Life is about making decisions, and my relationship with David Millar has informed some of the toughest and most critical decisions in my career. Looking back, his experience has also been pivotal in fueling my passionate belief in clean sport.
I first crossed paths with David in 2002 at the World Road Championships in Belgium. I was working as performance director to Team GB, and he was riding for the British team. It was clear from the outset that he was different from any other bike rider I’d met before. Hugely talented, ambitious, and extroverted, Dave was a thoroughbred.
He was intelligent and strong-willed, yet also very vulnerable. It is rare for me to mix personal with professional, but we got on immediately, and he is one of the few riders that I have also become close friends with.
Dave was already clearly frustrated with the “old school” thinking of the European scene. We talked about working together, developing new ways of thinking about racing and equipment, and taking those ideas into Europe. I knew that with the right environment he could go on to great things.
Yet in hindsight, I can look back and see that there were nagging worries. Dave was something of a wild child, living life to the full, lacking the kind of mentoring that he needed at the time. I knew he had doubts about the team that he was on, that he was under a lot of pressure, that some aspects of his lifestyle were extreme, but I didn’t know how far that extreme lifestyle had gone, or that there was another side to his life that he couldn’t share.
I had just come back to Biarritz with him, after watching him race in the buildup to the Athens Olympics, when it all came tumbling down. I looked on in horror and disbelief as the French police arrested him, just as we settled down to dinner in one of his favorite restaurants in Biarritz. It was a shocking moment, something I never want to experience again. Only then did I begin to understand his secret life and how deeply ashamed he was of betraying his ideals and his family and friends.
Dave’s arrest put me in a difficult situation. I was advised, in no uncertain terms, to leave as quickly as possible, to ensure that British Cycling was not tarnished by scandal. Ultimately though, I had nothing to hide and had done nothing wrong. I was warned that it could be damaging to my reputation, but I felt that I had a duty of care to Dave. I decided that the right thing to do was to stay.
He was in custody for seventy-two hours. The French police were brutal and very aggressive. I was interrogated for almost five hours, but they finally completely acknowledged that I had no involvement at all. I waited until Dave was released, exiting through the back door of the police station to avoid the media. Then I told him to tell me everything.
Over the next few days, as we talked openly about what he had done and what he had been through, the murky world of doping—something I had never encountered—became real. It opened my eyes as I learned how the culture of doping had poisoned his life. It was a steep learning curve for me, but his experience has given me valuable insight and helped me to further develop the strong ethical values that are now the foundation for Team GB and Team SKY. I have seen firsthand how doping can almost wreck an athlete’s life—I am determined it will not happen to any athlete in my charge.
Dave and I came close to working together a couple of years ago, when Team SKY was being developed. The team would have benefited from his racing knowledge, from his performances, and from his experience as a captain on the road. In the end, however, the premise of Team SKY, emphatically founded on creating a team that exemplifies clean sport and that has a zero tolerance on employing anybody with any doping history, made it impossible for him to join.
I am convinced Dave has learned his lesson. Since his comeback, he’s become a reformed character, a voluble contributor to the anti-doping debate through his work with Garmin-Slipstream, UK Sport, and WADA. More remarkably, his passion for cycling is undimmed, despite everything he went through. It’s very clear to anybody who knows him that he will always love riding his bike. That alone probably tells you more about who he really is than any number of speeches.
Most importantly, Dave’s story reveals what I have long believed—that, in the wrong environment, under the wrong influences, even people with the greatest integrity can make the wrong decisions. Although the culture of doping in sport is often depicted as black and white, it can be insidious and subtle: on the one hand, it exploits the vulnerable and pressurized athlete; on the other, it enables the cynical to clinically cheat. That’s why the David Millar story is so valuable and so instructive to all those who care about ethics in sport.
David Brailsford, CBE
Performance Director,
British Cycling and Principal,
Team SKY