Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar

by David Millar

  When I got back to the room he had locked me out. Eventually, thanks to a spare key, we got in.

  He was in there, looking completely deranged. He started whispering, saying that the room had been bugged with microphones and telling us that we were being listened to. The soigneur didn’t hesitate; he immediately told me to pack up my stuff, as I’d be sleeping in another room.

  Desbiens wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the kid was amphetamined up to his eyeballs. He’d obviously taken it to panic-train before the race and had ended up ‘cooking’ his brain, a condition otherwise known as speed psychosis.

  This, it turned out, was standard practice. ‘Pot-Belge’, a concoction of drugs, was used to underpin big training sessions and there was certainly a type of pro who loved the allumé training session. They used to say that if you were allumé, it didn’t matter if it was raining, as there’d be sunshine in your head.

  That was perhaps not a bad thing for those tackling their early season 6-, even 7-hour rides in the cold and wet. Often, however, they didn’t even really need to light up – it was seen as just good fun. Taken in the wrong doses or abused – yes, even amphetamine users can be responsible – you could not only destroy your body but also your brain, just like my friend. That was the last we were to see of him.

  His plight demonstrated the risks riders ran if they ‘experimented’ on their own. It was usually the soigneurs who dealt with rider medication. Any self-respecting soigneur would have their own comprehensive medical bag and, if the doctor was not at the race, which was often the case, then the soigneurs would assume the role – often with relish. The team truck would also have a sort of mini-pharmacy, nothing illegal, just a comprehensive array of pharmaceutical supplies.

  The big fad at the time was for Italian ‘recovery’ products. This was what I’d seen Frankie injecting. Prefolic acid, Epargriseovit and Ferlixit: prefolic acid, vitamin B and iron. These were all supposed to help keep your blood healthy and to maintain your oxygen-carrying capacity at its highest. Up to this point, it was all I had seen.

  It was common knowledge that I didn’t do ‘recovery’ and I think it was beginning to annoy some of the staff in the team, especially the soigneurs. They could see that I was a talented racer, but they also knew what I was competing against. I think they thought I didn’t understand, that I was naive, perhaps stubbornly idealistic, that I hadn’t grasped I was now a professional in a world in which where there was no room for idealism.

  My soigneur took it upon himself to explain, as he had done previously, that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with ‘recovery’. It was not illegal and, far from doping, it was a simple injection that gave my body the vitamins it couldn’t replace through eating alone.

  I’d spoken to Tony about it during the week, and he’d said that the combination of prefolic, Epargriseovit and small doses of Ferlixit could actually boost your blood values by a point, completely naturally.

  I thought about it some more. Maybe they were right; maybe I was just being stubborn. After all, this wasn’t doping. If I was going to take a stance against doping, then I needed to make sure I did everything else within the rules that might help my racing.

  So when my massage was over at the penultimate stage in Asturias, and my soigneur asked if I was sure I didn’t want to do recovery, I finally said:

  ‘Bon, allez, je vais le faire.’

  ‘Okay, fine, let’s do it.’

  I sat on the massage table and watched as he got out the ampoules and the paraphernalia required to inject it intravenously. Everything was new and disposable, the syringes and needles were all individually wrapped in plastic and he carefully opened all of these. There was one bigger syringe and one smaller, one needle and a butterfly; such a lovely name for such an ugly tool.

  The butterfly was the little plastic-winged needle at the end of a thin tube, used to make the IV junction between the vein and the syringe. The prefolic was in two ampoules. One was like a mini jar with powder in it, the other was a little standard ampoule with clear liquid; this liquid needed to be siphoned out and mixed into the powder. This was then shaken and left.

  He broke the top off the pinky-red Epargriseovit ampoule and drew that out into the bigger syringe, then the dissolved prefolic mixture could be siphoned out into the same syringe. This was put to one side, while he snapped off the top of the Ferlixit ampoule, a very dark brown liquid and exactly what one would expect iron to look like. He drew half of the ampoule’s contents into the smaller syringe and laid it carefully down next to the other syringe.

  It was strange watching all this, taking it all in. Once the two syringes were lying there, side by side, it was hard not to question what I was doing. I felt uncomfortable, but I was now too embarrassed to say, ‘No – stop.’

  So I sat there as he put a tourniquet on my arm and told me to clench my fist, my veins bulging out like the roots of a tree. He joked about how hard it was to find a vein. I smiled, trying to find it funny.

  The butterfly was now brought out and he wiped down the vein he’d chosen in the crease of my arm. I didn’t like needles. I’d been avoiding my tetanus booster for years, as I hated the idea of being stabbed with a needle. And now this . . .

  And then it was in.

  The butterfly gently pierced the skin and the wall of the vein and laid its wings down upon my arm. A couple of centimetres of blood pumped up through the tube before stopping, the pressure of the tourniquet limiting blood flow. He then connected the bigger syringe to the end of the tube and deftly removed the tourniquet. With one hand holding the barrel and the other gently pulling back on the pump, my blood flowed smoothly up and entered the syringe with a tiny little exploding cloud.

  ‘Ça va?’ he asked me. I answered, ‘Oui.’

  And, slowly, he began to empty the syringe into my body.

  He told me that I should tell him if I felt it burning. He emptied the syringe completely and pushed air through the tube till there was just a drop of liquid at the tube’s end, near the butterfly wings. Then he smoothly disconnected the empty syringe and reconnected the smaller darker one. This was the iron, and he said he had to pump this through much more slowly.

  ‘Pourquoi?’ I asked.

  ‘Because that’s what you have to do with iron,’ I was told.

  Once again, my blood was sucked back up through the tube till it met with the barrel of the syringe, only this time there was no pretty little exploding cloud, as the iron was darker than the blood.

  We sat there in silence apart from the occasional ‘Ça va?’ as the syringe was emptied.

  And that was that. A line had been crossed. I now did ‘recovery’. I didn’t like doing it and would only do it after the hardest days in stage races. I was a light user for no other reason than I didn’t like injections.

  My season progressed. I began to adapt to the racing and finally to get some results. I was close to the top ten in time trials, began finishing stage races and, unlike most other neo-pros, actually made it into breakaways.

  These were all big achievements for me that first year. I had high hopes of success in the Tour de L’Avenir – literally translated as the Tour of the Future, a mini-Tour de France, organised by the Tour de France promoter, ASO.

  There was a prologue and a time trial before it headed off into the mountains and I’d fixed my sights on winning both. The prologue I won with relative ease, but in the time trial, I was swept aside by French rider Erwann Mentheour.

  I finished the race and was being congratulated by everybody on what seemed an inevitable victory when Erwann came ripping through the finish taking my ‘fastest time’ and pummelling it.

  It was my first experience of having a win taken from me by a guy who was clearly doping, something he subsequently admitted to. But to his credit, Erwann didn’t really hide it and effectively apologised to me the next day. That didn’t stop me from quitting the race and going home though.

  I ended the season racing for Great Britain in
the World Championships in San Sebastian. I was excited at the prospect of being able to spend some time with the British team, which felt like a safe, friendly place compared to where I had spent most of the rest of the year.

  I didn’t know at the time that Tom Simpson had won the World title in San Sebastian 32 years earlier. But then, when I was 20 years old, I didn’t really know much about Simpson’s story.

  Robert Millar was team manager that week and we got on well. Chris Boardman and I were the two riders entered for the time trial. Chris took bronze in the TT, and I ended up in the middle of the field, but struggled in the road race and didn’t finish. But one of the key moments of that week in the Basque Country was meeting Harry Gibbings, a charismatic Irishman who was working for Oakley sunglasses at the time.

  Harry and I hit it off straight away and my first pro season ended with us partying the night away together, post-road race on Sunday evening. At some point I dropped my phone in the harbour, Bjarne Riis took a cigar out of my mouth and stuck it down my shirt, we both lost our jackets and went body surfing in the freezing sea. I woke up the next morning 30 kilometres away in Harry’s hotel, fully clothed apart from one bare foot. It was to set a precedent for our times spent together over the next eight years.

  8

  TOUR DE DOPAGE

  By the start of 1998, I’d had enough of Nice. The Americans were a strange bunch, bitching about each other incessantly, and, with Lance making his comeback after his cancer treatment, it was all getting too much. Cliques were forming and it was very hard to tell where you stood with anyone – plus, they weren’t really that much fun.

  So together with Jeremy Hunt, a fellow British pro, I decided to move to Toulouse, where a small group of Aussies – in fact, Henk Vogels and Stuart O’Grady, a freckled ball of energy who became a great friend – were based. This seemed like a good idea at the time.

  I was left in charge of all logistics, so after packing all my things into a rental car and saying farewell to Bobby, I drove to Toulouse. Unfortunately, however, neither Jez nor I had ever been there before.

  I went to some estate agents but quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be living there. I was in a no-man’s land now. I couldn’t go back to Nice, so I decided to continue on to Biarritz.

  I’d been there once before and had been struck by how beautiful it was, yet it had never crossed my mind to live there, probably because no other pro cyclists lived there. As my disillusionment with the sport grew, however, this became an appealing characteristic.

  I called Eric Frutoso, my mentor two years earlier at St Quentin, and he kindly offered to put me up while I decided what to do. I found an apartment in the nick of time before heading off to my first races. I lived there for the next seven years. That was how Biarritz became home.

  I’d saved up some money for furniture and I loved getting my own place together. I was nesting, and for the first time in a while it felt like I had found somewhere I could be happy. Biarritz affected me in much the same way Hong Kong had done.

  It’s a soulful place, precariously built on a rocky, wild coastline. The architecture is eclectic: the town is a nineteenth-century folly, built for wealthy and aristocratic Europeans. For a while, it was the only place to be in summertime, if you were rich.

  When I moved there, the town was a faded version of its once chic self. The shoeless surfers outnumbered the Hermès-carrying mesdames, and no longer was Coco Chanel to be found gallivanting with fallen Russian princes. Instead, there were numerous VW vans and groups of stoned, drum-playing students. That didn’t mean there weren’t a few remnants of la belle époque, and when one did see them a perfect juxtaposition was created, of two worlds colliding, fur versus neoprene. I loved it.

  Biarritz offered me an escape from a world I was beginning to hold in ever-greater disdain. I loved racing, and I loved being a cyclist, but I struggled with the people and the environment. The world of doping and the law of silence – the omertà – that went with it were eroding my self-respect.

  I started to distance myself from the people, and from some of the classless idiots who were considered as great champions. I was a mere apprentice yet I was already losing respect for my profession. Even so, I still believed that I’d be better than the dopers when my time came and I was confident that I could do whatever I wanted to, if I put my mind to it.

  As I separated myself further from the ethos of professional cycling, I read more and more. From McCarthy and Ellroy, I bounced on to Graham Swift and Niall Williams, and then to a biography of Victor Hugo, which helped me understand why I had seen his name in every French town I’d ever ridden through. Reading felt like the only way I could be different, more cerebral. I wanted so much to be different from the archetypal pro.

  Most of the time, when I raced, I got my head ‘kicked in’, as they say. But the rest of the time, things were better. I could actually be part of the race, and that made up for all the pain. Winning remained almost impossible, but I was better than most when it came to time trialling. I took it more seriously than others and I took great pride in my bike and in achieving the best and most aerodynamic position.

  That said, I didn’t have good equipment and I spent my first five years as a professional battling for bits for my bike. But because I cared, the mechanics did their best with what they had. I also took every time trial seriously, because of what Guimard had told me once, when I was particularly exhausted and I asked if I could take it easy in the time trial.

  He’d stared at me. ‘You are a professional – you do every time trial at 100 per cent,’ he said. ‘One day it will serve you well if you find yourself in the leader’s jersey.’ I have stood by his advice ever since.

  That spring, I won the time trial at the Three Days of De Panne, a brutal race held in Flanders and finishing on the grey Belgian coast. Feared by every professional, the general rule of thumb is that if you make it through without crashing you’ve had a great three days. Coming into the last day I wasn’t expecting much. After a 110-kilometre morning stage, we tackled the time trial, a simple affair out and back along the coast. I was 14 seconds faster than the next guy, Italian Michele Bartoli, the best one-day rider at that time, and I also broke the course record. To say it was a surprise would be an understatement.

  We went straight from there to another race in France, the GP Rennes, and soon after that I had another little stage race, Circuit de La Sarthe. The Italian contingent of the Cofidis team flew in to compete and I raced with Francesco Casagrande, our Italian leader and widely seen as one of the sport’s big stars, for the first time.

  I was on a high, largely because of the results of the blood tests the team had run on us all the day after De Panne. In theory, this was to make sure that nobody’s hematocrit was over the 50 per cent limit. When the results came through the day before La Sarthe started, I was a pitifully low 40.1 per cent.

  But instead of being disheartened by this I felt vindicated and excited, as it demonstrated that it wasn’t necessary to be near 50 per cent in order to win. I knew I’d raced against guys in De Panne who were fully prepared for the one-day Classic, the Tour of Flanders, a couple of days later. The blood test result made me realise that anything was possible.

  In my youthful exuberance, I was telling anybody who would listen that I’d won in De Panne and broken the course record with a hematocrit of only 40 per cent. I went to see Casagrande and his roommate, whom I’ll refer to as l’Équipier (‘the teammate’), so that I could show Casagrande the test results.

  I stood there, a big grin on my face, expecting Casagrande to congratulate me and say something morale boosting. But he didn’t. After a pause, he handed the result back to me and then turned to speak to his roommate in Italian.

  ‘Perché non è a 50?’ Casagrande asked l’Équipier, puzzled.

  ‘Why isn’t he at 50?’

  L’Équipier knew that I’d understood and that it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, so in his accented French
he tried to say something more congratulatory. It was too late though. I was crestfallen by Casagrande’s reaction. The damage was done.

  Many of the guys I raced alongside considered it their professional duty to be as close to the limits as the rules would allow. In their world, it had nothing to do with ethics, or what was right or wrong, and certainly had nothing to do with cheating. It was simply medical preparation.

  To riders like Casagrande I was a fool, a naive young foreigner who had yet to understand the true nature of his profession. He was right in thinking I was a naive young pro but he was wrong on one count: I wasn’t a fool.

  After that shattering meeting with Casagrande, I recognised – perhaps even accepted – what I was up against. But it didn’t make me upset like the first time I’d encountered it with Jim van de Laer the year before. Instead it made me angry.

  Fuck them, I thought.

  Fuck them for thinking they could judge me, or my choices. I wasn’t a fool, and I was no longer naive. I took it upon myself to prove to them that I was better than they were. I had no respect for them, these stupid men, these ‘professionals’, uneducated athletes who took drugs because they had no other option in life. If anything, I pitied them.

  It was this attitude that would allow me to survive clean for so long in such a deep-rooted doping culture. I had no outside help and it wasn’t something I could talk about or share, because everywhere I turned people seemed to have their head in the sand about it.

  It was a dark world that existed behind the technicolour caravan, a world that most in the sport knew about but none would challenge. It was all a big lie. And there was nothing for the clean guys to do but to carry on and stick to their guns.