s the guys like you that I like working with the most. You are so intense and I get better feedback from you than anybody else. But you can’t be like that all the time—you’re going to have times like this, when you burn out. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it—it’s just the way you are. You can’t hit the highs that you do, and be as intense as you are, without having these lows.”
Nobody had ever said that before—it made a lot of sense to me. He told me to go home the next day and have some rest, and to forget about the altitude training. His visit made our relationship even closer. For the first time, it felt like I had a coach who understood not only my physical strengths but also the psychological characteristics that had always left me in such deep holes.
Even so, I remained erratic. Typically, after resting, I jumped in at the deep end and went on a big ride, hoping to get an understanding of my form. But 70 kilometers from home I simply couldn’t go on. I spent half an hour searching for a taxi before I found one that would take me back to Biarritz. It was a little embarrassing explaining to the taxi driver that I was racing in the Tour de France in four weeks time, yet couldn’t ride home.
After the Dauphiné Libéré and the British National Road Race Championships, I traveled to Luxembourg for the Tour, head firmly screwed back on. I’d hooked up with Bridget Carter while I’d been back in England. We’d gone to the same primary school, and I’d had a crush on her when I’d been at Aylesbury Grammar. She’d become an airline pilot; I was about to ride the Tour de France: we hit it off immediately.
I took fourth in the Tour prologue, which, in hindsight, was a remarkable performance on what was a physically demanding course, yet I was still disappointed. So I set my mind on winning the road stage I so wanted. A few days later, as I sat studying the Tour’s road book, after the finish to Plateau de Beille, I realized that the next day’s stage, from Lavelanet to Béziers, was my opportunity.
The next morning, at the team meeting, we were asked if any of us were keen on going for the stage. I immediately said that I wanted to win it. Bondue smiled at that. “Well, that’s a done deal—shall we sign on the dotted line now?”
It was the first real transition stage, taking us from the Pyrenees across the Midi. It was also one of my best days on a bike. I led from start to finish, racing in a break with French star Laurent Jalabert, one of my idols and riding his final Tour.
Laurent was wearing the climber’s polka-dot jersey and had already been on the attack on his own in the two previous stages, so it was absolute madness that he was attacking again. Yet it was as if he was squeezing the last drops out of his career, and the French public loved him for it.
I could see he was tired, so I helped him win those first few mountain sprints of the day, feeling honored to be able to do what little I could to make sure he rode into Paris with the mountains jersey still on his shoulders.
After we’d exited the Pyrenees, it became a flat race to the finish, with fourteen riders in the breakaway, battling for the win. Tactically, it was going to be a tricky finale. I had no teammates with me and the run-in was not physically challenging: I knew I would have to play my cards right if I wanted to win.
Fifty kilometers from Béziers, Jalabert moved alongside me. “You need to stop making it look so easy,” he said. “Everybody is going to be watching you.”
“Really …?” I said, taken aback by what he’d said. “And you, Laurent—will you be watching me?”
He smiled and said: “The opposite, David.” Now I knew that he would repay my help.
On the course profile, there was one tiny climb, about 20 kilometers from the finish. The rest of the run-in to Béziers was pan flat. I knew I had to attack on that hill, but I didn’t know if it would work or not.
As we began the climb, I drifted to the back of the group and watched. Sure enough, the attacks came, and, before long, Jalabert made his move, attacking ferociously hard.
Being the classy rider he was, everybody panicked and chased after him, but he just kept going with the group desperately hanging on to his back wheel. Immediately, I realized what he was doing. I knew that the second he relented, his exhausted pursuers would sit up to catch their breath. That would be my moment.
As he finally eased up and the others breathed a sigh of relief, I launched myself as hard as I possibly could down the left-hand side of the road. I didn’t look back over my shoulder until I’d been going for about half a minute, but when I did, I saw there were only four riders left with me.
What I saw told me I was up against it, as three of them—Michael Boogerd, Laurent Brochard, and David Exteberria—happened to be among the world’s best riders. All were proven winners.
But none of that mattered. I was too good, too collected, too sure of my own strength for any of them. There is a photo of me crossing the line in Béziers that will always be one of my favorites. The photographer had climbed up onto scaffolding adjacent to the finish line and caught the moment of victory. It captures exactly how I felt: invincible.
I’d just killed some of the best riders in the world—and I was clean. I’d taken nothing—no EPO, no cortisone, no testosterone, no painkillers, no caffeine. I had justified to myself that I was a great rider without drugs—yet perversely given myself the green light to dope again.
I’d proved what I could do clean—how much more could I do if I was doped?
—
Cofidis had nothing booked to celebrate the end of the Tour that year, no restaurant or nightclub. So, in my new moneyed manner, I hosted the team at a restaurant in Paris. A lot of my friends were there, including new girlfriend Bridget. By coincidence, Team SKY hosted its post-Tour debut dinner at the same restaurant eight years later.
I was scheduled to go to the Tour of Denmark after the Tour, but my mind had turned toward the Vuelta—and renewing my acquaintance with Jesús. That entailed a return to Navacerrada and tackling an epic three-week training camp, fueled by EPO, testosterone patches, and Italian injectable recovery products. The hotel owners, who did everything they could to take care of whichever athletes stayed with them, had it all stored in their fridge in a sealed polystyrene box.
Once again, I returned to a monastic existence. My phone was switched off for most of the time, and the distance grew between myself and Bridget. I withdrew from the world as soon as I began to dope and became a different person, insular and focused. This latest program was nothing like the first time in Tuscany the year before. Now I was cold and calculating.
I didn’t use EPO at first, as I allowed my body to react naturally to altitude before provoking it artificially. I wasn’t doing much training beyond riding on the little plateau that was only a few kilometers long.
Jesús had given me training plans with codes on them, according to the drugs I would be taking, when they had to be taken, and in what quantities, so my days were very structured.
There was a combination of EPO, testosterone pills, and, after a week, one normal dose of cortisone followed by weekly micro-doses. On top of this were the legal injections for vitamins, iron, antioxidants and, on occasions, amino acids and glucose. Before long, I was injecting at least once a day. If I hadn’t felt like a doper before then, now there was no doubt.
The longer this went on, the more injections and pills I took, the deeper I got into it, the more I felt I had to perform. There was no longer any thought of fun or enjoyment—it was completely professional now. I had bought into the belief that doping was the only way of being a player in a Grand Tour. That’s what the program was all about: seeing if I could manage it in the Vuelta, and if I could, who knew—then maybe I could also do it at the Tour.
By the time I returned to Biarritz, I was lighter than I’d ever been in my professional career and the same weight I’d been when I was eighteen. Jesús and I were sure this was the ticket to success—we were following the old Michele Ferrari adage of losing weight, increasing power—and then going faster. The problem was that I’d lost too much weight, and with it, the power I needed to go fast. I had become obsessive. I wasn’t eating enough, and I was stressed. I was trying too hard. I wanted it too much, and I had taken it too far.
The Vuelta didn’t go as planned. I was still holding on to a top-ten place as the race entered the final week, but it was clear that I wasn’t at my best. Because of what I’d done to prepare for the race, I kept pushing on and not throwing in the towel. It would have been totally unacceptable for me to have doped and failed. That wasn’t an option: mentally, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with the consequences of that.
It would mean I’d have to face the fact that it wasn’t just my prior refusal to dope that was stopping me from being the most successful rider I could be. I’d have to acknowledge that maybe there were other characteristics preventing me from achieving the success I craved. I didn’t want to know what they were.
I started the key stage, climbing the vicious Angliru, in this confused state of mind. The Angliru is in Asturias in northwest Spain and had been raced on only once before. It was reputed to be perhaps the hardest climb that any bike race had ever gone up, a road so steep that cars could barely make it up there. In just a few seasons, it had become the most feared summit finish in the sport.
But the forecast wasn’t good and before the start, “Chechu” Rubiera, who was from Asturias, was telling all the teams that if it rained we should strike. The roads in the region were covered in coal dust from the local mines and could be treacherously slippery in the rain.
There were two approaches to the foot of the Angliru. One took the main valley road, which Chechu said would be quite safe; the other climbed over one mountain then dropped down the other side of the valley to the foot of the Angliru.
This was the route the Vuelta organizers had taken the previous time they had used the mountain. It had rained and there had been crashes everywhere, forcing some of the main contenders out of the race with broken bones. Instead of learning from this, the race organization had decided, recklessly, to use the same approach. It was clear they wanted crashes, and they wanted spectacle. We all agreed we would call a truce to the racing if it rained. They were empty words. When it started to rain, we rode even faster.
The roads were like an ice rink. There was a series of crashes on the descent toward the Angliru, and I was involved in the first of these. I got up without serious injury, although my left side had been ripped, but on the false flat leading to the foot of the Angliru my wheels disappeared from under me and I went down again, this time on my right side. It was a farce. I was one of the best riders in the wet, and yet I had no control of what was going on. Remarkably, my bike was still fine, so I straightened it up and set off again. But it was more dangerous than it had been all day, and we were going uphill.
September 2002, the l’Angliru. Lying on the side of the road after crashing and being run over by a team car on the run into the Angliru, where I would protest by refusing to cross the finish line.
Soon afterward, I went down again, sliding along in the middle of the road on my left side. The car that was following me ran right over my bike—and I still had my feet in the pedals. Now I was furious. I dragged myself to the side of the road and just sat there with my wrecked bike, watching as bloodied riders came by. I love competition on an epic scale, but this had nothing to do with sport. We were being exploited. It was incredibly irresponsible of the organization, but they were getting what they wanted—headlines and TV ratings—at the risk of not only our health but even our lives.
But the peloton had only itself to blame. We, the riders, let them do it to us. We were a bunch of lone wolves, contracted mercenaries who stabbed each other in the back at every opportunity. We couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, I thought to myself as my peers struggled onward. Then I corrected myself—actually, that was probably the one thing we could do.
Eventually, my team car pulled up, with my spare bike on the roof. I got back on, but mentally I had quit the race. Bingen Fernandez, my loyal Basque teammate, finally caught up with me and tried pushing me, but I told him to forget it—we were so far behind that it was over.
It was so dark now that in the pouring rain it felt like dusk. I was covered in blood and had ripped a lot of skin, as coming down on my left side twice had worsened the road rash. I still wanted to finish the stage, even though, at the speed I was capable of, there was still close to an hour of climbing ahead of me.
The last part of the Angliru is the hardest. Over the final 6 kilometers, it averages 13 percent with some passages at 24 percent. Bingen didn’t leave my side, and, as a Basque rider, he was massively supported. Basque fans are among the most devoted in cycling, and they were desperate to help him, but every time they tried to push him, he would wave them away and tell them to push me.
I was a mess: it was all I could do to keep momentum. With just a few kilometers to go, we had to weave through broken-down cars, and the dark misty air stank of burned-out clutches. The fans who were up there had no doubt climbed the mountain on foot and waited all day, but were now trapped behind 2-meter-high riot barriers guarded at intervals by police.
I’d never seen this before at a bike race, and I haven’t seen it since. Clearly, just to guarantee the spectacle, the organization had wanted the bloody stragglers to suffer unaided, without any fans interfering in their bloody battle.
Not far from the finish, a fan managed to squeeze between the barriers and came running up to help me on what was one of the steepest parts. It was obvious I was in a lot of pain, and although pushing me at this point made no difference to my race, or to the race overall, he wanted to help.
He’d barely started to push me when a policeman came running over and slammed him against the fence, crushing his neck with his forearm. I stopped—which wasn’t difficult as I was riding at about 1 kilometer per hour—and went for the policeman. I couldn’t believe it was happening. It had nothing to do with cycling.
Somebody had to take a stand against the madness; I decided it had to be me. I hated everything about cycling at that moment. I blamed it for the mess I found myself in: the doping, the loneliness, the craziness, the exploitation.
So just short of the finish line, I stopped. I leaned my bike up against the crowd barrier. Then I ripped my race numbers off and threw them on the ground, leaving my bike where it was. It made perfect sense to me.
The irony was that everybody thought I was protesting because of the difficulty of the Angliru, when it was, in fact, directed at the race conditions and the irresponsibility of the race organization. Afterward, I needed to explain on several occasions why I had done it. My “strike” started the discussion, though, and proved that I had the balls to do it. Funnily, my name is always linked to the Angliru, even though I have posted possibly one of the slowest-ever times for the climb.
—
I was still bandaged after the Vuelta and didn’t really have much time to prepare for the World Championships in Zolder, Belgium. But I was committed to racing there, so after ten days off the bike, Rob Hayles was recruited as my temporary head coach. This involved his riding my scooter while I chased him on my time trial bike. I was in terrible shape, but I rode in the World Championships time trial anyway.
Somehow, I got sixth place, only thirty-five seconds off the winning time. But the real upside of making the trip to Belgium was that I met David Brailsford, who was at his first road World Championship in his role as Team GB performance director. We were like peas in a pod and instantly became friends.
He was unlike anybody I’d ever met in cycling, especially British cycling. Dave was charismatic, enthusiastic, and persuasive. He told me he would do everything he could to help me become world champion the following year, and that he’d go as far as having one of the Olympic project track bikes converted into a time trial road bike for me.
He gave me confidence and belief, and, most importantly, a desire and a reason to commit to winning the Worlds. My season ended soon after our meeting; meanwhile, I prepared to enter the final season of my contract with Cofidis: 2003 had to be a big year.
All the while, I hid my secret life. In fact, I hid it from everyone close to me until I went back to Hong Kong in the winter of 2002 and spent some time with my dad. But it wasn’t an easy visit. Something had shifted in our relationship.
We were both so busy that we didn’t see much of each other, and, when we did, we were more distant than we had been before. He treated me as if I was somebody special and was almost deferential toward me. I didn’t like it. I just wanted us to be the same as we had always been.
One night, we were in a bar in Tsim Sha Tsui with all my old school friends. There was nothing odd in Dad’s being there with us, but, unusually, I was ignoring him. We were all pretty drunk, and late in the evening Dad came over to me and said: “David, let’s go outside for a chat.”
We stepped outside, wandered down the street, and then found ourselves in one of the narrow alleys so characteristic of Hong Kong.
Dad spoke first. “What’s going on?” he asked.
I shrugged. “What do you mean what’s going on?”
“You’re acting strangely, David. I’m worried about you; even your friends say you’re not yourself.”
It didn’t take much to get my anger rising. “What? Oh, come on, Dad,” I said. “You’re fucking joking, right? Everything’s changed. I’m a different person from what I was.”
He was straining now, trying to reach me. “But you’re not—you’re still the same person. That’s what I don’t understand. Why are you doing this to yourself?”
“If this is about my drinking, then don’t even bother!” Now I was almost shouting.
“Oh, here we go …”
Now all the frustration and self-loathing came spilling out. “You know what, Dad? You know how you think the sun shines out of my arse?” I was shaking with anger. “Well, it doesn’t. I’m not the golden boy. How about you tell your friends that David’s a doper? That I take EPO …?”
Dad slapped me, hard. I took a step back, and we stared at each other. His face crumpled, and he broke down.
I went back into the bar. I didn’t care.
