Whenever I gave interviews and spoke about how long it would take for cycling to heal itself, I would usually say ten years. Sometimes, people would be shocked or depressed by this answer, but then another scandal would come along to prove my point—just as it did in July 2007.
For the Festina affair read Operación Puerto, for David Millar read Alexandre Vinokourov.
Once the race had left England, things got worse at the 2007 Tour. The British tabloid press—not for the first time—called it the Tour de Farce. After tying himself in knots over whether he had lied to the UCI, his team, and the media over missed doping controls, the race leader, Michael Rasmussen, quit the race in shame under cover of darkness. Hot on his heels, Kazakh Alexandre Vinokourov, lauded for his coverage and gutsy riding, tested positive.
Vinokourov—“Vino”—and his Astana team had arrived at the Tour with the intention of total domination, but a crash in the first week had effectively killed off his overall chances. But in a startling return to form, he recovered to win a time trial in dominant fashion and then one of that year’s hardest mountain stages in the Pyrenees. L’Équipe hailed it as “Le Courage de Vino”—within forty-eight hours, courage had turned to dopage.
On the Tour’s second rest day in Pau, Saunier Duval had organized a press conference, publicizing the sponsor’s involvement in conservation. Knowing that not many from the media would come to us, we took it to them, holding court in the press center at the Palais des Congrès.
There were three Saunier Duval riders: Spanish climber Iban Mayo—the day after the 2007 Tour finished it was announced that he had been random controlled that very day and had tested positive for EPO—Christophe Rinero, my old Cofidis teammate, and myself.
It was a lackluster affair. Almost all the questions were directed toward me, and there was little interest in Saunier Duval’s good deeds. The few journalists there were trying their best just to find things to ask, hoping perhaps to give the whole affair some heart. It was a little desperate really and in truth a bit embarrassing.
So we were all easily distracted by a buzz that suddenly started to wash over the press room. Watching from the platform, as people started running, phones rang off the hook, and shouts erupted across the desks; it felt like a tsunami. I could feel something malevolent in the distance heading my way. Then it hit us, full force—a tidal wave of shit.
British journalist Daniel Friebe told me what had happened. Vinokourov had tested positive after his two stage wins. I was in total shock.
I collapsed inside. Vino had been one of my heroes. I loved his attacking style and truly believed if anybody could do it clean, then he could. Admittedly, I’d been a little disturbed when it had been disclosed pre-Tour that he was trained by Michele Ferrari, and his total avoidance of tackling the subject of doping disappointed me, too, but at the same time, if I was clean and never doped, I’d be pissed off about being asked about it over and over again. And after all, I’d worked with Luigi Cecchini and been clean—I wasn’t exactly in a position to jump to conclusions about Vino working with Ferrari.
Daniel asked me for my reaction. My response was simple, off the cuff. “We may as well pack our bags and go home,” I said. Mayo and Rinero, sitting alongside, sensing my mood, shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
As soon as I said it, I knew I couldn’t throw in the towel like that. I wasn’t allowed to believe that. I’d promised myself that when coming back to the sport I would take responsibility. So I tried to gather myself, to defend the progress being made in anti-doping, saying that the very fact that Vino had been caught was a massive step forward. I remember giving my heartfelt opinion on it all and there being a ripple of applause when I’d finished. But the shock was deep, and it was all such a blur.
We stood up to leave. A huddle of journalists quickly surrounded me, and Paul Kimmage began to berate me. I can’t even remember what Kimmage was saying, but I felt woozy with it all, desperate for some fresh air. Eventually the huddle broke up. Jeremy Whittle from The Times, who’d seen me go through a lot, always there as a witness and often as a friend, sensed my unease.
“David,” he said. “Are you all right?”
I began to well up. “I just feel like crying,” I said and then sat down on the nearest chair.
He put his arm around my shoulder and allowed the mask to fall. I just sat there, head in my hands, in tears. Meanwhile, Kimmage watched from across the room.
In the Sunday Times that weekend, Kimmage skewered me, accusing me of crying for Vinokourov, talking of my “tears for a cheat.”
He was wrong. They were not tears for a cheat, nor were they tears of self-pity, desperation, or fatigue.
I wept because suddenly, definitively, I fully understood the gravity of what I’d done to my sport and to everybody who had believed in me, cheered for me, defended me, and trusted in me. I’d broken their hearts the way that Vino had broken mine.
—
The Tour de France always ends with a party, and 2007 was no different. I didn’t linger at the Saunier Duval function as I wasn’t really hanging out with the riders by this point. We weren’t enemies—we just didn’t really have much reason to spend time together away from racing.
Afterward, Nicole and our photographer friend Camille McMillan popped into the CSC team’s bash, hooked up with Christian Vande Velde, and then headed off to the private party that the Discovery Channel team—who’d just won the Tour with Alberto Contador—was hosting in the Hotel Crillon.
We wandered into the penthouse of the Crillon and, to our surprise, stumbled on one of the cooler post-Tour parties that I’ve been to. Given how corporate Discovery could be, this was a surprise.
Discovery had the best after-party?
Although Contador had won the Tour, the team’s management figureheads—recently retired Lance Armstrong and his long-standing colleagues Johan Bruyneel and Bill Stapleton—couldn’t find a new sponsor. Yet—after winning eight Tours and also earning significant wealth—instead of thanking the sport and bowing out graciously, they were critical.
“It’s not an environment right now that’s conducive to a lot of investment,” Stapleton said, as a way of explaining their inability to find a sponsor.
“Clearly things need to improve on many levels, with a more unified front, before you would see us venture back into cycling,” Lance stated.
Bruyneel, Stapleton, and Armstrong, in particular, owed everything to cycling, and yet now they treated it with what I felt was disdain.
I’d written to Lance criticizing his disregard for the state of cycling, and attacking the way that the Discovery team had signed Ivan Basso, despite the allegations of doping against him. Basso was still at the center of the Operación Puerto storm, and, due to the tacit agreement between most teams not to sign or race those under investigation, their pursuit of Basso had seemed deliberately provocative. I believed that to be particularly irresponsible and of no help to the state of cycling at that time.
The thought of them walking away from cycling like that was on my mind when I saw Lance at the Crillon and wandered over to say hello.
Earlier that day, I’d been among the only guys in the peloton not wearing Livestrong-branded sunglasses on the final stage, something I was sure he knew. Oakley—a company that sponsored dozens of cyclists and one I’d had a long relationship with—had sent people around the team buses the day before the Paris stage, handing out black-and-yellow Livestrong sunglasses for the riders to wear on the Champs-Élysées.
I’d always liked Lance, but I didn’t feel like representing him or his brand. I could have justified wearing the glasses and supporting the cancer charity, but at the same time Livestrong, especially at the Tour de France, was much more representative of Lance Armstrong, the brand, than it was of a cancer charity. So I made the decision not to wear the sunglasses. I didn’t think it had been fair of Oakley. It seemed to me that the company was almost forcing them on us, and I really didn’t like that.
Lance is a charismatic but controversial man. All the good he’s done has been tarnished by the never-ending accusations. His wins in the Tour de France came during what was one of the most doped periods of professional cycling. Almost every single one of his ex-teammates who attempted to come out of his shadow was caught for doping, and some have also made allegations against him. Tyler Hamilton, Roberto Heras, Floyd Landis—they were all Lance’s lieutenants who changed teams and tried to beat him. Yet, once on other teams, all of them ended up failing doping controls.
I can’t say definitively if Lance doped or not. Yes, there are all the stories and rumors, but I never saw him dope with my own eyes. If he did dope, then, after all that he has said and done, it would be disappointing to say the least. Certainly, his performances in the Tour were extraordinary, unprecedented, but then he’s unlike anybody I have ever met, a force of nature. But I felt he could have done more and he should have done more against doping; he was in a position to make a difference and to help his sport, but I never saw any evidence of that.
He is a phenomenal human being—I would never argue against that. He lives life on a different level, controlling his world in an omnipotent manner, leading by example but also by fear. His ability to motivate, based on his absolute self-belief and complete fearlessness of failure, is legendary. His own lack of fear brainwashes those around him to believe in everything he does.
But you don’t fuck with Lance because he will not forgive you—in his mind, in cycling at least, forgiveness equates to weakness. What also sets him apart is his ability always to be switched on, to not make mistakes. Every detail is thought of and taken care of. Yet there’s no doubt he’s an odd fish, and sometimes unpredictable. After we started chatting at the Crillon, I quickly got on to the subject of the Livestrong sunglasses.
“Of course I noticed you didn’t wear them, Dave,” he said, calmly, “but it’s your choice.”
I explained that I didn’t agree with Oakley forcing them on us, that they didn’t have the right. So what did Lance say in response?
“You want me to speak to Oakley and get them to sort you out a new contract?”
That threw me, although not for long. So then I asked him if he’d received the e-mails I’d sent him the year before, taking him and Discovery to task for signing Basso, e-mails that he’d not responded to.
July 2007, Paris. My soapbox moment with Lance Armstrong. Christian Vande Velde and Nicole share a panicked glance as I begin my diatribe.
“Yeah, I saw them,” he said.
By now, drink in hand, I was warming to my theme.
“Look, Lance—I know how much you love the Tour,” I said, “but you’re alienating yourself from it more and more. What are you going to do twenty years from now if you’re not welcome back? How can they invite you back as a past champion if you treat the sport like shit and are clouded in controversy …?”
Lance stared at me. So did a wide-eyed Christian and an increasingly unnerved Nicole, standing alongside me. I continued, undeterred.
“You didn’t win seven Tours without loving the sport—I know that. Give something back, help us clean up the sport; it doesn’t matter what happened when you raced, it’s what happens now and in the future …”
I awaited his response.
“Dave,” he said, “of course I love the sport, but I can’t help it if it won’t help itself. I’ve got bigger things to do now, Dave, and shit—life is amazing away from cycling. I could tell you stories you wouldn’t believe. I’m moving on.”
I shook my head. “Lance, that’s bullshit. You will always come back to cycling …”
We talked a little more, and I told him about what Jonathan and I were doing. I knew Jonathan and Lance had history, and I didn’t want that affecting Slipstream’s future, so I suggested that we should be allies, not enemies. We parted on good terms, I think—but I’d perhaps lectured him for a little too long—ten minutes too long …
Camille took a photo of our encounter. Lance is staring at me, stony-faced, as I lecture him. Alongside me is an edgy Christian, who had been on one of Lance’s Tour-winning teams and knew better than to say what I was saying.
Sadly, I think it was the beginning of the end of my friendship with Lance. He’d always stood by me and supported me, but I was now a different person from who I had been when we’d first met. And I could no longer pretend otherwise—even with Lance.
—
Saunier Duval dropped me from their team for that autumn’s Vuelta. I was pissed off, but I knew that I was paying the price for my conflicts with the team earlier that year. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was the end of the Worlds, because, without racing in the Vuelta before the World Championships, I stood little chance of competing against those who had.
So I focused on other things and was very proud to win both the British road and time trial titles. As I had won the individual pursuit title earlier in the year, this meant that I held three of the most prestigious national championships.
It was very important to me, and it meant that I’d race all road events in the following year in the white jersey of British national champion. It felt fitting that I’d be launching my dream team wearing my country’s colors.
My standing as a reformed athlete was growing and UK Sport had put me forward as the British nomination for the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Athlete Committee. This was a complete surprise and a great honor. It gave my anti-doping role within sport an official title.
Each stakeholder country in WADA can put forward a recommended nominee for the committee. It’s then up to the WADA executive committee to select who it believes is an appropriate addition and matches the cross-section they are looking for.
The majority of the committee is made up of former athletes, but there are a few who are still active. But there wasn’t—nor had there ever been—an ex-doper or a professional cyclist.
Suggesting my name was a forward-thinking move by UK Sport, but one that we thought might not be supported by WADA, which had long been critical of cycling’s record on doping. But my nomination was approved, and I was elected to a three-year term on the Athlete Committee. I was now officially part of WADA, the global agency promoting anti-doping—something that would have seemed preposterous a few years earlier.
Meanwhile, Slipstream had signed almost all its riders, securing three of the biggest names in American cycling—Christian Vande Velde, Dave Zabriskie, and Tyler Farrar. I’d played a big part in securing their signatures. In fact, I’d spent hours persuading all our bigger names to come to the team.
It was a labor of love for JV, Doug, and me. We didn’t follow the usual route of bouncing numbers back and forth to agents. We wanted whoever came to the team to understand what we were about. I loved this and became our chief persuader.
Our first get-together was in Boulder, Colorado, in November 2007. There was immediately a different vibe from any cycling environment I’d known before. Everybody was excited, from the young bloods getting their big break to the seasoned campaigners like myself. We all felt that we were part of something different.
I finally signed my contract during the camp. We’d agreed to financial terms months before, but, more importantly, I also became a part owner of the team. This was rare in cycling, and it demonstrated how the relationship between Doug, JV, and myself had grown over the previous year. It also meant that my money was where my mouth was, and we thought this to be very important, given how much of myself I was putting into it all.
We had a blast in Boulder. Our recruitment strategy had worked well; we were all slightly different from the usual professional cyclist, and, paradoxically, our individualist maverick personalities knitted together well. As most of us came from the English-speaking world, we had a cycling culture that was different from the traditional one. This was new-world cycling—there was to be no more old-world mentality.
Team Slipstream launch poster.
February 2008, Tour of California. The team of misfits begins its journey. Left to right: Cozza, Vande Velde, me, Peterson, Zabriskie, Pate.
It was an attitude that carried us through that first year. From our garish orange-and-blue argyle kit to our complete transparency with the media, we stood out. At one of our first races, the Tour of California, I even shared my room for two nights with a journalist. Fortunately, he was a cool guy and we talked as much about music and books as we did about cycling, but it wasn’t exactly conducive to resting during a stage race. Visiting the restaurants of one of our sponsors, Chipotle, for appearances and signings in each of the towns the race visited wasn’t the best move for post-race recovery, either, but we were on a steep learning curve.
The Tour of California was our first major outing as a team, and we were dominant. Christian and I both finished in the top three, Tyler spent a day in the race leader’s jersey, and we won the teams’ classification. As the year went on, we proved to be good at hitting our objectives.
Young Dutch signing Martijn Maaskant rode to a superb fourth place in Paris–Roubaix, we won the team time trial stage on the first day of the Giro d’Italia and Christian took the coveted Giro leader’s pink jersey. It was a massive result for Slipstream—our first Grand Tour and we won the first stage and put an American into the lead. The result was the perfect example of the mixture we had created of science and spirit.
But on the day, what made it possible for us all to implement that blend was Matt White. He had been on the steepest learning curve of all, having been thrown in at the deep end from the beginning of the year. By the start of the Giro, Matt had learned an unfathomable amount and was already capable of doing his job better than 90 percent of the directeurs sportifs already in cycling.
The rousing speech he gave us before the Giro’s team time trial remains one of my most memorable sporting moments. We were inspired, and I’ll never forget us congregating after the finish and congratulating one another on the perfect ride. We all knew that we couldn’t have gone any faster, and, even though we had to wait another forty-five minutes before we were confirmed as the winners, we didn’t care what the result was as we had nothing to reproach ourselves for. It was an amazing feeling.
It was my first experience of the Giro, and it was easily the most physically demanding Grand Tour I’d ever done. I wasn’t exactly on top form, having peaked for the very start of the year, yet on the sixth stage I found myself in contention for the win. I had nothing planned that day and, in fact, was so relaxed that I’d missed the peloton rolling out from the start, because I’d been chatting to Max Sciandri in the start village.
I tagged onto the very back of the bunch and was perfectly happy just to sit where I was and make my way to the finish, with as little exertion as possible.
But that day my legs felt magical. I was so fluid that I couldn’t feel the pedals, so I decided I’d make my way to the front of the peloton. When I got there, the attacks had already started, and the next thing I knew, I had broken clear with four others. In total, we rode in the break for 180 kilometers.
I felt in control the whole day. When it became clear that we wouldn’t be caught before the finish line, I weighed up my options and assessed the other riders. I planned to control any attacks in the group and win in a sprint.
But the others in the breakaway knew that, if we finished the stage sprinting, I was the most likely to win, so one by one they attacked. Each time, I chased them down, and reeled them in, but the acceleration to shut down the penultimate attack caused something to go wrong with my chain.
As we were inside the last 2 kilometers, there was no time to change bikes, so I couldn’t do anything about it. The final attack came under the “1-kilometer-to-go” flamme rouge. As I sprinted after the move to close it down, my chain snapped. I ground to a halt, while the others rode on to contest the stage.
I knew what had happened instantly. Anger coursed through me. In one furious movement, I was off the bike, standing in the road, and, in a red mist, hurling the bike powerfully over the crowd barriers.
The bike went arching through the air into the Italian countryside, while I was left standing like a lemon in the middle of the road, live on TV. I was so angry. I knew how rarely the stars align like that, and I was furious that victory had been taken away from me because of the rarest of mechanicals.
People may love Italy, but I hated the rest of that Giro. Every day my loathing grew, particularly as we traveled more kilometers in the bus, transferring to and from stage starts and finishes, than we did racing on the bike. The Giro made the Tour seem a civilized affair, and the Vuelta feel like a holiday camp.
After the race ended, our grand plan was to go straight to altitude in Saint-Moritz and then to the Pyrenees, first to recover and then to train. JV was a big fan of altitude training, and he was convinced it would give us a significant advantage at the Tour. He was right.
I was flying in the Tour’s first few days, finishing second in the time trial by only a second (on the day, I was actually a distant third, but the winner was Stefan Schumacher, who tested positive and was later wiped from the results).
My form really lasted for only the first week, but meanwhile Christian developed into a Tour contender, finishing fourth in Paris with little support from the team. It was a strange experience for me. I’d gone from the team’s big name and hope to an also-ran, while watching Christian race against the best and finally take control of his fate. I wasn’t jealous, but I wished I could have been him. I would have loved to have experienced that.
Christian had come to Slipstream after a spell as a deluxe-domestique on the CSC team. His father had been a pro rider, and he’d grown up among the biggest names in American cycling. He was freakishly talented, and had turned pro in 1998 on Lance Armstrong’s U.S. Postal team. For a while he was touted as “the next Lance,” but he suffered from high expectations and repeated injuries, not to mention the somewhat unhealthy environment of pro cycling during his first years as a professional.
The U.S. Postal team wasn’t known for nurturing riders, and it wasn’t long before Christian was jettisoned from the team. His battle back to the top had been a long and painful one, and his attitude had become that of a worker. He didn’t see himself as a winner anymore, so to see him rediscover himself at the Tour was emotional, and I was very proud of him.
There was a real togetherness about Slipstream. Everything was so different from how it had been for me in the past. We all got on so well and had so much fun, and, most importantly, we shared a mother tongue. Since turning pro at nineteen, I’d never been on a team where we spoke English, yet it had never occurred to me how important this was.
Sharing a common first language felt like such a luxury. Communication was so much better. It didn’t matter that we were American, Australian, Canadian, Scottish, and Kiwi—we were English speakers in a foreign world, and it proved to be a very powerful bond between us.
I think we were respected for bringing a breath of fresh air to a stagnant arena. We never took ourselves too seriously and demonstrated that being clean didn’t mean being boring or worthy; in fact, quite the contrary, we were fun and interesting.
As I relished racing with Slipstream, Saunier Duval finally fell into the abyss. Predictably enough, it was the precocious Ricco who led the way. This time he didn’t get away with it, and both he and Leonardo Piepoli tested positive after winning Tour stages in the Pyrenees. There was little joy in watching their downfall, only satisfaction in knowing they’d been caught.
On the morning that the police turned up at the start village to arrest Ricco, our team bus was parked alongside theirs. As we watched the mêlée, all of us had something to say about him, except Christian, who just stayed quiet. At first I didn’t understand him, but then I realized why. Christian was angry.
Ricco represented a lot more than just another doper to Christian. He represented every doper, every cheat who had ever ridden past him and crushed his own hopes.
When he was younger, Christian had been discarded, written off for not living up to expectations, without anybody truly understanding the reasons why he couldn’t compete. Things were now changing, but Christian would never get back the lost years of his professional career.
—
The more she learned about my old life, the more Nicole was thankful that we’d met when we did. Often, when I was in my cups, retelling some anecdote from the past for the umpteenth time, she’d shake her head in disbelief.
“Oh my God,” she would say, “I’m so glad I didn’t know you then.”
Nicole much preferred the Hayfield-living, clapped-out Mazda-driving, penniless me to the Biarritz-based, Jaguar-wielding, fashion-victim playboy. She found even the thought of it ridiculous.
“You were such a dick, David!”
My feet are always on the ground with Nicole.
It was down to her support and belief that I’d made my comeback so quickly and to such a high level. She was strength personified when it came to supporting me. But being a professional athlete’s partner or relative is not easy because we live very selfish, goal-oriented lives.
Although we’re often at home, we are rarely actually there, our heads being wrapped up in whatever our next sporting objective may be. At times the self-absorption is taken to the point of obsession. Life boils down to the cycle of racing, training, eating, resting, dieting.
And if one of those functions isn’t going well, the subsequent neurosis leads to misery. The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away. Nicole is good at keeping me in the real world. I can have my bubble, but it’s not quite as small as it once was.
In the old days, I had always yo-yoed between the obsessive and the cracked. I never found balance. I even convinced myself that’s how I was programmed to be and that in order to get the best out of myself, I had to live that way.
But when I met Nicole and saw how hard she worked every day in London, I realized that balance was possible. She worked like a maniac when I met her, but she knew what the real world was about, and she couldn’t believe how easy we had it as professional cyclists.
We get paid to compete in sport, we get paid well, we often enjoy public acclaim, and we live in beautiful places. Competition is tough and there are sacrifices, but in many ways we don’t have to work that hard.
Nicole loves sport. She dreams of being a successful athlete and possesses the work ethic and competitive spirit to have reached the top, if she’d had the raw physical talent. She never lets me forget how lucky I am and the good fortune I have had to live my dream.
I spent three years telling Nicole we’d never get married. I couldn’t understand why we needed to. We loved each other and would always be together—why ruin it by getting married? Marriage made no sense to me, and I was passionately against it.
I wondered if that anxiety was rooted in my parents’ divorce. But Nicole’s parents are divorced, too, and yet she is a strong advocate of marriage. In the autumn of 2008, I realized that I was making no sense. If I knew we were made for each other, then I should stop being, as Nicole would say, “a dick.”
Whitey accompanied me as no-nonsense moral support when I went to the jewelers to pick up the ring. A week later Nicole and I traveled back to England to visit her family in Henley-on-Thames. I planned to ask her when we were there.
It was ironic that on the way to Henley, the ring tucked safely away in my jacket, Nicole told me that she was no longer bothered about marriage. Later on that evening, after I’d asked her dad’s permission, we went for a walk.
I finally plucked up the courage to ask the question and then to offer her the ring.
Nicole looked puzzled.
“David—really …?” she asked.
—
Jonathan Vaughters and I had long wanted to sign Bradley Wiggins to Slipstream, but he hadn’t wanted to change his professional team in an Olympic year. So we had to wait until after the Beijing Games in 2008.
I didn’t know Brad that well at the time, but we had always had conversations, and I felt that we were closer than most in the peloton. In truth, this had only ever been due to our shared nationality. We didn’t have a relationship outside of cycling, but this wasn’t unusual. There were many riders that I got on with well in the peloton, yet had never hung out with off the bike.
Our bond had been formed in 2007, on three memorable occasions. The first came when we’d found ourselves climbing the Ventoux, side by side, and had both removed our helmets, as a mark of respect, as we rode past the Tom Simpson memorial. Later that summer, at the Tour de France, our teams had been staying in the same hotel when the police had taken his Cofidis team into custody after one of its riders, Cristian Moreni, tested positive.
Brad was mortified by the Moreni affair. That evening, we had chatted for a while, and the next morning I gave him one of my Saunier Duval T-shirts so that he didn’t have to wear Cofidis-branded clothing on the way home. Then, over a beer, as the season ended, we had one of our deepest conversations about my past and our futures. I was looking forward to having him as a teammate.
June 2007, Mont Ventoux. Bradley Wiggins and I remove our helmets on passing the Tommy Simpson memorial.
That November, Brad and I flew out to Boulder to join the team for our annual “bonding” week. We began to spend a lot more time together and got on even better than I’d expected.
He was good company, very funny to be around, but I felt he had something of a chameleonlike personality: a strong desire to blend in and tell people what he thought they wanted to hear.
His ability to observe and assimilate was best displayed in his phenomenal ability as a mimic. He had us in complete hysterics most of the time. He is a born entertainer. When he’s had a few drinks, Brad morphs into his Liam Gallagher persona, an act that bears little resemblance to his real self. It’s funny watching him trying to be edgy and cool, when he’s one of the straightest people I know.
Brad is a very dedicated, driven, self-obsessed and, ultimately, sensible man—he wouldn’t have achieved the success he has achieved if he wasn’t. On form, he is a superb rider, but the talk in his own book of nearly becoming an alcoholic during his post–Beijing Olympic comedown doesn’t add up for me. He is too controlled for that.
Brad looks after number one, and that’s one of the traits that makes him so successful. But I think he sometimes takes advantage of the admiring and respectful reaction to him.
When we signed him, he was one of the world’s best prologue riders and a possible future contender for the Classics. Contrary to what JV would have people think, we had absolutely no idea he would become a Grand Tour contender or challenger in anything but the flattest and most simple of stage races. We never expected that he would one day finish fourth in the Tour—as he did in 2009.
Brad’s quirky personality was perfect for our team, and his approach fitted the way we operated, because he is very professional and dedicated. His ability to nail objectives is remarkable and comes from years of controlling variables and targeting one-off events—such as the Olympics—on the track. After many years of underachieving in road racing, he was finally beginning to show signs of development. We planned to bring it to fruition.
—
Just as we were getting ready to move on with the Slipstream project, my sister started calling me more often, asking hypothetical questions about setting up a professional team. By 2009, she was working closely with Dave Brailsford, acting as his right hand as he worked toward his dream of putting together an elite European team.
Prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, SKY had sponsored what was to become one of the most successful British teams in history. The Brailsford-led track team took over the Olympic velodrome in Beijing, winning the majority of gold medals on offer, as Brad, Chris Hoy, and Vicki Pendleton became household names.
Sponsoring Team GB was a masterstroke by SKY, and, buoyed by Olympic success, they were quickly infatuated with cycling. It offered the perfect marketing tool for them, a mass participation sport that reached a massive audience. As SKY’s interest grew, Dave used his influence and the track team’s success to lever the sponsorship he needed in order to create his Tour de France team. Fran was now effectively drafting the blueprint for this, and I offered her and Dave as much advice as I could.
Dave’s vision was more Formula 1 than professional cycling, but they had to learn an awful lot very quickly, and had to grasp the fundamentals of what was effectively a completely foreign sport. Track cycling and road racing are completely different beasts.
I was fascinated by their plan. In many ways, much of what we’d created with Slipstream had been based on what I’d learned from Dave. His methodology and management style, militaristic in its precision and planning, was like nothing else that existed in cycling.
Initially, it was out of the question that I might leave Slipstream, but the prospect of working with Dave and my sister captured my imagination. Before long, the subject had been broached, and I met with Dave and France.
The thought of joining SKY was exciting, but neither Dave nor I could fully commit; I felt great loyalty and love for where I was, and Dave had a more surprising reason—one that I wasn’t to discover for a few more months.
JV, Christian, and most of the Slipstream team seemed resigned to the prospect of my leaving for SKY. They knew how close I was to Dave and were aware of the admiration I had for him. The fact that my sister was the other key player made it seem all the more inevitable. Yet I didn’t want to leave; every time I went to a race, I was reminded of what an amazing team Slipstream was. I was totally confused.
Then I broke my collarbone in Paris–Nice and found myself on the sidelines, with too much time to think. Eventually, I decided I would definitely stay with Slipstream. Then I decided I’d absolutely definitely go to SKY.
In the end, the decision was made for me. Dave told me that SKY couldn’t take me because of my doping past and that he would be enforcing a zero tolerance policy toward any members of the SKY professional cycling team having any prior doping history.
I understood their position and didn’t hold any bad feelings, certainly not toward Dave. After all, he’d stood by me through the most horrible of times when everyone else had fled. Dave didn’t owe me anything. In fact, it was the reverse, because he’d contributed hugely to my renaissance.
But it brought home how little Dave and SKY knew or understood the world the team would soon be entering. In the current climate, it is nigh on impossible to construct a professional cycling team without people involved who have encountered doping in one form or another. Doping had been so prevalent on the European scene that the whole team would have to be under twenty-five to come close to guaranteeing no doping history. Even then, you couldn’t be sure.
This was where JV and Slipstream had been so smart. He had accepted the pragmatic truth that, in order to create a clean modern team, you had to acknowledge the past. He knew that the past couldn’t be swept under the carpet; it had to be understood and accepted, not ignored and forgotten.
—
Part of Slipstream’s bid to be as transparent as possible meant confronting our demons. One of mine came in the form of Irish sportswriter and former pro cyclist Paul Kimmage, a winner of sportswriter of the year and also author of the groundbreaking Rough Ride.
Kimmage and I had history. When I’d been embroiled in the opening cross fire of the Cofidis affair and mired in denial, Paul had wanted to interview me. Paranoid and scared, not to mention knowing that he was fervently anti-doping, and—so I thought at the time—anti-cycling, I declined.
That made him angry. Typically, he wrote about me anyway and published an article, in which it became clear that I had threatened to sue him and the Sunday Times. It became a bit of a mess, although not one that I was particularly concerned with, as a far bigger judicial problem was heading my way.
The conflict left its mark on Paul, though, and was probably one of the reasons why he held me in such incredibly low esteem. That said, I think there are many people on Paul’s radar who are held in low esteem, so it wasn’t as if I was getting his undivided attention.
His “tears for a cheat” article on me after the Vinokourov doping scandal simply reinforced the sentiments we shared for each other. I saw him as bitter, small-minded, and unforgiving. He didn’t believe I had reformed—he saw me as lying scum.
That was how things stood when JV called me to ask if I’d be open to being interviewed by him. He also asked if I’d mind if he followed the team through our first Tour de France. Initially, I wasn’t keen and expressed my doubts to JV, but then, after some thought, accepted that it would be the ultimate display of transparency. Showing a renowned and skeptical journalist who hated my guts and didn’t trust me or believe that we were sincere and trustworthy would surely silence the majority of doubters. There was no option really.
Paul came to our training camp in the Pyrenees about two weeks before the Tour started. This seemed like a good idea as we had a fair bit of ice to break through. I had already decided that I had no problem wiping the slate clean and, in fact, felt I had become quite accustomed to it.
But I was interested to see how Kimmage would be with me. Paul seems on edge the whole time and finds it very hard to make eye contact unless he’s the Interviewer. There is no spontaneity in his style; it is not a conversation. Instead, it is a formal interview that has been scrupulously researched and structured. He is a professional through and through. First though, we had to bury the hatchet.
I was very welcoming to Paul, which I don’t think he expected. We shook hands, went up to the apartment I was staying in, and sat down at the dining table.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
This was classic Kimmage, no messing around, straight to the point. He handed me a pile of faxed pages, with key sections highlighted.
Jeremy Whittle’s book, Bad Blood, had come out that very day. In one chapter, Jeremy met with Paul to talk about doping. Kimmage had been unflinching in his criticism of me and of my comeback to the sport.
One strike and you’re out [he’d said]. I find it hard to accept that he is now being heralded as a whistle-blower. He didn’t blow any whistles, didn’t do any favours to cycling.
When I see Millar welcomed back like a hero … I mean—I tried to do the sport a service. But he hasn’t shat on any of his pals, he’s still playing the game, still respecting the omertà.
Millar should not have been let back into the sport. He should have been banned for life. Until the sport does that, there’s no chance.
I read through the pages slowly, enjoying how uncomfortable Paul was. I knew what he thought of me, and in some ways it was actually liberating to have him sit and watch me while I read it. I put my hand in the fire and held it there.
I didn’t think Paul was objective about cycling.
Confronting doping—confronting me—was so personal for Paul. Sometimes I couldn’t believe that he even covered cycling, given his bitterness and the emotionally charged hold that it had on him.
I’d been amazed to read an article he’d authored about the Étape du Tour, the mass-participation event, organized by ASO, that re-creates a mountain stage of the Tour de France. In the piece, he had belittled all those who took part, making them sound like complete imbeciles for wanting to emulate professional cyclists.
I thought it was a very misjudged piece, but it allowed me to look at him differently. He had never forgiven cycling for what he perceived it had done to him. He was an embittered fanatic, but as my mum always told me: “There’s a very fine line between love and hate.”
And I think this was the problem. He still wanted to love cycling, but he couldn’t reconcile the gray world in which it existed with the black-and-white world he longed for.
I put the pages down.
“Well, I think we’ve both said things about each other,” I said. “If we’re going to do this, then we need to start at zero.”
He nodded, and we shook hands.
I genuinely meant what I said. After all, I was the ex-doper, the enemy. If he was willing to give me a second chance, then I was sure I could win him over; I was just as sure that he wanted to be won over.
He wanted to believe in cycling again, and I wanted to help him rediscover his faith.
