by David Millar
Away from the racing, it was possible to have constructive discussions with him. He was a great motivator and always saw the big picture, just as he had done with me when mapping out my next five years at lunch that day in St Quentin. There’s no doubt that he knew the psychology of a professional cyclist better than many other directeurs.
During the races, however, it was a different matter. He gave the orders; his style wasn’t that of co-collaborator but that of a tactical savant who knew what was right and wasn’t interested in a debate. This was something he had from day one.
At his first Tour, in his first year as a directeur, he ordered Van Impe to attack rival Joop Zoetemelk.
But Van Impe refused, or at least he did until Guimard, at the wheel of the team car, drove up alongside and told him that if he didn’t follow orders, he would drive him off the road. Van Impe quickly learned to do what he was told.
And Guimard was right. Van Impe rode so hard that he put half the field outside the time limit, took 3 minutes from Zoetemelk and then went on to win the Tour. Even the great Hinault, one of the most feared men in professional cycling and perhaps the greatest-ever French cyclist (who twenty-five years after retiring is still a physical force to be reckoned with), agreed.
‘You don’t argue with Guimard,’ Hinault said.
Cyrille brought his support staff with him to Cofidis, an old guard of colleagues who had been with him for close to twenty years. These were the stalwarts of French professional cycling, the men you would see in old black and white photos massaging a young Hinault or hanging out of an old Peugeot team car having a cigarette. They had seen it all and were not to be questioned; it was their way or the highway.
But I chose my allies. The soigneurs – soigneur is the French word for the carer of an athlete – were definitely the real deal. Their principal job was to massage the riders, but in fact they did much more. They would do everything: pick us up at the airport, transport our suitcases between hotels, organise the kitchens at the hotels and become maître d’ of any restaurant that wasn’t up to the high standards of service they deemed necessary. They were also our medical advisers – our nurse and often our doctor – prescribing whatever they thought was needed.
It was with the soigneurs that we would have the quietest, most intimate moment of every day. After the frenzy of racing, lying on the massage table for 45 minutes of relaxation, peace and quiet, was the time when concerns would be voiced and anxieties aired. That was often the case for me during that first year.
My first pro race was programmed to be Etoile de Besseges, the opening stage race on the French calendar. It is only five days long and not exactly tough, but a shock to the system nonetheless, even if you are in a good state of fitness. It’s almost impossible to prepare for racing fully in training. No matter how hard you try, what race simulations you attempt, you cannot push yourself as hard and as deep as you can in a race. You need competition that will push you psychologically and physically beyond a level that you or your training partners can attain while training at home on your local roads.
The ultimate training partner is a motorbike, ideally a Derny. Riding behind these motorised bicycles comes about as close as is possible to racing in the slipstream of a professional cyclist in full flight. Behind a Derny, you can ride a bigger gear at a higher cadence and experience fluctuations in pace that are nigh on impossible to generate on your own. Of course, the Derny needs a good driver, preferably an ex-cyclist who knows you very well so that they can read your suffering from a glimpse of your poise on the bike and the look in your eye. If they know you well enough, they can keep you on the edge of collapse and, in doing so, make you race-ready
But I didn’t have a Derny and my training had been further compromised between the end of that miserable training camp and my first race, after I had moved to Nice, to share an apartment with Bobby Julich.
I had heard about Nice, but I’d never been there before. When the Americans were discussing their planned move from their previous base in Lake Como to the Côte d’Azur, I chose to join them. After chilly St Quentin, the balmy Côte d’Azur sounded much more like my idea of France.
Soon after my arrival in Nice, Bobby rented a van and we set off to pick up his final bits and pieces from the apartment in Como. I could see why they’d decamped to Nice. Como is a beautiful place, but it’s not ideal for a cyclist. The weather can be quite miserable in winter and there isn’t a vast selection of roads to choose from. The Americans had made it their European base principally because their coach lived nearby.
There wasn’t much to pick up in Como, but it was worth going if only to visit the storage room they had in the basement. There were bags of Motorola cycling clothing lying around, kit I would have died for only months before. When I was younger, I’d been given an old Motorola plastic rain cape, with a rider’s name on it, by Mike Taylor. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Bobby was busy looking for something that he couldn’t find, so I tried to contain my excitement as I had a nose through some of the Motorola kit bags.
There wasn’t any question of me ‘taking’ anything but it was weird to think that all this kit was to be discarded. I treasured every single bit of cycling gear I owned and here, at my feet, were piles of kit worn by some of the best-known pros in the sport. I opened a bin bag filled with white jerseys and to my weak-kneed astonishment, realised that they were Lance Armstrong’s unused World Champion jerseys.
Bobby must have heard me mutter, ‘Oh man, oh shit.’ Pausing from what he was doing he glanced across to see me reverentially clasping a pristine Motorola-branded rainbow jersey.
‘Oh yeah,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Lance is always leaving shit around. God knows what else there is here.’
‘But they’re his rainbow jerseys,’ I spluttered, still such a fan. ‘There’s a whole bag of them . . .’
Bobby was unimpressed. ‘You should just take one, he’ll never know. He’s probably never coming back here to get his stuff.’
I was still clinging to the jersey, but I couldn’t take it, even though I wanted to so bloody much. I put it gingerly back in the bag and tried my hardest to forget about it. Soon after our visit, the very same storage room flooded and everything was thrown away.
As Bessesges loomed training was going better. I was able to go out with Bobby and not get killed, and although I was getting the bejasus scared out of me by everybody about how hard the racing was going to be, I felt a little more confident. Although not as good as I could have been physically, I was fresh and fearless psychologically. Shockingly, Besseges was even harder than I expected; hills that would have ripped a race to pieces with the amateurs didn’t even require the professionals to change out of the big ring. The sprinters, who I’d presumed couldn’t climb, would have been able to win hilly amateur races. With the amateurs I barely needed to get out of the saddle to win races, with the professionals I was having to get out the saddle so much just to stay in the bunch that my arms would lactate and give up before my legs. It was a different sport – I was soon to learn why it was quite so different.
My blissful ignorance about the ‘demands’ of the European scene was swept away at Besseges, my first pro race. I was rooming with Jim van de Laer, a Belgian rider and formerly a great hope, who hadn’t fulfilled the potential that was expected of him. Jim was a great guy, and we got on very well. He told me that the team wanted him to get a result in that very first race of the year and that he’d been offered cortisone in pill form to ‘help’ him.
He didn’t want to do it, and was really pissed off that the team was already panicking about results and acting in such a way when the season had barely begun. I wasn’t stupid enough to think the sport was squeaky clean, but I didn’t expect my team to be condoning it. Crazily though, the French didn’t really think of cortisone as being ‘proper’ doping.
I learned over the years to come that cortisone was the drug of choice in French cycling. Back then, it was undetectable in d
oping controls, and although it was on the banned list, its use was permitted if a medical situation required it. Cortisone wasn’t exactly hard to get hold of – the local doctor would prescribe it if you had bronchitis.
But there’s no doubt it was something of a wonder drug. Boosting the natural levels with a pill or injection can decrease pain and increase strength in the short term. If the stronger forms of it are used it will reduce weight by making your body go catabolic. That’s not a bad combo for a professional cyclist, but equally, not good if abused. The very muscles you rely upon are slowly eaten away by your own body as fuel; that’s just one of the down sides.
I was devastated by what Jim told me, by the fact that the team was asking – no, telling – one of its riders to dope. Already the choice was there, working on me. After only a few weeks as a pro, I’d been confronted by it. There was no more protecting the young guy: Jim, bless him, was taking me into his confidence, asking my opinion. I told him I didn’t even know what cortisone was or what it did.
‘Jim, I don’t want to know about this shit,’ I said to him, a little desperately.
I called my mum later that night.
‘Mum, they’ve asked my roommate to take this pill,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think it’s that bad but it’s not that good either. He’s refusing to take it, but it’s clear the team is panicking. He’s asking me what I think. It’s just stupid – why’s he asking me?’
‘Oh, David,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry’
‘I didn’t think it was like this. From what Jim says there’s a lot of it going on. I don’t know what to do, Mum, I don’t know what I’ve got myself into.’
‘Well, has anybody approached you about taking anything?’
‘No, I don’t think they ask neo-pros to do anything.’
‘No? Well, good,’ she said. ‘Just make sure you stand by what you believe in, and remember, you can pack it in tomorrow and come home and go to art college.
‘You have options, David – don’t forget that. It’s your dream, I know, but it shouldn’t make you unhappy, and it shouldn’t make you do things you don’t want to do,’ she said.
‘Remember that – and to hell with the rest of them.’
7
CHILDHOOD’S END
I realise now that, despite my age and the fact that I was a raw, new professional, Cofidis threw me in at the deep end. Yet I survived February and was due a couple of weeks off racing in March, during which I would train hard, in the hope of getting back on top of things.
After one 6-hour day training in the mountains behind Nice, I came home to a message from Guimard. He wanted me to race in Tirreno–Adriatico, the tough and mountainous week-long stage race crossing the backbone of Italy, tracing a route from the Mediterranean coast to the Adriatic.
I told Guimard that I didn’t think it was a good idea, as I was tired from the recent big block of training. He didn’t listen. Off to Italy I went. So it was at Tirreno, before the race even began, that the scales definitively fell from my eyes.
In 1997, the UCI introduced what they called a ‘health check’, a new 50 per cent limit on hematocrit, to guard against excessive use of artificial EPO, the red blood cell booster. Hematocrit is the percentage of oxygen-carrying red blood cells coursing through your veins. I’d heard talk of this but had no idea what it meant, what my hematocrit level was or ever had been. In fact, up to that point I don’t think I’d ever done a blood test. But I was learning fast and it became clear that, during the EPO era, hematocrit levels were the cyclist’s holy grail.
EPO (erythropoietin), like cortisone, is naturally produced, making it very hard to find in anti-doping controls. Prior to the creation of an effective test, during the first ten years of its popularity it was impossible to detect. In essence, its benefits are the same as altitude training – some riders used to call it altitude training in a syringe.
By the mid-1990s, EPO use had become excessive and there were plenty of stories in the peloton of those who’d pushed their hematocrit level to over 60 per cent, and whose blood was like thick soup.
Heart failure had been widely linked to EPO abuse – there were stories, urban legends, of riders setting alarms to wake themselves through the night in order to do sit-ups, or some other exercise, as insurance against their hearts stopping.
The UCI knew that EPO use was rife, but was, apparently, powerless to stop it. The health checks weren’t dope tests, because if you tested ‘positive’ – that is, were over the 50 per cent threshold – you were simply suspended for two weeks. If, after that, your hematocrit was back below 50 per cent, you quietly resumed racing.
Of course, the presumption was guilt if you did get suspended, and in the majority of cases, rightfully so, but for a few it was an undeserved black mark. Some do have higher natural hematocrit, be this genetic or simply because of living or training at altitude. A small percentage of the professional peloton carried certificates demonstrating their high hematocrit but these were not easy to get and required years of supporting data as proof. All in all, it was very basic science, yet the ‘health check’ did serve to rein in the ‘he who dares’ attitude towards EPO use.
We had a shitty journey to the start of Tirreno–Adriatico, arriving at Sorrento in the small hours after a late night drive from Rome. We were billeted in a grand but faded old hotel that had seen its best days long ago. The first stage was an afternoon prologue time trial, but because I didn’t even have a time trial bike yet, I was using my training bike and wheels that I’d brought from Nice.
I was still unaware of the excesses of EPO, so when I went out for a ride the morning before the prologue, with a group of older pros, I was puzzled by why we were going so hard and so far, when I’d imagined that the ride would be a short ‘loosener’ after the long journey. I was dropped on the first hill and turned around and went back to the hotel decidedly worried about what awaited me in the race.
Later, I began to understand the thinking at the heart of that manic pre-race training ride. They were trying to ride the EPO out of their blood. Tirreno–Adriatico was likely to be the first race in which the UCI were going to use the new 50 per cent test. There’s no doubt that a large number of the peloton were using EPO, but all to differing levels. So, it was impossible to know how many were actually teetering close to the 50 per cent limit.
One thing is for sure, none of them wanted to go over 50 per cent. The word was that it was a good idea to keep training hard right up until the race started, in a bid to keep hematocrit low. I just thought they trained like that before every race and that it had been easy for them and hard for me. But it was a demoralising start to a painful week and I only finished 100th in the prologue.
I worked my arse off at Tirreno, looking after our team leader, Maurizio Fondriest. The stages were all fast and crazy and we seemed to end on hilly finishing circuits every day. I don’t think I made it round one of those with the rest of the peloton.
One day sticks firmly in my mind. We had been lined out for over an hour, grappling to hang on to a fierce pace. I was doing everything I could just to hold the wheel in front of me and prevent myself dropping back through the convoy of following team cars. But it was killing me. I was so tired that I was barely able to get out of the saddle after each corner or haul myself over the smallest inclines.
Just as I was about to give up the ghost, I looked up and saw Robbie McEwen, the Australian sprinter, swing out of the line of riders, waving his arm in the air, angrily shouting obscenities. Eventually he looked behind him, by which point he was not so far ahead of me.
Robbie wasn’t done though. He put his head down and started sprinting back up to speed alongside the line of riders, only to begin ranting again.
‘FUCKING JUST STOP!’ he screamed. ‘THIS IS NOT FUCKING BIKE RACING!’
I felt better after that. Later, when the pace eventually dropped, I introduced myself. It was the first time I ever spoke to Robbie and he made me realise that I wasn’t the only
one finding it hard. I’m grateful to him for that.
I also got introduced to ‘recovery’ – or récup – methods at Tirreno. This was the use of injected vitamins to speed recovery from racing and keep your blood levels at a ‘healthy’ level. I remember, after one stage, lying on the bed, watching my roommate Frankie Andreu opening syringes and breaking ampoules, in front of the TV.
Another rider came in the room, looked across at me and said to Frankie: ‘Sure he should be seeing this? Wanna do it in my room?’
Frankie, in his very pragmatic way, simply replied: ‘He’s gonna see it sooner or later – it’s no problem.’
I got on pretty well with Frankie. Yes, he was grumpy, but you knew what you got with him. I asked him later on what he’d been doing.
‘What was that you were injecting?’ I said.
‘Vitamins. Iron and vitamins. The usual, all legal, don’t worry’
‘Does it make a big difference?’
‘Don’t know about big, but you know, David,’ he said, ‘small things make a difference.’
I was pretty sure I was irritating him, and the bottom line was that I wasn’t about to start injecting myself, so what did I care? I tried to be as nonchalant as possible about it all. I was curious though. What exactly was ‘the usual’? What did it do and where did he get it? And how the hell had he learned to inject himself?
As the race went on, I realised that most of the guys were doing ‘recovery’. They all had their own little medical bags with their ampoules and syringes, and it did not appear to be any different to them than having a protein drink or some amino acid capsules. Injecting yourself was normal.
There were other things that I had to get used to. Ice was regularly delivered to rooms, by the soigneurs, in little plastic bags. I’d noticed it a couple of times and thought nothing of it; after all, ice is a sportsman’s best friend.
