It was time to get back on the bike.
I’d tried to source equipment from a couple of prominent companies but with no success, so—reluctantly—I went back to Terry Dolan and asked him once again if he could help me out. He had supported me so much in the past that I really did not want to ask him again, when I knew how little exposure he’d get.
Terry being Terry, he said he’d been waiting for the call and had already set aside a bike that was perfect for me. It was a beautiful, no-expense-spared, black—definitely not white—stealthy machine. I picked it up from his warehouse in Liverpool, not far from the docks.
I’d given away all my cycling clothing when I’d left Biarritz, but Dave Brailsford’s drive home went right through Hayfield. One day, when he dropped in to see how I was getting on, he gave me a load of kit.
By coincidence, he’d lived in the same village a few years earlier so he knew it well. We chatted for a while and then, unexpectedly, he asked if I’d like to come in to the lab and do a Vo2 test.
“But, Dave—I haven’t been on a bike for a year,” I said. “Maybe I should ride for a few weeks first?”
He dismissed my worries. “Just come on in—get the ball rolling,” he said.
It was a subtle way of motivating me, but it worked. I was booked into the English Institute of Sport (EIS) in the following week for a full-blown lab test.
It was almost a year since I’d last ridden a bicycle. I was apprehensive. I’d never enjoyed riding my bike when I wasn’t at race fitness—what if I got back on and hated it? What if it brought back too many bad memories?
But I knew I had to do it at some point, to find out what the future might hold. So I set the bike up, pulled on the kit, and, finally, stepped outside, locking the door behind me and slipping the keys into the back pocket of my jersey, just like any other cyclist heading out for a quiet spin.
I rolled out through Hayfield into the Peak District. At first, awkward and uncoordinated, I was uncomfortable and felt like I was riding a bike for the first time. How the hell had I ever ridden with my handlebars so low? I could barely even get my hands to sit on the brake hoods, let alone down to the drops.
But all the sensations were fresh and new, and it was liberating. I didn’t care about where I was going; how long I was going to be out for; what speed, power output, or heart rate I was generating. I was riding my bike for no reason other than pleasure, and, as the feeling took me over, I realized I hadn’t ridden my bike purely for fun since I’d been in my early teens.
There had always been objectives on the horizon, sponsor commitments, schedules, and pressure. Now I had no obligations. Now I didn’t care that I bore no resemblance to a racing cyclist. It was bliss.
I’d been out on the bike three times when I turned up at the EIS for my test. Because Dave had been so supportive, I had expected the same attitude from others. It hadn’t crossed my mind that, as a banned athlete, I perhaps wasn’t very welcome there. Carried away by his desire to help me, I don’t think this had really crossed Dave’s mind, either.
As soon as I walked through the door, I sensed it in the air. I wasn’t the star anymore—I was the pariah. I became very self-conscious—signing in was embarrassing. Writing “David Millar” and then seeing it there, next to all the other athletes, reminded me that my name was now synonymous with doping. I was out of place.
Despite my unease, the test went well. Even after a year off, I was stronger than many top cyclists after only a month off. The power and fitness would return the more I trained, but, most importantly, my pedaling action remained nearly perfectly balanced.
My right and left legs followed almost precisely the same power curves, so at the very least the test showed that I was born to ride a bike. But there were repercussions from my visit.
The next day, Dave got a call reminding him that I was banned from all official facilities—that as a banned British athlete I was banned from everything. He listened but then made it clear that he was going to be standing by me and allowing me to use his facilities at the velodrome, even though I was banned from all others. As performance director of British Cycling, he had the power to do this. But what was amazing was that he had the strength of character to resist the pressure that was put on him. It meant so much to me.
Dave and I sat down to talk it all through. He told me that he had spoken to his team at the velodrome, asking them how they felt about helping me, and that they’d all offered to support me. This saved me. Many would have been happy to see me eradicated from the history of the sport and banned for life. But if I had been ostracized, as certain people wanted, then I think I would have destroyed myself completely. I didn’t have the strength to try to come back on my own.
If it hadn’t been for Dave B. and British Cycling, I would have ended up a very different man, living a very different life. They knew that what had happened to me was about more than simply my own mistakes—they knew it wasn’t black and white. They judged me as a person rather than simply judging my crime. They were strong enough to try to learn from my experience and then to help reconstruct me.
I owe them a massive debt.
—
I’d realized that I’d be a fool not to go back into cycling. I wanted to try to right the wrongs, to set the record straight—to prove myself without any doubts. To do that, I needed to get back on the road.
It was also the only profession I knew. I was talented and passionate about it, I had the skills and experience—and it paid well, compared to anything else that I might possibly do. This hit home when I went to the Borders bookshop in Stockport to try to get a job.
I barely knew how to fill in the application form. I couldn’t remember my GCSE and A-level results, let alone the addresses of my schools. The interview was fine, but what did that matter if I’d been stumped by an application form? I couldn’t believe I’d ever even thought that I could do anything apart from professional cycling.
But I also knew that I had to make my comeback mean something, that it had to have some worth beyond my own experience. I knew I could train hard and in time recover my fitness, but I was a doper, a cheat—why did I deserve to come back? I’d thrown away so much, hurt so many people, and taken myself to the very edge. I had to show that it wasn’t all for nothing. I had to demonstrate that something had been learned.
One of the points I had made clear to every authority, journalist, friend, and family member I’d spoken to was that what had happened to me was preventable.
I had never wanted to dope. I hadn’t ridden my bike around Hong Kong and High Wycombe, dreaming of the Tour de France, and thinking, I’ll do whatever I have to do to win—doping will just be part and parcel of that.
I’d spent years resisting doping because I was totally against it. It disgusted me. I knew it was wrong, I knew it was cheating—yet eventually, I succumbed.
Yes, I was vulnerable and I was weak and I took the decision to dope myself—but there was nobody offering proactive support to me when I wanted to stay clean. That was due in part to the omertà—the law of silence.
The nondopers were too scared to say they were doing it clean, and they would even go as far as defending the guys who doped, in order not to rock the boat. That’s how binding the omertà was—and sometimes still is.
There was never a voice saying, “One day you’ll be better than all of them, so be patient and be proud.” Instead, clean riders were just looked upon as simple-minded and stubborn.
As I thought more about my comeback, I thought about what I would have wanted to hear. What advice would I have needed to prevent me from throwing in the towel on staying clean? In truth, I knew the answer to this—simply because I’d wanted to hear somebody say it for so many years.
If nothing else, when I came back to racing I could be the older guy, the hitter—the fallen champion who was proactive toward anti-doping and wasn’t scared to stand on a soapbox and talk about doing it clean. That was my prerogative now, my obligation. My arrest, admission, and ban meant that the omertà no longer applied to me.
I wanted to help younger riders, to prevent them from going through everything I’d gone through. I recognized that this would mean taking on new responsibilities.
Every interview I gave would have to confront doping, and I accepted that this was going to be integral to my return to cycling. I no longer had the right to avoid the subject. I was in a very rare position to make a difference, to tell people what I’d been through and also to explain that the world of sport wasn’t as black and white as some would like to think. It gave everything I did a raison d’être. I believed I could make a difference.
I had a year until the 2006 Tour de France. The first thing I needed to do was to speak to Jean-Marie Leblanc, director of the Tour. Jean-Marie had watched me win the prologue at the Tour de l’Avenir in 1997 and also followed me when I’d won the first stage of the Tour in 2000. I felt like I’d let him down particularly. I needed to apologize to him, face-to-face.
I also wanted to ask him if he’d allow me back into the Tour de France. I called the offices of the Tour in Paris and left my name and number. Thirty minutes later, he called me back.
“Daveed? C’est Jean-Marie Leblanc.” He sounded jovial, which I definitely wasn’t expecting.
“Jean-Marie, thank you for calling me back.” I spoke my most formal French, trying to be as polite as possible.
“David, it’s good to hear from you,” he said. “Where are you?”
I was surprised by how friendly he was.
“I’m near Manchester; that’s where I live now,” I told him, as I stood in Mike and Pat’s garden.
“That’s different to Biarritz—non?! Well, you would not believe where I am … PLOUDANIEL!” he exclaimed excitedly.
“Sounds familiar—but where is it?” I had absolutely no idea where it was.
“Daveeed—it’s where you won the Tour de l’Avenir prologue in ’97.”
“Of course it is!” I did remember now.
The small talk carried on for quite a while. His manner was so relaxed and friendly that it put me completely at ease.
Eventually, I found the courage to ask him.
“Jean-Marie, I was wondering if it would be possible to meet with you. I’d like to explain everything that happened.”
He was receptive to the idea, and said that I should come to Paris a few days after the Tour ended on July 27.
Jean-Marie’s positive response enthused me. I didn’t even know who the world champion was, who’d won Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, or Paris–Roubaix, but as the Tour gathered pace, I began to get sucked back into it all again. I didn’t have satellite TV, so instead relied on the Internet and occasional dashes to Nick Craig’s house to watch Eurosport as my way of keeping up with events. Now I was following the Tour as a fan—not a jaded, embittered professional—and I loved it.
—
Toward the end of that July, I stayed with my sister in London. Sunday was a beautiful summer’s day, perfect for lunch by the Thames, so we headed over to Putney. We found a riverside restaurant with seating on the water.
As we walked through the restaurant to our table, France gave me a nudge. “Oooh, you’re in luck today,” she said. “Look—a table full of blondes!”
“Very funny,” I said dismissively. Romance hadn’t been on my agenda for quite a while.
“Hang on—you are in luck—I know one of them.” She sounded genuinely shocked.
“Who?” I asked. “Which one?”
“Nicole.” I had no idea who Nicole was.
“That trip with the Major?” France said. “Mallorca New Year’s? Remember Desirée? You met her there—well, Nicole’s her daughter.” But the moment had gone, and I still hadn’t been able to spot Nicole. We sat down and ordered lunch.
In hindsight, Nicole was very brave because later on she came over and said hello. Knowing how shy she can be, that’s actually quite remarkable. But thank God she did because it changed my life. I was smitten immediately. She was lovely, and there was something quite magical about her.
We chatted, and then, by coincidence, we ended up in the same pub after lunch. We all sat down together, and Nicole and I hit it off. She knew nothing about cycling, or my life, which made it all the better. The next night, more bravely, she had dinner with the Millar siblings at France’s club.
I then disappeared back up north. There was no contact for over a week, until I finally cracked and called her. That was it—we became an item.
My life had turned a corner. The future was opening up for me. Good things seemed possible. I had followed the 2005 Tour de France avidly, falling in love with it all over again. I didn’t care about what went on behind the scenes or feel resentment about not being there. I relished the fact that it existed, and with that came the final and most radical awakening: I was lucky.
I rediscovered my childhood dreams watching the 2005 Tour. I had fulfilled that dream once, but I’d let it slip through my fingers. Now I’d been given a second chance. This time I’d do it properly and I’d treasure every moment.
—
The Amaury Sports Organisation—ASO—owns a host of French sporting events, as well as the Tour de France. ASO also owns L’Équipe, the renowned sports newspaper that published my statement to Judge Pallain. The Paris offices of L’Équipe and ASO sit side by side on the same site at Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the banks of the Seine.
I did my best to be invisible as I sat in reception at ASO, waiting to see Jean-Marie Leblanc. I really did not want to be spotted by any journalists from L’Équipe. I hid behind a newspaper, trying my best to get past the second sentence of the article I was reading, but incapable of focusing beyond what I was going to say to Jean-Marie.
Finally, his secretary emerged and took me through to his office. Jean-Marie was on the phone, but he looked up and smiled as I sat down. The room was filled with an overpowering—an overwhelming—stench of cheese.
I studied the room. It was a big office, with views over the river. There were all sorts of bits and bobs scattered around the shelves, and boxes stacked up, yet nothing stood out apart from a photo of the Pope. He was sitting with another man in what looked to be a prison cell.
Jean-Marie put the phone down, and we shook hands. He was immediately warm and friendly. The boxes, he explained, were the accumulated booty of three weeks on Tour, of being the guest of honor in town after town around France.
Similarly, he said, the cheese had been a gift and he’d left it in the fridge but underestimated its aroma. He opened the fridge door. Cheeses, charcuterie, and bottles of champagne were crammed into it. Well, what else would you expect of the director of the Tour de France?
Then we sat down again. I was far from the first rider to let him down—he had been director of the Tour during perhaps its darkest hour, when the Festina affair had almost brought it to a standstill. But I didn’t waste any time and immediately apologized to him for having cheated at his race.
He accepted my apology, but also wanted me to explain how and why. So we sat there for about half an hour, while he asked me questions and I gave him answers.
Then I told him I wanted to come back and make a difference, to race clean and with pride. I told him that I’d like to make the following year’s Tour de France my first race back, but that I didn’t want to make his life difficult.
“You will have served your time,” he said. “That is punishment enough.”
As I listened to his voice, a weight lifted from my shoulders.
“Mais alors, Daveed,” he said, “you cannot ride the Tour if you do not have a team …”
This was a valid point.
“At the moment I’m trying to rebuild my life,” I said. “Once I feel like I am in the right direction, I will start talking to teams. In all honesty, I haven’t really thought about that bit yet.”
Jean-Marie listened.
“Well, look—maybe I can help you,” he said. “There are not many teams that are suited to your new attitude, so we will have to think carefully. Let me call up Roger now and speak to him first, see what he thinks.”
Roger was Roger Legeay, his close friend and boss of Credit Agricole, one of the biggest and oldest of the French teams. Jean-Marie called him, and they chatted for five minutes.
Although nothing concrete came out of the conversation, Jean-Marie said he would do his best to help me. I knew how influential he was. His support was more, much more, than I had ever expected.
Then he stood up.
“Now, let’s go for lunch!”
As we left the room, he pointed to the photograph of the Pope.
“You see this photo, David?” he asked. “This is the Pope forgiving the man who shot him. I like to have it here. It’s a good reminder of how we should live our lives … showing forgiveness.”
Jean-Marie’s chauffeur-driven car took us to a restaurant attached to a small sports stadium. He was clearly a regular. All the staff welcomed us with a “Bonjour, Monsieur Leblanc, Monsieur Millar.”
There were photos of many sportsmen and -women on the walls. I paused and studied some of them as we walked to our table. Then I saw a big photo of me in a kilt with my bike, and below it one of my actual bikes on show. I was humbled. I didn’t know whether Jean-Marie had chosen that restaurant specially—in hindsight he must have done so—but it was the first time that I had felt proud of being a professional cyclist for a very long time.
We had a wonderful lunch. Jean-Marie ordered a bottle of champagne, and we had a wide-ranging conversation. Then, as we were leaving, the staff wished him happy birthday.
He had given so much to me, on his birthday of all days, and demonstrated his generosity of spirit. As we said our good-byes, he reiterated his support. It was another step forward. In those few hours, he had made me see so many good things about professional cycling that I’d been blind to before.
—
My financial circumstances however were dire. I was ruined. I had debts totaling over £800,000 and no prospect of any income for probably another year. The only asset I had was my house in Biarritz, which was up for sale. But, not surprisingly, it was proving difficult to find a buyer for an unfinished, state-of-the-art bachelor pad.
I was going to have to take it on the chin and lose an awful lot of money on it. It was clear that I’d be very lucky to clear half the debt through the sale of it.
The majority of the money owed was to the French tax authorities. They had taxed everything I’d earned during the previous four years at 50 cents per euro—and then added a 40 percent penalty on top of that. The remaining debts were legal and accountancy bills. It was an unfathomable amount of money really.
The French were nonnegotiable. Forfeiting the debt through bankruptcy was an option—I’d be protected under UK law but not French law, and this was no use as I wanted to return to France. I was in debt to the French Republic until I paid back every cent.
There was also something about declaring bankruptcy that I didn’t like. Aside from the stigma, it didn’t feel right—it didn’t offer any closure. I decided that I would pay back my debts. I agreed with all my creditors to pay them back in full through an Individual Voluntary Agreement (IVA). This was formalized when I submitted the IVA to the Stockport courthouse on August 21, 2005.
I submitted my monthly living expenses to an insolvency lawyer. Once this was accepted I received an allowance while the rest of my income went toward repayment of the debts. At the time, I had only enough for my month-to-month living. But I finally paid off the debts in April 2009. It was one of my proudest achievements.
The financial limitations taught me to curb the out-of-control spending that was part of my lifestyle. I had no concept of managing money; it came in, it went out. I learned how valuable it really is, and I also learned that it wasn’t my God-given right as a professional sportsman to avoid tax.
Beyond that, I had one goal: to be on the start line of the 2006 Tour de France. I had a little over ten months to turn my body back into that of a professional cyclist. I knew I could do that—the difficult bit would be finding a team.
I didn’t know where to start when it came to finding a team. I hadn’t been “on the market” since 1996 when I was an amateur looking for that first pro contract. I had given a couple of interviews in which I talked about my plans for a comeback, and after that I heard that a small Spanish team, Saunier Duval—a team I would have never even considered in my pre-ban days—were interested in me.
They had probably the smallest budget and one of the more eclectic rosters in the peloton. They were an opportunistic team—they had to be with such a small budget—and it was clear in their eyes that I was an opportunity: a big-name rider going cheap.
Former pro Max Sciandri had contacted me to ask how I was getting on and what my plans were. Max is about as Italian as they come—except that he’s English. He was born in Derby and his mother is English, and in truth that’s where his Englishness begins and ends. He grew up in Tuscany until his early teens, and then his family emigrated to California, when his father went into the restaurant business.
Max recounts with pride his tale of driving a 1967 Mustang around the West Coast, as a seventeen-year-old boy toy to a successful woman in the movie business. But he missed Italy and cycling, and so he left his family in America and went back to his beloved Tuscany to chase his dream of being a professional cyclist.
He became one of the best one-day riders of his generation and also proved his Englishness, winning two of the World Cup races that used to be held in England and taking a bronze medal in the Atlanta Olympics in the road race, in British colors.
When I told him that I was training again, he asked if I’d like to come and stay with him in Tuscany for a while. I loved Hayfield, but the training wasn’t ideal, so I made the first of what became bimonthly visits to Max in September 2005. Steadily, my strength and fitness was reawakened.
Max loves cycling. He also loves cars, watches, motorbikes, furniture, clothes, snakes, wine, food, and women. But he loves cycling most of all. It was great spending time with him, and his excitement about my comeback was palpable.
Max had a beautiful Tuscan villa on the side of a valley, not far from Pistoia. He’d spent years renovating it but had recently divorced. His wife and three kids had moved out, leaving him skulking around what was now a cold and dark empty house. I could see why he’d wanted me to come over. I nicknamed him Edward Scissorhands.
Max knew everybody in cycling, and he said that he’d speak to a couple of teams for me. At first they were interested, but each time it would fall through. My last chance appeared to be with CSC, the team run by the Danish former Tour winner, Bjarne Riis.
Jean-Marie had asked Riis to consider me, so I met with him in Lucca. Bjarne was very straightforward, and as we chatted he asked me about my life before the ban. I told him, candidly, about life in Biarritz, living in the apartment.
He was shocked to hear this, stunned that I’d always lived on my own.
“Who did your washing and cooking?” he asked. “That’s no way for a professional to live.” I found his attitude—that marriage was a career move—amusing and very old school.
Then I told him that my dream was to make the Tour de France my comeback race.
“That’s not possible on our team,” he told me.
I understood. CSC had many good riders who wanted to be on the Tour team; it wouldn’t have been right to have me, fresh from a doping ban, walk straight into the team and take somebody’s place.
He also believed I’d be better building up to the Vuelta a España, which started two months after my ban ended. He was probably right about this, too, but it didn’t fill me with the same motivation. I needed the grandeur of the Tour to make sense of it all.
My options had narrowed. If I wanted to start the Tour, the only choice I had was Saunier Duval. So we agreed to meet. I flew to Madrid and arrived at their hotel on the evening of the last day of the 2005 Vuelta. It was the first time I’d been to a bike race in fourteen months, and it felt like home.
I’d been wrong to think I’d have teams chasing me. I was in absolutely no position to be looking down my nose at others. My life was now very different, but I still hadn’t fully understood that I no longer had the same status within professional cycling. Now I felt lucky to have just one team wanting me. I didn’t care who or what it was—I needed them more than they needed me.
The Saunier Duval team was run by Mauro Gianetti and Matxin Fernandez. Mauro, the manager, was a Swiss-Italian ex-pro who lived near Lugano, while Matxin, a Cantabrian Spaniard, was the head directeur sportif. Matxin had been an amateur cyclist but had started directing young and then worked his way up through the ranks.
In 2005, he was the youngest head directeur among the top-ranked teams of professional cycling, an impressive achievement for a man who had not earned his stripes racing with the pros. The two of them were entrepreneurs—their team was able to gain results in some of the biggest races and maintain a full complement of riders and a complete race program on what was a shoestring budget. It was remarkable really.
There was another side to this success, though. The majority of their riders were paid very little. These were the riders who didn’t quite make the cut with other teams, for one reason or another. In some ways, it was the perfect comeback team, because if a rider had lost ground, due to injury, illness, or a doping ban, then the one team sure to take them was Saunier Duval. But such an environment was best suited to the desperado mentality, and many in the team—perhaps too many—had nothing to lose.
I knew this was the environment I’d be going into, but convinced that the sport had surely changed in my absence, I was confident that it couldn’t be that bad.
I told myself that I was worrying for nothing, that my anxiety came out of my past bad experiences. Anyway, everybody at Saunier Duval was incredibly friendly, much more so than Cofidis had ever been. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the natural warmth of the Spaniards, but it was an unexpectedly welcoming team.
As I sat with Matxin and a translator in the hotel in Madrid, we agreed that the Tour de France would be my first race back. Then I’d tackle a couple of the big August one-day races before going to the Vuelta a España. This was more like it.
We agreed there and then that, in principle, I would sign with them. The money was less than I’d hoped for, but I was in no position to negotiate. I was tied to a two-year contract, which expired on New Year’s Eve, 2007. It wasn’t ideal, but I’d get to fulfill my plan of making my comeback at the Tour.
A couple of months later, Mauro and Matxin came to London. We signed the contract in the conference room of my law firm in central London. We had a drink to celebrate, and then, with a hug and a handshake, I clambered into a black cab with the bike and clothing they’d brought for me.
It was a typically dark but cheery winter evening in London, with commuters and evening shoppers teeming through the West End. As the black cab began its stop-start journey back to my sister’s place in west London, I sat there with my head against the window, watching it all go by.
I felt no excitement or joy, just weariness. I stared at the bulging bike bag, with SAUNIER DUVAL emblazoned across it, crammed in alongside me.
It hit home. My comeback was really happening.
