"Soon we were on the flat again and heading for Barcelona. Again I conserved my energy and waited for the Pyrenees. Before that, though, we had the stage which finished at the top of Mont Ventoux, the Giant of Provence. This is a great mountain stuck out in the middle of nowhere and bleached white by the sun. It is like another world up there among the bare rocks and the glaring sun" — Tommy Simpson: Cycling Is My Life

A guy walks into a restaurant with his sister for lunch and there are eight blondes sitting at a table. Sounds like the opening line from a joke, right? But what if the guy was David Millar? And what if the restaurant was in Putney? And what if his sister, Frances, happened to know one of the blondes: “Hey! Is that Nicole?” And what if Nicole and her brother started dating? And what if everything in his disastrously crumbling world suddenly turned good? They’d make it into a film, right? They’d call it The Fabulous Destiny of David Millar. It would be sad and moving and yet strangely uplifting. And nobody would believe it.

Scene 1: exterior, mountainside, daytime

The month is July 1967. The 13th stage of the Tour de France has taken the riders to the summit of Mont Ventoux. In grainy black-and-white images, the camera follows the Englishman Tommy Simpson as he battles to reach the summit. He is weaving drunkenly across the road.

Millar (voiceover)

“I have been a professional road racer since I was 19. At 32 I am now older than Tommy Simpson was when he died. He was in his 30th year when he collapsed 1km from the summit of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. There is a memorial to him on that spot, and every time I pass it I am in the habit of doffing what in my younger days was a cloth cap, but has since become a helmet, to his memory. It is a memory I hold closer than most, because he is a person I can relate to more than most.”

Simpson fights with every breath but can go no further. Two helpers prise his fingers from the handlebars and he slumps, exhausted, on the roadside. A doctor arrives and administers the kiss of life but the champion is fading. There is nothing to be done.

Millar (voiceover)

Tommy Simpson and I share many traits and have followed similar paths. I, like him, immersed myself completely in a world that was very foreign to me in the pursuit of a dream. As with Tommy, that dream became life-consuming; as with Tommy, it ended up with my doping. But I have survived where Tommy didn’t.

Scene 2: exterior, Monaco, daytime

The month is May, 2005. Millar is sitting on the sunny terrace of a beachside restaurant at the Monaco Grand Prix, drinking beer with mates. Ten months have passed since he was exposed as a drugs cheat; 10 months of binge-drinking and wallowing in self-pity as he comes to terms with a two-year suspension, the loss of his Biarritz apartment and an £800,000 fine for tax avoidance.

Why me?