Sports Calendar

This is the question.

Why me?

Day after day. The beer soothing his pain.

Why me?

He’s about to hit rock bottom.

Lance Armstrong and Eddy Merckx are sitting at a nearby table. It is Merckx’s 60th birthday and Armstrong has invited the legend to lunch. Millar spots them and wanders over but is absolutely blitzed. An hour later, he receives a frantic phone call from his sister. “I’ve just had a call from Lance,” she says. “He said, ‘Hey! What’s going on with your brother?’” “It’s nothing, Frances,” Millar assures her. “Just too many beers.” But when Millar flies back to London she’s hysterical: “Please, David! You’re a mess. You can’t go on like this!” She is the one person in the world he cannot bear to hurt.

A month later he signs an Individual Voluntary Agreement (IVA) and makes the first payment on his tax liabilities. Then David Brailsford invites him to Manchester and encourages him to start training again. Frances is thrilled and suggests lunch at Rockets, a restaurant in Putney. . .

“Your luck’s in, David,” she grins. “A table full of blondes.” “Very funny, Frances,” he replied, moodily.

“Oh my God!” she said. “I know one of them.” That was the moment everything changed. Nicole Downing lived in Henley and worked for a public relations firm. She had never heard of David Millar, the disgraced cyclist, but liked him the moment they were introduced and they have been inseparable since. “I’m at a good place with my life, a happy place, but there was a point when I didn’t think this would happen,” says Millar.

“What would happen?” I ask. “Having a healthy existence, living a real and proper life. We’re getting married, we’re going to have kids, a family hopefully and . . . consistency. A huge amount of that was meeting Nicole and the sort of person she is. She has been really healthy for me.”

*****

WE MEET on a warm Thursday afternoon at his beautiful rented home on the outskirts of Girona. The last payment of his IVA was completed last month and for the first time since his arrest in 2004, Millar has passed what he calls “zero” and is officially solvent again. But not for long. “I have a huge f***ing tax bill to pay here \ this month,” he smiles.