In May 2004, on the eve of a race in northern France, I walked into the lobby
of David Millar’s team hotel and left a handwritten letter for him at
reception.
"David, In a recent interview with Procycling (magazine) you expressed your
frustration at the lack of coverage you’ve been getting in the mass media.
The stage is yours. I’ve a lot of interesting questions for you. This is my
mobile number.
"Regards. . ."
Two days later, his solicitor replied.
"Dear sir, We act for David Millar. It has come to our attention that your
newspaper may be about to publish an article about our client and the
Cofidis cycling team . . . If you publish any suggestion that our client has
taken banned substances we will bring legal proceedings against you.
"Yours faithfully. . ."
We published the article; there were no legal proceedings. But I never got to
ask him those interesting questions. Until now. Last Wednesday in Brest, on
the eve of his seventh Tour de France, he invited me back to his room. A
small TV in the corner was showing highlights of Murray and Nadal. He
reached for the remote and zapped the screen.
“Right, where do we start?”
A nightclub in Manchester. Let’s start at a nightclub in Manchester as Millar
struts his stuff on the dance floor and wiggles his bony ass. The month is
November 2003, six months before our contretemps in France, and after a
lengthy interview with Procycling, the recently crowned world time trial
champion has decided to hit the town.
Those cool, designer threads he is wearing have been crafted by his friend
Paul Smith. That timepiece on his wrist is a Rolex Explorer 2. Outside, the
car parked kerbside is a British racing green Jaguar S-type R. It has fine
leather seats, cruise control and (optional extra) Lance Armstrong on
speed-dial. Millar is 27 years old and trades on the image of the “dandy” of
professional cycling. His flip-side is less appealing. He’s a selfish,
materialistically-driven bastard.
He has just dumped his long-time girlfriend, Megan, because she asked him to
visit her family in Australia. He has signed a new mega-bucks deal with his
team but is cheating on his taxes. He owns a loft apartment in Manchester
and two properties in Biarritz . . . oh, and he’s a fully paid-up member of
the Brotherhood of the Needle. Yes, that’s right, the dandy is a doper, has
been for years.
Does he worry about being exposed? No chance. Do you see the guy he’s drinking
with? Well, he’s a journalist! I know, incredible, but that’s how the
omerta, the conspiracy of silence, works. It took years for Millar to cross
the line but now he’s as bad as the rest of them, denouncing the
whistle-blowers and preaching the dopers’ creed.
You’d like an interview? Speak to his agent. An autograph? Join the queue.
You’re his No 1 fan? Then you’ve obviously signed up and bought the T-shirt
from his website: “It’s Millar Time”. Yeah, you better believe it, baby.
He’s invincible, bullet-proof, a Master of the Universe.
But wait! What’s this? That small story buried in a corner of the sports pages
in January 2004: “Polish cyclist arrested with drugs in Paris”. It’s the end
of the world as he knows it, the spark that fans the flames, but Millar is
unperturbed. “One of the ex-riders from the team, a Polish guy, was arrested
in Paris,” he explains, “a protégé of the soigneur [masseur] in our team. It
was a little internal ring. They had no links to me.”
The police arrested the masseur. Things started to get complicated. Four of
his teammates were brought in and questioned and a second doping ring was
uncovered. A few weeks passed and the storm seemed to lapse. Then Millar
took a call from a journalist at L’Equipe, who had secured the leaked
testimony of Philippe Gaumont, one of the accused. The omerta was broken.
Millar had been fingered. He tried to laugh it off and denounced Gaumont as
a “nutter”, but he thought he was going to be sick.
“I thought, ‘Oh f***! This is going to get messy’. I hadn’t got away with it.
The only solution, apart from admitting it all, was flat-out denial.”
“And did you never consider that?” I ask.
“What?” “Admitting it.” “It didn’t seem like an option,” he says. “It was a
period of my life when everything was built around material possessions -
that was all I had. The world I constructed didn’t have that ‘get out of
jail free’ card.”
He hired an expensive lawyer and tried to weather the storm. In May, on the
eve of the Quatre Jours de Dunkerque, he returned to his hotel after a
training ride and was handed a letter from The Sunday Times. “I remember it
said something like, ‘This is your chance to explain everything’,” he
recalls, “and asking people who you were, they all said, ‘No, no, you don’t
want to speak with him’.”
“So you wrote me a letter,” I say, smiling.
“I spoke to the lawyer and for him it was a normal thing to do,” he says. “I
hadn’t thought what the consequences were of that; it was a case of ‘Fire
away’. That’s what happens when you start entering that world of legal
advice, you don’t ever think of the actual cause and effect.”
The Tour de France loomed.
He thought he had pulled it off. His friend David Brailsford, British
Cycling’s performance director, travelled to Biarritz to discuss plans for
the Athens Olympics and they arranged to meet for dinner. The date was July
1. The restaurant was Blue Cargo. They ordered a bottle of wine and had just
poured a glass when three officers from the drugs squad in Paris arrived at
the table and ordered Millar outside.
They took the Rolex, his phone, his belt and his shoe-laces in the car park
before driving to his apartment. They sat him on a chair in the middle of
the room and he watched as they rifled through his things. “It was like a
film,” he says. “They started ripping stuff out and making a real mess of
the living room and kitchen and wardrobes. I just sat there thinking,
‘You’re wasting your time’.”
He hadn’t doped since the previous autumn in the build-up to the world
championships, injecting two doses of EPO (a blood-boosting hormone) at his
apartment in Manchester. He deposited the used syringes in a wash bag, left
for the race in Canada, and thought no more of it until two months later.
“I was unpacking in Biarritz and found the two syringes and remember thinking,
‘These were the last two syringes I had used when I won the worlds’. I put
them in my watch box on the bookshelf in my bedroom and completely forgot
about them, even through all of the shit [of the investigation]. It was only
when they got to my bedroom that I started thinking, ‘There’s something in
the bookshelves’. But I couldn’t remember what. And sure enough, five
minutes later, he comes down with an empty syringe.”
Jail was an odd experience for him. He’d been living in Biarritz for seven
years, was friendly with many of the officers and found it hard to balance
this warmth with his contempt for the Parisians. For 14 hours he resolved to
defy them. ‘It’s not over’, he thought. ‘I’ll win. I'll get you’. And then
his resolve finally cracked. “One of the Biarritz police came in and gave me
some crisps and stuff. He was really nice. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. I
just started crying. The bubble had burst. All of a sudden you realise that
there are actually rules, and that you’ve been living on a different moral
plane to other people; this ‘uber’ athlete. It’s a very cleansing process;
you are locked in a room and have to think about everything you have done.
“I spent the first 24 hours trying to come up with an excuse. And then you are
trying to come to terms with the fact that you are going to lose everything;
the house and my career and the cycling and the car. And then I thought,
‘How in the space of 10 years did I go from loving the sport to lying in a
prison cell in Biarritz? I couldn’t figure it out. And I just got very sad.
I knew this shouldn’t have happened. I knew that the person lying in that
cell wasn’t me.”
Who is David Millar? He has never been sure. Until 1988 he thought he was this
happy little boy, with a happy little sister and a happy mum and dad, living
in happy old Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. But his parents, Gordon and
Avril, weren’t happy. “My world fundamentally changed at the point of the
divorce,” he says. “I had this idyllic little-boy existence until the age of
11, it was perfect, and then . . . well, you just don’t see it coming.
Suddenly you are in the real world.”
The two years that followed were traumatic: Gordon moved to Hong Kong; Avril
moved to Oxfordshire; Millar moved from bewilderment to a growing, festering
resentment. He resented school and he resented Oxfordshire and he especially
resented his mum. Avril was to blame. It was her fault. At 13, he told her
he was going to live with his dad. Avril was devastated. “It was a horrible
thing to do to my mother and sister, a selfish thing, but I could see myself
being much happier in Hong Kong. The lifestyle was better; I didn’t have any
rules; my friends had to stay in and study but I could generally do what I
wanted and a lot of my personality was formed there. I lived in my world.
The world revolved around my decisions. And it has taken an awful lot for me
to break that - to the point of imploding - and accept that there is
actually a society I have to respect and be part of.”
He spent five years in Hong Kong and was happy for four of them, but his
father, an airline pilot, was away a lot and by his 18th year, Millar was
spending more and more time talking to his mum on the phone. Absence had
made them very close again. It was Avril who had nurtured his love of
cycling during his annual summer visits; Avril who encouraged him to
postpone art college and pursue a professional career; Avril he embraced
when he took his first Tour de France yellow jersey; and Avril who shared
the burden of his long and tortuous path to the Brotherhood of the Needle.
The year is 1997; Millar is 20 and it’s the eve of his debut as a
professional. He’s nervous; pre-season training was tougher than he’d
expected and he is worried about the race. Far more troubling, however, is
the scene he has witnessed in his room. His roommate, an older pro, has just
taken cortisone.
“I was a bit disturbed by that and called my mum,” he says. “She made it very
clear to me that there was no shame in coming home and going back to art
college, but I wasn’t about to do that. ‘Will you be able to race [clean]
with it?’ she asked. ‘Yes’, I said. And that was it. I just thought, ‘I’ll
deal with this’.”
For four years he dealt with it admirably, shooting to fame in 2000 with a
fantastic ride in the Tour prologue.
Rewarded with a hefty pay rise, he responded by setting new goals, but a year
later, after a disappointing ride in the Tour, he drove to a villa in
Tuscany, rolled up his sleeve and took the first injection of a five-day
course of EPO. It had started. He was a doper.
“I was amazed at just how underwhelming it was,” he said. “There was nothing
dramatic about it. It was at a villa in Tuscany, a beautiful, peaceful
environment. I had dinner with a family, watched TV until they went to bed,
and then we went through to the kitchen and . . . it was almost a relief;
for the year before I had been fighting it and then I finally did it and it
was, ‘Phew . . .’ and then you just reap the dividends.”
A few weeks later he called his mum. “I had to tell somebody,” he explains.
“It helped me knowing that somebody knew that I cared about.
“My mum was always aware of the world that I was living in. She saw me change
as a person over those four years.”
His father also noticed the changes. One night, after too many beers, he told
Gordon what he had done in Italy. His father took it badly.
“He hit you,” I suggest. “Yeah,” he says. “Did that hurt?” I ask. “I don’t
mean physically but emotionally?”
“No. I mean I was fairly drunk at the time. I stayed out and he went home
upset. I was very cold about it. It was a cruel thing.”
“Why did you want to hurt him?”
“My dad had become my biggest fan, hugely proud of me. It started to piss me
off that he put me on this pedestal, so I abused it and pushed it beyond
reason to the point he became aware something wasn’t right. We got into a
heated argument about my having changed so much, and when he was at his
wits’ end, I told him coldly that I wasn’t what he thought I was, that I had
doped. He hit me. I didn’t care, I wanted to hurt him. That’s what I mean by
cruel. I regret hurting him like that. He didn’t deserve it.”
Three summers passed, Gordon forgave him, and on the night of his arrest in
Biarritz, Frances, his sister, was the only member of the family he hadn’t
discussed doping with; France who had always been there for him; France who
was ready to bat for him through hell. And it felt like hell.
Cofidis had sacked him; the World Cycling body had banned him for two years;
French tax had slapped him with a bill for eight hundred grand and he had
massive legal fees.
In October, he packed his possessions into a rental van and drove to his
sister’s apartment in London, where he spent the next four months sleeping
on the floor. And drinking. He did a lot of drinking.
“I remember, a few days after I got out of jail in Biarritz, sitting on a wall
in front of the beach with Frances, looking at some kids playing. ‘France,
what am I going to do?’ I said. And she looked at me and said, ‘Cometh the
hour, cometh the man’.
I said, ‘France, the man is not coming’. I was literally terrified. It took
about seven or eight months of me just running away from it all. I was drunk
almost all the time.”
In the summer of 2005 he turned the corner. Brailsford had encouraged him to
start training again, he was dating a smashing girl, and he was suddenly
counting the days until the end of his ban. A year later, his return to the
big stage was the prologue of the Tour, but he still seemed confused about
who he wanted to be.
How, for example, could he claim to be clean and associate with a coach like
Luigi Cecchini, whose former clients included Bjarne Riis (confessed doper),
Tyler Hamilton (banned doper) and Ivan Basso (banned doper)? The critics
showed no mercy.
“It took me a while to go from doping to not doping to becoming somebody who
was anti-doping,” he says. “It has taken time for me to realise that I have
to earn people’s trust and that a big part of that is how I act and who I
associate with. It’s a path I've had to learn to walk.”
But he is walking it well. There was his impassioned plea that he had “won on
bread and water and wasn’t taking any injections” at the 2006 Tour of Spain;
his decision to commit to Jonathan Vaughters’s vision of a dope-free team at
Slipstream; and, most impressively, his recent, fervent criticisms of Basso.
“You know, when I gave that quote about bread and water at the Tour of Spain,”
he says, “I knew there was a 23-year-old version of me somewhere that would
have loved to have heard that, that needed to hear that. I never heard that.
I never heard guys winning races and shouting that they were clean because
that would have helped me a load rather than hearing everything else.”
“What if the police hadn’t found those syringes?” I ask. “What would your life
be today?”
“Thank God they did,” he replies. “They [the syringes] are the reason I am
here today, otherwise I don’t know. I knew the path I was going down was
self-destructive and even if the police had found nothing, my name would
have been mud. It would be a miracle if I was still employed by a cycling
team. I suppose I would have kept drinking and followed that clichéd path of
the f*****-up cyclist that we have seen in the past decade.”
The floor of his tiny bedroom in Brest is covered in bags of new racing kit.
He will model the strip at a press conference tomorrow for the new team
sponsor - Garmin - and then his mind will return to the business in hand.
His preparation for the Tour with the anti-doping cycling team has never
gone better but he’s been feeling peculiarly nervous these last few days. A
nervousness he hasn’t experienced before and is struggling to explain.
“The prospect of the three weeks doesn’t worry me in the slightest,” he says,
“and yet I’m nervous. I just want to lead my team really well and I’m
worried about the suffering that’s going to involve. This is the first time
I’ve ridden the Tour when I’ve felt part of a group and where I feel I have
a real responsibility.”
“And not just to yourself,” I observe.
“No, not just to myself,” he says, smiling.
Who is David Millar? He may just have found himself.
Back from the ban: when the disgraced return to competition
BEN JOHNSON
A year after first breaking the 100m world record, the Canadian won the
Olympic title in 1988 and set a new world best of 9.79sec, albeit with a
little help from his friend Stanozolol. He returned after a three-year ban
and to nobody’s great surprise wasn’t quite as fast at the 1992 Olympics.
Understandably frustrated, he took some more drugs and was banned for life
after testing positive for excess testosterone. Last heard of racing against
a horse and advertising the energy drink Cheetah. ‘I cheetah all the time,’
he quips, hilariously
VIJAY SINGH
Banned from the Asian tour for two years after his scorecard was altered at
the 1985 Indonesian Open. Singh claimed someone else had done the altering
and that if, perhaps, it had been him, then he should only have been
disqualified. He fled to the Malaysian jungle, lived on £25 a week and
practised. Hard. ‘It was the lowest point of my life. It never occurred to
me that one day I would reach the top,’ he said. On his return, he qualified
for the European Tour, then the PGA Tour, and has won three majors
SHANE WARNE
The master of spin was no stranger to controversy. He first landed in trouble
in 1994 when he passed ‘information’ to bookmakers. He was charged with
bringing the game into disrepute in 1999 after comments about the Sri Lankan
captain Arjuna Ranatunga and was fined and given a two-match suspended ban.
In 2003, he failed a drugs test, admitting he took a banned diuretic ‘in a
bid to improve his appearance’. No, really. He was banned for a year, but
returned to the Australian Test team better than ever. When he retired, he
had taken a record 708 wickets
ERIC CANTONA
Banned for eight months for his ‘kung-fu’ attack on Crystal Palace fan Matthew
Simmons at Selhurst Park in 1995, Cantona returned for his first game to
face Liverpool at Old Trafford. After two minutes he’d set up Nicky Butt for
the opener. Sixty-eight minutes later, Liverpool were ahead when Ryan Giggs
was felled in the penalty area. Up stepped Cantona to tuck home the penalty
and United were on their way to a Premiership and FA Cup double, with the
Frenchman scoring the cup final winner
PETER SWAN
The England centre-half and nonplaying member of the 1962 World Cup squad was
jailed for four months and banned, in 1964, after placing a £50 bet on his
team, Sheffield Wednesday, to lose at Ipswich. Eight years on, after he had
spent spells as a landlord and car salesman, Swan’s ban was rescinded and in
1972, aged 36, he made an emotional return to Wednesday: ‘As I'm going down
the tunnel, they gave me the match-ball to carry. The players stopped and I
went out on my own.’ He now suffers from Alzheimer’s
David Millar and The Sunday Times
PAUL KIMMAGE AND THE INTERVIEW THAT NEVER WAS
On May 4 2004, Paul Kimmage, in Calais, submitted an interview request to
David Millar. Kimmage wanted to ask him about claims that he was implicated
in a doping scandal. He received no response. The following day, Kimmage
found Millar in Dunkirk. The cyclist told him he would be declining the
request because ‘you’ve got a bit of a reputation’. Kimmage asked Millar’s
sister Fran to mediate. Just when it looked like the two would finally meet,
Millar’s French lawyers blocked the interview until Kimmage had submitted
his questions in advance. He refused. The following day, lawyers
representing Millar threatened legal action against this newspaper if it
repeated the doping allegations. Kimmage wrote up the story of his bid to
speak to Millar on May 9. A month later, Millar admitted using the banned
EPO substance.
