In February, the new cycling season began with five past and present riders from the Cofidis team, along with the team masseur, under investigation for drug trafficking. The rider Philippe Gaumont was one of those who gave evidence. Last month, huge extracts of the cyclist’s testimony to the investigating magistrate, Richard Pallain, were leaked to L’Equipe.

In it, Britain’s David Millar — the Cofidis team leader, world time-trial champion and Tour de France stage winner — was implicated in a doping scandal.

It is Tuesday, May 4, and I am sitting in a bedroom of a hotel in Calais, staring at my mobile phone. I have just sent a note to Millar and am anxiously awaiting his call ...

“David, in a recent interview with Procycling (magazine) you mentioned 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.

“Regards...”

The afternoon stretches into evening. I call his room, but there is no reply. Two days later, a fax arrives from the office of his London solicitors.

“Dear Sir, “We act for David Millar. It has come to our client’s attention that your newspaper may be about to publish an article about our client and the Cofidis cycling team. You will be aware that several ex-members of the Cofidis team are being investigated by the French judicial authority in connection with the use of banned substances. Our client is not under investigation and has gone on record to say that he has never used banned substances. Furthermore, we understand that the Cofidis team have dismissed any person whom they had any suspicion of being involved with banned substances and accordingly, no current members of the team are being investigated or are under suspicion. If you publish any suggestion that our client has taken banned substances we will bring legal proceedings for libel against you.

“Yours faithfully ...”

WEDNESDAY, MAY 5 (Part 1): It’s 11.30 on a cold, grey morning in Dunkirk, and I am standing outside the Hotel de Ville as the deluxe camping car carrying Millar and his seven Cofidis teammates arrives for the opening stage of the Quatre Jours de Dunkirk. Two TV crews and a handful of journalists have gathered in the square to monitor their arrival. Since January, the team has been rocked by doping allegations, and Dunkirk marks its return to competition after a month of self-imposed suspension.

Millar is first off the bus. He signs a couple of autographs and follows his teammates to the podium, where they are introduced to the crowd. In 1986, in what seems a different life, I stood where he stands now. I earned my living as a professional bike rider, the toughest job in sport. Millar has just finished a short TV interview when I introduce myself. I tell him I work for this newspaper.

It’s starting to rain; an icy wind is blowing through the square. He accepts my hand, but does not seem pleased to meet me. “What are the chances of sitting down with you at some stage this week?” I ask.

He thinks about it: “Emm, pretty slim, to be honest.”

“Is that a slim ‘yes’ or a slim ‘no’?” “It depends what you want to talk about; cycling or doping.”

“I want to talk about your career and the allegations that have been made about you.”

“You want to talk about my career! I’ve been a pro for eight years and you’ve never spoken to me once. I just find it strange that you come suddenly out of the woodwork.”

“Well, (my colleague) David Walsh has covered the last few Tours (de France). I’ve been doing other things.”

“Well, tell them to send David Walsh then. I’ll talk to him. I respect his work. And I’ve no problem talking to Jeremy Whittle (The Times) or William Fotheringham (The Guardian). But you — you’ve a bit of a reputation.”

I tell him that serious allegations have been made and I’d like to hear his side of the story.

“That’s all bullshit,” he says.

“Really? And what about the interview your boss gave a couple of months ago? It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. Did he tell you I was asking about you at his press conference yesterday?” “And what’s he saying now?” “He says you’re a great champion.”

“Yeah, well you’d better take him at his word.”

He grabs his bike and begins moving away from the podium. It seems a good time to compromise. “Okay, maybe this is a bad time. I don’t have to write anything this week. Why don’t we sit down next week and go through it from A to Z, when things have calmed down?” “No, I’m not talking to you,” he says, pedalling towards the bus, “you can write whatever you want.”

Oh dear, what have I done to upset hi

WHEN it comes to the art of racing a bike, Millar has always been a class act. It was class that set him apart during his earliest days at High Wycombe and class that brought him to the Cofidis team at the tender age of 20, in 1997.

He could not have entered professional cycling at a worse time. The abuse of performance-enhancing drugs was rampant, its drug culture so ingrained that the doping continued after the Festina scandal in July 1998, when its rotten core was finally exposed. The following year, Millar’s third as a professional, the Cofidis president, François Migraine, was worried about some of the rumours he was hearing, and commissioned a French doctor, Jean-Christophe Seznec, to conduct a psychiatric analysis of his team. The results, published later that year in a French medical journal (Cofidis were not identified), were frightening.

A number of the team’s riders, Seznec concluded, were showing addictive tendencies towards a sleep-inducing pill called Stilnox, which was consumed in high doses at parties, or in hotel rooms between stages. Performance-enhancing? No, they were abusing the drug for kicks. There were other trends; relations with prostitutes; use of Viagra; an initiation rite for new riders that included planting drugs in food.

And yet, despite the mayhem going on around him, Millar emerged unscathed. How do we know this? Because the word on the grapevine was that Millar raced and lived “a l’eau”. He was clean. “It is why I have become such a big commodity in the sport,” he told Walsh in February 2000. “Teams are looking for guys who can do it naturally. People within cycling know who is clean and they can tell from my results that I am.” Three years later, nothing much has changed. Millar is clean — we can tell from his results — but there have been some strange noises of late, coming from the so-called “people within who know”.

Last January, two weeks after the start of what has become the “Cofidis affair”, Frederique Galametz, a journalist with L’Equipe, was granted an interview with Migraine in Paris. The 60-year old Frenchman has never been shy in front of a microphone, and the more the interview progressed, the more Galametz found herself glancing at her recorder, praying its wheels were turning. The team president’s candour was astonishing.

“I wouldn’t cut my hand off for any of my riders,” he announced, when the conversation turned to doping and those he believed were clean, “except, perhaps, for one, and you know who that is”.

“David Moncoutie?” “Yes, everyone is pretty much unanimous in saying that he takes nothing.”

Later in the interview, the spotlight turned to Millar, the team leader. “Managing a David Millar,” Migraine said, “is no mean feat. I dream of finding a leader tomorrow like (the former French champion) Charly Mottet who possessed the four elements that make a good rider but never touched the fifth. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen any more.”

“How do you mean?” “Mottet had the talent, the mentality, the healthy lifestyle and the dedication. The fifth element for me is doping. David has the talent, especially in the time trials, a good mentality ... and a sometimes healthy lifestyle, like his dedication ... As far as doping is concerned, for David (he shrugs his shoulders), I know nothing . . . As I’ve already said, I wouldn’t be sure about anyone.”

“But you’ve spoken to him?” Galametz asked.

“What’s the point? If I ask him and he says, ‘Yes, I dope’, what am I supposed to do? I can’t fire him before the end of his contract but I know and I have to live with that. I’m in a shit that’s unmanageable, I’ve no solution.”

“So you prefer not to know?” “It’s better that I don’t know.”

The portrait that Gaumont, one of those dismissed by Cofidis, paints of the aftermath of Millar’s Tour de France stage win in Nantes last year is controversial and extremely damaging to Millar. “Millar won the last time-trial and we celebrated that evening with champagne,” he says. “Millar trusts me, and he ordered (Jean-Jacques) Menuet (the team doctor) to give (Cedric) Vasseur and me the rest of the preparation he had used that morning with (Massimiliano) Lelli before the time trial. The next morning, just before we left the hotel, Vasseur and I went to Menuet’s room at Millar’s request . . . It was a Sunday, the Champs-Elysees stage . . . Menuet injected each of us with a syringe containing a clear liquid, but wouldn’t say what it was. I think it was cortisone or growth hormone. He then cut the syringes with a pliers to dispose of them. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we’re going to see some Cofidis on the telly’.”

Vasseur was also pointing fingers when summoned before the magistrate. In his testimony, he alleged that Gaumont had come to his room one evening during the last training camp in Spain and told him he had just seen Millar “doing a line” of cocaine. “It wasn’t actually cocaine,” Vasseur told the judge, “but Stilnox and ephedrine.” The allegation appears again in Gaumont’s statement. He also claimed that Millar had been working with a Spanish doctor with “a bad reputation”.

Menuet and Alain Bondue, the Cofidis general manager, have since lost their jobs.

On Wednesday, during our brief conversation, Millar dismissed the allegations as “bullshit, but declined to say more.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5 (Part 2): Do you believe in divine intervention? I’m sitting in a car, driving through the village of Warhem, ahead of the race, when the weirdest thing happens. I have just passed a banner by the side of the road that reads “It’s Millar Time. Go David!” when David’s sister, Fran, calls my mobile phone. She sounds charming and seems very concerned that David and I haven’t hit it off.

“There’s no problem here,” I assure her, “I would much rather sit down in comfort with David than write anything this week.”

“Why don’t you fax your questions to his hotel and we’ll take it from there?” she says.

“No, no,” I demur, “he’s a big boy now. Let’s set up the interview first.”

I agree to send her an e-mail outlining what the interview will entail. For the next hour, we engage in frantic text.

(Message from Fran) “Hi Paul, my email is ------. Please include terms and agenda for potential interview. Thanks, Fran.” (Message to Fran) “Fran, my terms are truth and honesty. No agenda, just the A to Z of his career. Monday is good for me — anytime, anywhere.” (Message from Fran) “Hopefully that goes without saying — but I will need you to be more specific than that I’m afraid! Would also like confirmation that if this is agreed to, it will replace the piece on Sunday. Call me if you want to discuss.”

I call Fran. “I’m not a magician,” I say. “There’s not going to be any rabbits coming out of hats. All I want to do is sit him down and discuss the current allegations and his career. You are more than welcome to join us. He can even bring his lawyer.”

She insists on a written guarantee that nothing will appear on Sunday if the interview is agreed for next week. No problem, I say. We’re almost home. Fran does not see any reason we can’t meet on Monday, and she promises she will speak to David as soon as the stage has finished. When she calls again, I’m standing on the press podium opposite the finishing line and can hardly hear a word with the noise. She says something about the nature of the investigation and there being a problem: “David’s French lawyers are insisting they see the questions in advance.”

I tell her this is not something I can do. An hour later we reach the endgame. The stage has finished. She’s spoken to David. He hasn’t changed his mind.

(Message from Fran) “Sorry we couldn’t arrange it this time, maybe some other time? At the moment David is just keen to get on with riding his bike. Regards, Fran.” (Message to Fran) “No problem, I understand, the law of silence is golden.”

The next afternoon, the solicitor’s fax arrives. I am left with questions. If Millar’s solicitors are correct, and Cofidis have rid the team of the bad eggs, why was he so reluctant to talk, and why couldn’t he simply tell me that Migraine’s previous laissez-faire attitude had changed and that the team had rid itself of the drug-takers? And how could he not have known that others in the team were doping? Millar may be the victim of damaging allegations from teammates, but he is not helping himself by refusing to talk. In the meantime, we await Pallain’s judicial findings.

SOMETIMES the end feels like the beginning. I’m sitting in a bedroom of a hotel in Calais on a wet Friday evening, writing a note to Millar. I have decided to send him a book I wrote in 1989 called Rough Ride, an exposé of doping in cycling. It documents my own experiences in the peloton and tells how I came to discover the depressing realities of life as a pro.

“David, during our brief conversation on Wednesday you mentioned my ‘reputation’. I can only assume you were thinking of this book. Fran asked me to send you my questions and I told her that I don’t do that. But I have decided to make an exception. I have a question. What aspect of the book do you have a problem with? Best wishes, Paul Kimmage.”