Côte des Basques

After forty-seven hours in custody, I admitted everything.

I was on good terms with the police when I left, the relief of having told them everything putting me in a state of euphoria. I was grateful to them for liberating me from the torment.

I was escorted out through the back door, away from the waiting cameras. Dave Brailsford was there, waiting for me. He didn’t look angry or pissed off, just relieved that I was all right. He gave me a big hug. We got into a car and headed to a hotel. I don’t know what I’d have done if Dave hadn’t been there, really I don’t.

Dave had also had a rough time. They had presumed he knew everything about me and had questioned him for four hours. He explained the shock and incomprehension he had felt when they had shown him the two empty EPO syringes. He was only weeks away from leading Team GB’s cyclists at the Athens Olympics and had been advised to get out of Biarritz and as far away from David Millar as possible. Despite that advice, he had decided to stay.

Dave speaks fluent French. While I was in custody, he had tried to speak to Cofidis, but they had washed their hands of me. Now he realized how the professional world, my world, operated. He saw that I was now on my own, that the cord had been cut. This was when he decided that somebody had to be there for me when I got out, no matter what I had, or hadn’t, done.

He had booked us into the Sofitel, overlooking the beach—one of the most beautiful hotels in Biarritz. We stayed up late drinking. I told him everything, all the dark truths that I’d kept from him. He didn’t judge me. He understood what it meant, that my life was now in tatters. But the shit hadn’t even begun. In a way, that night was the last before I had to really face the nightmare ahead. When I woke up the next morning, the euphoria had gone.

I spoke to my sister, my mum, and my dad. I told them all the same thing: “It’s over.” Dad listened and then said: “Is it true?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you tell them everything?” he asked.

“Everything.”

“David, I’m immensely proud of you,” he said. “I hope Cofidis will now pay for what they did.”

—

I hadn’t expected that they’d be happy—happy that it was “over.” But then they had known for a few years that I hadn’t been right.

I called Francis Van Londersele, my directeur sportif on Cofidis, and told him the same thing: “C’est fini, Francis.” That was the last contact I had with Cofidis. They fired me a couple of weeks later.

I needed a little bit of time before going back to my place. My friends, Xavier and Didier, spoke to their neighbor who lived in Paris most of the year, and, very kindly, he let me use his beautiful apartment for a few days. It looked out across the Côte des Basques, the waves crashing in the background, day and night. It would have been hard to find a more beautiful hideaway.

I spent a week there, partly thinking that everybody was being overprotective of me. I was sure I’d be fine back in my apartment. I was wrong. I did go back there to pick up some stuff, but found myself dizzied by the experience. The place was wrecked and reminded me of the state my life was in.

While I’d been in custody, Dave had spoken to Dr. Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who had been working as a consultant to the national team. Dave decided to fly Steve down to Biarritz to spend a day with me. A couple of years later, I learned that Dave had funded this out of his own pocket. At the time, it hadn’t even crossed my mind who was paying for Steve’s time and expenses.

I sat down with Steve just two days after I was released. We met at the Sofitel, just after nine in the morning, and spent the day talking. He told me straightaway it wasn’t going to be like the therapy sessions I’d seen in TV shows. He spent the morning asking me questions about my life and upbringing, starting at the beginning in Scotland, up until that day. Then we broke for lunch and met again in the afternoon, when he was able to explain to me why I’d made the decisions I had taken.

It was an eye-opening experience.

It became clear that I still had a fairly adolescent mentality, relied heavily on father figures, and had created behavioral patterns that were destructive and self-perpetuating. He made me understand that most of the decisions I’d made were unavoidable, considering the personality and upbringing I’d had.

I then understood that my history, combined with the situations I had found myself in, gave a certain inevitability to everything that had happened. There was little emotion involved in the whole process, no floods of tears. It was all very clinical, but I left with the understanding that there was a lot of work to be done.

In the context of my development, I had acted normally. I relied heavily on other people guiding me and had been let down by the people around me, particularly my team. It would have been out of the ordinary, unusual, for me not to have made the mistakes I’d made. So in conclusion, I was normal … and I had always thought I was different.

A few years later Dave told me that when he’d spoken to Steve after our time together, Steve had told him that there was no short-term resolution, that only the passage of time would allow me to sort myself out. In other words, I hadn’t quite finished my self-destruction. I still had a little way to go.

Fran had flown over to Biarritz almost immediately and was there, waiting, as I spent the day with Steve Peters. We met at the Côte des Basques after Steve and I had finished talking. I was a bit dazed. I hadn’t talked that much about my life to anybody before, and I’d certainly never had anybody dissect it in the way he had. It left me feeling very open to the world.

We sat at the top of the steps that led down to the beach. I was in jeans, wearing a T-shirt, leather jacket, and some big black sunglasses. I didn’t belong there, a brooding presence, on the beach in summertime. Everything felt wrong, as if all the shit that I protected myself with had been stripped away. I was twenty-seven, and I’d thrown my life away. I felt empty.

We sat there in silence for what seemed like an eternity, watching people come up and down the steps to the beach. None of it made sense: How had I done this? I was both angry and sad, filled with incomprehension.

Finally, I spoke.

“They said I’d still be able to do the Tour de France.”

Fran looked at me. “David, I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.”

There was another long pause.

“Are you still proud of me?”

“Of course I am, you’re my big brother.”

I watched some little kids playing in the sand.

“If I ever have kids, I’m never letting this happen to them,” I said with conviction. A tear escaped from under my big black sunglasses.

France reached across and put her hand on mine.

I looked at her and smiled sadly.

“I wish I had a fast-forward button,” I said.

—

Biarritz is a small place. It wasn’t possible for me to go into town without bumping into people I knew. Those I didn’t know probably knew me, and the prospect of walking around daunted me. It was shameful being known as a doper, a cheat. It’s one thing doing it in secret, lying to yourself—but there was now no hiding from who I was and from what I’d done. I dreaded living with it.

But my dread was misplaced. I was lucky in that the friends I had made were all great and took particular care of me. Alain and his girlfriend Valerie now had a café-restaurant on the Côte des Basques, and I would spend my days between there and Sabine’s Ventilo.

They organized mini-football tournaments on the beach, and generally it felt like my life was unchanged, even if it was now a life without cycling. Even random people, people I’d seen around but never spoken to before, came up to me and asked if I was okay.

From older members of the Biarritz community to the surfing crowd, there was genuine concern. I had never expected that. One day I was walking through town, down one of the quiet backstreets, when a local surfer dude, sitting on his window ledge having a cigarette, called out to me.

“Daveed! Putain, c’est la merde. Ça va?!”

I was a bit surprised but mustered a response: “Ça va bon, pas trop, mais ça va aller.”

Then he said the loveliest thing: “Tu sais on pense à toi, tu n’est pas un mauvais mec—d’accord?” You know we’re thinking of you, you’re not a bad guy—okay?

I muttered some thanks. It cut deep to realize how lovely people were and how much I’d let them down.

I never met anybody who was critical of me in Biarritz. I think most of them knew me, or knew what had happened, even if they’d never spoken to me. They’d watched me grow and seen my success, yet I’d always been one of the few Anglophones who had been totally immersed in French life.

I was fiercely proud of being from Biarritz, and in the two previous years I’d become known in the French press as un Biarrot, a local, a part of the town. In my downfall the town took me under its wing more than it had ever done at the height of my success. All of a sudden I was accessible, and people reached out to me. That got me through those first few weeks.

But at some point I had to start dealing with it. I was scheduled to go to Paris to meet with my lawyer, to brief him on what I’d said and for him to educate me on what would happen next. Up to this point, beyond Dave Brailsford and my family, I had not disclosed to anybody what had happened during my forty-eight hours with the police, but that changed when my entire statement was leaked to L’Équipe. This was a legal document that was supposed to remain confidential until the case was presented in court. But there had been leaks about the “Cofidis affair” from day one, and L’Équipe was better informed than the lawyers involved.

Cedric Vasseur, one of my teammates, had been falsely accused of taking cocaine. The urine and hair samples he’d given when arrested with Gaumont at the beginning of the year had tested positive, yet anybody who knew Cedric well knew that he didn’t do cocaine.

While Vasseur was fighting this allegation, he also claimed that one of his statements had been forged—which seemed ironic, given that the police were investigating a sporting team for fraud. Cedric was eventually cleared.

I headed back to London and gave two interviews: one to William Fotheringham of the Guardian, the other to Jeremy Whittle of The Times. I slept through most of the Tour de France. I was effectively running scared and became nocturnal, living in the alternative world that comes to life as the sun goes down. It was good escapism, but I was refusing to face the scale of the chaos. I had been paying my house off as the money came in, using every euro I had in Luxembourg. I spent my salary in France on a near monthly basis, and there was money, but nowhere near enough to sustain my lifestyle for more than a few months. Yet I carried on buying the drinks, showing largesse—it seemed more important than ever for me to pay now.

It soon became clear that I was going to have to leave France. The French tax office was pursuing me, and it was inevitable that they were going to freeze all my assets at some point—not that I had many. My bank accounts were drying up, and my house was unfinished and the property of a Luxembourg company. I didn’t really have anything else. There were a few watches, lots of books, CDs and DVDs, clothes, and shoes.

My house was only a month away from being completed, and yet now I had no money to complete it. I faced the harsh reality that I was going to have to sell it, so I made a big sign with my phone number on it and stuck it in the window. It symbolized, perhaps better than anything else, the scale of my downfall.

My life was like a burning fuse, but there was no bomb connected—it was just going to fizzle out until there’d be nothing left.