I had thought that I could just stop doping and put it behind me, that ending the cheating would end the lies. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Within a few months my life would spiral further out of control than ever before.
Yet I was now a clean athlete, taking that philosophy to an extreme that I hadn’t done since my first few months as a pro. Team GB’s thinking and professionalism was having a profound impact on me. After long discussions with GB’s sports scientists, I decided I would put a stop to all needles, which meant no more “recovery” injections.
They had convinced me that there was no scientific proof of injectable récup speeding up an athlete’s recovery. I simply had to be diligent with the food and drinks I used and my body would recover just as well, if not better.
I was now in a position where I could stand by this and stick to it. I wasn’t a wide-eyed, gauche neo-pro who knew no better and was easily manipulated. I was reigning world champion—and an ex-doper. I didn’t care what my fellow pros, team doctors, soigneurs, or team management at Cofidis thought: if I wanted to do it my way, then that was how it would be.
I had realized that the more I doped, the more I hated cycling—and the more it became a job, not my passion. I may have been able to win bigger races, but I’d never felt less joy in doing so. That feeling stayed with me, an emptiness, a pointlessness that wouldn’t go away.
Dave Brailsford and Team GB gave me another option. They had an anti-doping stance that they truly believed in, and they operated in a manner that made you want to be clean. I had in many ways given up on Cofidis and the European pro scene, but the prospect of being part of Team GB for the Athens Olympics inspired me.
I holed up in Manchester and spent increasing amounts of time training on the track. Rod Ellingworth and Simon Jones were coaching me, and I spent every afternoon in one-to-one sessions on the boards. Before long, I was in training sessions with the track squad. The level of skill and experience was terrifying, but I loved it.
I hadn’t had so much fun on a bike in years, and we discussed the realistic possibility that I’d race in the Athens Olympic track team. Soon afterward, Nicole Cooke and I were announced as the first official members of the Team GB Athens Olympic Squad. The future was looking bright.
—
My lifestyle in Biarritz was very different from the disciplined environment of Team GB. Work on my house was progressing as it was transformed into the ultimate bachelor pad. From the outside, it looked to be a classic Parisian-style villa, but once inside it was anything but traditional. There was a fingerprint-access front door, 400 square meters of loft space fitted with the most cutting-edge technology available, furniture shipped from Italy, a wine cellar, and a cinema in the basement. There were glass panels through each of the four floors, and standing in the basement you were able to look up and out through the atrium, far above.
Tellingly, it had not even crossed my mind to have an area for my bikes. I hadn’t wanted the house to have anything to do with cycling. I persuaded myself that it was my ticket to happiness, thinking that when it was finished, everything would finally make sense. But the closer the work came to completion, the more I recognized how incredibly wrong I was to have thought that; I realized that the house was the manifestation of my cheating. I began to dread the day it would be finished and I’d close the door behind me.
I was enjoying a world champion’s lifestyle. I had a deal with Jaguar that meant I had a car waiting for me wherever I went, and an XKR on order. I was an Olympian with medal success almost guaranteed, and I was one of the highest-paid cyclists in the world. Yet I was lonelier than ever. I was now seeing a French girl called Katherine de Freycinet, but I still struggled to sustain a relationship.
My house in Biarritz.
Katherine, a bohemian aristocrat and very French, fitted my new image perfectly. For a few months things between us were good. She would sit in the center of the velodrome, sketching and writing songs while I was whizzing around the track, learning how to become an Olympian. From the outside it probably looked like a wonderful life.
I began to think that maybe having the fabulous life was what it was all about. Then I’d beat myself up about it, and then tell myself off for that. What right did I have to feel sorry for myself? I had a life people only dreamed of.
But it didn’t make me happy. I found it almost impossible to spend time on my own. I had to be with people as much as possible. Before long I couldn’t even handle being on my own with Katherine and decided that I wasn’t cut out for relationships. I had my house—that was a big enough relationship.
And through it all, my doping past shadowed me. It was always there, hovering. I’d done my best to bury it, but it wasn’t long before I realized how wrong I’d been to think I could just put it all behind me and move on.
At the first Cofidis get-together for the 2004 season, in Amiens, I found out that Philippe Gaumont had spent a week at L’Équipier’s house in Tuscany. I was completely stunned. I’d been able to influence the team to re-sign L’Équipier for one more year. To hear that he was now taking care of Gaumont’s needs blew me away.
I stormed through the hotel corridors until I found his room. “Tell me it isn’t true that Gaumont came down to stay with you,” I snapped at him.
He was shocked by my anger. He looked down, eyes averted.
“David, he came down with his family for a week.” He shrugged apologetically. “He understands though—don’t worry.”
I was incensed. I couldn’t believe how stupid he had been to trust Gaumont.
“You fucking idiot!” I shouted. “What does he know? Does he know about me staying with you?”
“No, no! Of course not,” he said. There was a pause. “I don’t think so anyway.”
I was panicking, terrified of what could happen. Gaumont knew all about the omertà, but he had trouble keeping his mouth shut. There was no doubt in my mind that everybody would soon know that L’Équipier was the team’s fixer. If Gaumont got caught, then L’Équipier would be implicated and then, eventually, so would I.
There was a high risk of my being linked to him. The Tuscan trip had been over two years earlier, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be traced. I had been so calculating when I’d worked with Jesús. I had reduced the human factor to a bare minimum. Two people were in on the deal—Jesús and me.
My mind was racing: Gaumont, always Gaumont. How was he still on the team? Nobody really knew. There were rumors of his having a series of clauses in his contract that allowed the team to fire him if he went off the rails, while some claimed he blackmailed the team into keeping him on. I think the truth was simpler. Philippe could be a charming man when he chose to be, and no doubt it was this charm that had convinced Migraine to stick with him.
I was in shock, gripped by the awful realization that word might spread that I was a doper. Finding out about Gaumont spending time with L’Équipier awoke me to the bitter truth: it was never going to go away. I would always have to live with my doping past, no matter how much I cleaned up my act.
—
Two months later, my worst fears were realized.
An ex-Cofidis rider—Marek Rutkiewicz, a young Polish guy who was mentored by one of Cofidis’s soigneurs—was arrested at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, carrying doping products. The soigneur, “Bob” Boguslaw Madejak, had brought several young Poles across from Poland and secured them contracts, acting as agent, doctor, and father figure. Bob was a great soigneur and part of the old guard, but from what we could tell, he didn’t seem to do anything that was too risky.
As soon as we heard about Marek’s being arrested, we knew Bob would be next. He was in Spain with us at our pre-season training camp, but it was like watching a dead man walking. He was naturalized French and his family lived in France, so he had no choice but to return.
Marek was released after cooperating with the police and telling them what they wanted to know, while Bob, arrested on arrival when he flew home, simply refused to speak. He was of the Eastern bloc old school. In the 1980s, as part of the Polish national cycling team, he had escaped the country and been forced to leave his family behind in Poland for two years until he could get them out. A few months in jail weren’t a big deal to Bob.
It seemed obvious to most of us that Gaumont would be the next to be arrested. He had previously been detained by the police and was the obvious target. After the camp ended, when the team returned to France, Philippe and Cedric Vasseur were arrested and held for the maximum forty-eight-hour period.
During their detention, L’Équipier and I were implicated, just as I had feared. People knew I worked with Jesús, but Gaumont wrapped us up in other accusations as well. He claimed that we’d been taking cocaine at the training camp in Calpe. Whatever Gaumont’s recollection, I knew this was not true, but he had no choice but to drag others into it all, as he was drug-tested while in custody and knew that he would test positive for cocaine and whatever else he’d been taking.
I knew what I’d done—and I also knew what I hadn’t done. I was the golden boy of the team, but Philippe made me sound like a monster. I could only surmise that, in the death throes of his cycling career, he tried to protect himself by implicating me and as many others as he could in order to reduce the impact of his own corruption.
The police were convinced they’d unearthed a massive drugs ring and that Cofidis operated a complex internal doping program. All of us knew that this was about as far from the truth as was possible, but we also knew they would do everything within their power to prove their theory. Gaumont certainly made it sound as if there was systematic doping, but then he was genuinely convinced that it was impossible to be a successful professional cyclist without doping.
The L’Équipe had received leaks of the statements that Gaumont had given to the investigating judge. They had two journalists working on the story and when I saw either of their numbers appear on my phone, my palms would sweat and my heart would race.
I never knew what their latest bit of information would be, so I always assumed the worst. Had L’Équipier talked? Had they found something out that nobody knew?
I was not very good at weathering this storm. For the first time I was being asked, point blank, whether I’d ever doped. Up to that point, I’d never had to lie, simply because I had always been thought of as an innocent. Now I was having to lie, but I didn’t live with it well.
The day before I was supposed to compete in Manchester at the Track World Cup, for Team GB, Cofidis withdrew the whole team from racing in order to try to bring an end to the ongoing saga that was the Cofidis affair. We were grounded for a month. During that time, Cofidis planned to put new internal controls and rules in place so that the team could move forward.
The team ran the first of what were planned to be regular hair tests, able to detect drug use over the previous months (depending on the length of the hair and the drugs they were looking for).
We also signed the latest ethical charter, but God knows how many of these we’d signed in the previous years. It was all more of a publicity stunt than anything else, because Cofidis had fundamentally failed when it came to preventing doping. But the last thing they wanted to do was admit it.
The Cofidis affair had also attracted the interest of the French tax authorities. Gaumont had told the police about certain riders in the team receiving income from image contracts paid through a Luxembourg holding company. He had been the recipient of this type of contract when he had first come to the team and was generously paid.
As a result, the police raided the Cofidis headquarters and took all our contracts. It was only a matter of time before I would receive demands from the dreaded “fiscal Française.” I got in touch with a UK firm to try to piece together the previous four years of accounts, but it was a gargantuan task and one that had no prospect of a happy outcome. Now I faced the very real threat of losing my house.
It seemed more than likely that I would soon be arrested, so in the spring of 2004 I met with a Parisian lawyer to discuss my rights. As it turned out, I had very few. I had no right to a lawyer and could be held for up to forty-eight hours. I could be held longer if the judge saw fit, although I would then be allowed access to a lawyer. It was frightening. There seemed to be little I could do; my life was now out of my hands.
Then, as my panic grew, everything went quiet. There were no more heart-stopping phone calls from journalists who had seen the latest leaked reports, there were no more arrests. It seemed that the Cofidis affair had ground to a halt.
I thought that maybe I’d escaped it all, that maybe the investigation had reached a dead end. When it came to doping, I had nothing to do with Bob or Gaumont or anybody in the team, except L’Équipier. So as far as I could tell, they hadn’t got anything against me other than Gaumont’s allegations.
Ten days before the start of the 2004 Tour de France, I felt that the worst was behind me. Dave Brailsford and Lisa, his pregnant girlfriend, were having a short break in Biarritz before Dave headed off to Athens for the Olympics, so we got together for dinner.
Dave had seen how committed I was to being on his team and living by his standards. He respected me for it. In many ways, the thought of working with Dave and Team GB had saved me from completely losing the plot. They had shown me there was another world beyond the corruption of the European professional scene. I clung on to what they represented: it was what kept me riding my bike when otherwise I simply would have disappeared into a black hole.
We decided to go to one of my favorite restaurants, in Ilbarritz, called Blue Cargo. It’s a beautiful converted house, perched on the hillside above the beach. It was the place to be seen. It had an adjacent bar, where, late at night, dancing on the tables was considered the norm.
I loved going there. I’d been there before—once on a hot rainy night with Stuey, Matt White, and Lance. It had turned into a memorable Blue Cargo evening, Stuey walking around shirtless with a bottle of vodka in each hand serving random people, while Whitey danced on the tables.
The next morning, Lance and Matt flew on a private jet to a race in Germany. Midway through the flight, Lance turned to Matt and said: “Whitey—what a night. Maybe in my top three best ever.”
Whitey stared back at him, baffled.
“Fuck me, Lance,” he said. “You should get out more.”
We’d ordered some wine and I’d just finished telling this story, when two frowning strangers walked up to the table and stood over us.
“David Millar …?” they snapped at me. They held up their police badges.
“You have to come with us.” We stood up and followed them out into the car park. A third policeman was waiting for us.
They told me to take off my belt and then to remove my shoelaces. It was the first step in dismantling me. Initially, I wasn’t scared or nervous, just very angry. One of them was particularly aggressive and seemed to take great pleasure in belittling me. It felt personal, as if they had a vendetta against me.
We were split up and put into different cars. I was on my own, and Dave and Lisa were in another car, escorted to Biarritz police station by the angry policeman who spent the journey punching the back of Lisa’s seat, scaring her to death. Now Dave unleashed his anger, telling him to calm down and respect his pregnant girlfriend.
They took me back to my apartment. As I unlocked the door one of them restrained me, while the other crept in, gun in hand, to clear the place before we entered. I thought it was contemptible: I was a professional cyclist, not a drug-running murderer.
They switched the lights on and took me into the living room. They pulled one of the dining chairs into the middle of the room, sat me on it and told me to sit still.
“Move and we will take you down,” one of them said to me, with a look that told me that he meant it. I could see that he would not hesitate to use violence.
So I sat there, as still as I could, for the next three hours, as they turned my apartment inside out. At first I felt secure in the knowledge that they’d never find anything, but that smugness steadily dissipated as they started to go through everything I owned, effectively ripping my life apart. I felt violated. It was another step toward breaking me down so that I’d be easier to interrogate.
After over two hours, I could sense their frustration. The last room they took apart was my bedroom, and, for some reason, I began to feel a rising panic. There was something there, something hidden, something incriminating.
What was it …?
Then I remembered.
The bookshelves.
No—please—you mustn’t look through the bookshelves …
I love books. They’re among my most treasured possessions. I take care of them. Even after reading them I try to keep them in perfect condition, the spines undamaged.
A month after I had come back from the World Championships in Canada, I’d finally got around to unpacking. That was when I rediscovered the two used syringes that I’d stowed away after taking my final dose of EPO in Manchester.
By then I’d already made the decision that I’d never dope again. I thought it would be a poignant souvenir to keep the last two syringes that I ever used, so I hid them in the bookshelves in my room. Then I forgot that they were there.
I could hear the jubilation in their voices even before they walked toward me, brandishing the syringes. I felt like I’d been punched. My world came crashing down. Suddenly, I was very scared. Panic gripped me, and I denied their existence. They smiled at me.
They took me to the police station and led me to a cell. Later, a friend on the Biarritz police force told me that when they had arrived they had reserved the cell for forty-eight hours, whether they had found anything or not. They had always intended to detain me for as long as the law would allow.