by David Millar
The scenery around Valencia is beautiful and it was a pure joy racing alone ahead of the peloton. I raced up the climbs, bagging all the mountain points, and then ripped down the technical descents using every inch of the road. I was 22 and pretty fearless, oblivious to the consequences of making just one mistake. That gung-ho attitude caught up with me, with about 50 kilometres to race.
I came roaring around a blind switchback bend to find the road kicked on, through almost 180 degrees. All that stood between me and the other side of the valley was a protective barrier. At high speed, I T-boned the barrier, took off and saw that it wasn’t a sheer cliff, more of a very steep drop.
That season, we’d just started using shortwave radios, linking the riders and the team cars. The big heavy receiver, tucked away in my back pocket, took the impact as I slammed onto my back and began sliding down the hillside. I started grappling for something to hold on to. Eventually I came to a halt.
In the post-crash stillness, I lay there, gripping onto bushes and rocks, trying to understand what had just happened. Above me, up on the road, the team car that was following me down the mountain had slid to a halt alongside the barrier I’d just flipped over. Meanwhile far below, my bike was bouncing down the mountain.
Before I knew it, our team mechanic was with me, roughly pulling me back up the hill. I sat on the barrier for a moment, my head in my hands, realising how lucky I’d just been. After peering down at the tangled remains of my bike, my team directeur asked me if I was okay, and within seconds I was being put on a spare bike and pushed off.
Despite my tumble, I was still hyped: as soon as I got back on the bike I felt fine again; so fine in fact, that a couple of hundred metres later, when I saw photographer Graham Watson on the next hairpin bend, readying himself to take a shot, I yelled: ‘Graham – you just missed the most amazing crash!’
The race in Valencia was a great success for me. I claimed the mountains jersey that first day and, after deciding to defend it, found a new confidence in my climbing ability. I was playing with the big boys, riders like Laurent Jalabert, Michael Boogerd, Michele Bartoli, Alexandre Vinokourov. I finished fourth overall and won the mountains classification.
I was really beginning to think the sport was changing – it didn’t cross my mind that I was.
After the success of Spain, I was flown to Switzerland for two races, GP Chiasso and GP Lugano. They weren’t very high-profile events, but Chiasso was renowned for being physically extremely hard. Roland Meier, the Swiss rider on our team, told us: ‘Normally out of the 200 who start, 50 or so will finish. If it rains, maybe 15.’ This was not the most motivating of pep talks, but it proved very accurate.
Chiasso went straight up one side of a mountain valley, dropped down a bit further along, did a loop and then repeated the climb and descent. It was a savage course. It began to rain about halfway through – cold, icy rain – and as Meier had predicted, half of the field dropped out. I wasn’t overly motivated as my big objective was Tirreno-Adriatico, a few days away, but l’Équipier, my new-found loyal domestique, took it upon himself to get me to the front and string the field out into the climb.
His was the classic teammate’s kamikaze effort, riding himself into the ground as he set the pace on my behalf. I’ve done it myself and gone down in flames in the process. So, inevitably, the exhausted l’Équipier finally sat up. I remember thinking: ‘Off to the showers you go – you bastard. Now I’m out here on my own and I’ve got to race . . .’
Soon after that, as we approached the top of the climb, it began to snow. There were about fifteen riders left and we still had over an hour of racing ahead of us. After a brief hiatus, we all dropped back to our team cars to get what little warm weather clothing we had left. I was fully clad in thermal gear by this point, yet still couldn’t feel my hands or feet.
As I looked around it was clear that the few guys who were left were not only the strongest, but the hardest men in the race. We rode over the summit in a blizzard and faced up to the fast descent.
It was a horrible experience. After only a couple of minutes I was chilled to the bone, shivering everywhere, and the finesse needed to brake in the wet was lost. I could barely move my fingers, let alone feather the brakes, as I’d normally do.
As we slid into the hairpins, it was simply a case of braking in time and making it through the corner. We weren’t racing on the descent – we were fighting to survive. It was an epic experience and I loved it. Some riders missed bends and disappeared into the sleet. I stayed upright to finish third but I collapsed as I crossed the finish line and was carried to the showers in a hypothermic state. But it had been a classic day of bike racing, the kind that had enraptured me when I fell in love with the sport in Hong Kong.
The next day was a rude awakening. My disillusionment with Cofidis deepened, as instead of recognising that I’d gone deep into my reserves 24 hours earlier, they told me that I had to race in what was essentially an amateur event.
‘Think of your teammates,’ I was told. ‘Do you want them to see you sleeping in, while they’re out there racing?’ That was all it took for me to feel guilty. I caved in and raced.
We started at 7.30 a.m. and the course was over 200 kilometres long. I finished, but it meant I had raced over 400 kilometres in 24 hours. Within a day, I developed a cold that turned into bronchitis. I was still driven down to Sorrento in Italy where I was expected to start Tirreno–Adriatico.
We stopped at Pisa for the night but I was coughing my lungs up and knew there was no way I was going to get better in time for Tirreno. Once again I protested. Once again, nobody wanted to listen. I knew it was useless.
‘There are still two days to the start,’ they said, ‘and then you can just ride yourself into the race. We’ll see how you are on the morning of the race.’
It was no surprise, after the workload of the previous five weeks, that I was ill. It was obvious that I should go home and rest. But the team needed me – there was nobody else who could lead in Tirreno. With Vandenbroucke leading the team on one front, Cofidis had become reliant on me elsewhere. They were better off gambling that I might miraculously recover than they were going into a major race without a leader.
I started Tirreno, but didn’t even make it through the first day. I was so angry. They’d forgotten that I was 22 and that I was being stretched to my absolute limit. They risked wrecking me, burning me out, and it felt like they didn’t care if that happened. I could have just refused to race, and now, older and wiser, I would have done, but I was still desperate to impress.
I recovered in Biarritz and started training for my next race, the two-day Criterium International in the south of France. Despite having been ill, my form held and I finished second overall, only 0.002 seconds behind final winner Jens Voigt. But I should have won.
My time trial bike for the final afternoon was a joke. I’d waited a year for specific handlebars, but still they were not ready. We had so few time trial wheels that I was using the same front wheel as I’d used in the road stage. It would have taken the tiniest detail on my time trial bike to have closed that 0.002 seconds deficit. It was a lesson that I didn’t forget.
In some ways my good results worked against me, because even though it was clear that I had already raced too much, Cofidis kept me racing. The quick recovery I had made for Criterium International disguised the underlying fatigue that had set in.
In the meantime, VDB and his clique were dominating every race they entered. There were suspicions about those successes and Cofidis was getting a reputation within the peloton, especially the French peloton, which, in the aftermath of the Festina affair, was doing everything it could to eradicate doping.
At Paris–Nice that spring, VDB and his cabal had raced how they wanted, without any other teams being able to live with them. I’d heard stories of them actually laughing and joking about how easy it was. Some said that they were exploiting the reluctance of others to use EPO as an opportunity. There were mo
re and more tales filtering back of extreme nocturnal activities, fuelled by sleeping pills and alcohol. Cofidis was getting a very bad name within the world of cycling; in 1999, only a few months after Festina, that was no mean feat.
Then Vandenbroucke won perhaps the toughest one-day race of all, Liège–Bastogne-Liège, in a manner never seen before.
Before the race VDB had told whoever would listen where he would make his decisive attack. Yet the night before he had taken eleven Stilnox and could barely talk or walk before passing out. Within ten days of his win in Liège, he and Gaumont were arrested by the French police, over amphetamine possession. They were interrogated for 24 hours but nothing, other than thousands of column inches and the exposure of their relationship with an infamous ‘horse doctor’, Bernard Sainz, came of it. Sainz – nicknamed Dr Mabuse – was an oddball character from Paris, a guru who coached riders and gave them little-known homeopathic treatments.
The team suspended them for a short while, but then, things simply carried on as normal. I was outraged and decided that I had to talk to François Migraine, the president of Cofidis. I needed him to intervene for me. I wanted nothing more to do with VDB and Gaumont. We met at his office in Lille. We shook hands and sat down. I took a deep breath and then all my rage came spilling out.
‘François, everybody is talking about how it’s not normal that our team is so strong,’ I told him. ‘Everybody thinks Gaumont, VDB and the rest are still doping. I’ve been told that in Paris–Nice they were laughing at people, showing off how much stronger they are. It’s not right.’
Migraine looked at me. ‘Have you seen them doping?’
‘No, our schedules are different so I don’t usually race with them,’ I explained. ‘Anyway, I think anybody doping hides it well now after last year.’
‘It’s surprising that anybody would be so stupid to risk it after Festina.’
I carried on. ‘But they’re crazy, François – they just don’t care. Things in the peloton have changed since last year, yet VDB and Gaumont have seen it as an opportunity to get an even bigger advantage.
‘The team lets them get away with anything as long as they’re winning. They’ve been taking sleeping pills, drinking at night and intimidating the riders who aren’t with them.’
Migraine looked pained. ‘Does Alain [Bondue] know about this?’
‘It’s difficult to imagine him not knowing,’ I said. ‘I think he’s just happy they’re doing so well. I don’t think they’d get away with it if their results were shit.’
He got to his feet. ‘I will have to speak to Alain about it, but if this is true then I am sorry and I will make sure it no longer happens. I can understand why you’re so angry, David – thank you for telling me.’
Then Migraine walked across his office to where a large framed photo of Gaumont, winning Belgian classic Ghent–Wevelgem, was hanging in a prominent position on the wall. He turned and looked at me.
‘David, I have had enough of Gaumont,’ he said, ‘and I will show you how much.’ Migraine reached up and took the photo down, turning it to face the wall.
‘That will no longer ever hang on my wall,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure he does not cause any more destruction.’
Philippe Gaumont may have had his photograph removed from Migraine’s office wall, but Frank Vandenbroucke was still the golden boy.
Frank’s incredible results from the early season put him in the number one world ranking position and the team was now excited about him finishing the year in the top spot. They genuinely didn’t seem to care about what may, or may not, have happened earlier in the season; they certainly weren’t putting any measures in place to prevent it happening again.
VDB had long been pushing the envelope on what was possible within the rules and more than once he had just scraped in under the 50 per cent UCI blood control. He was so far over the 50 per cent limit the day before the 1999 World Championships in Verona that he had used two bags of plasma, brought to his hotel by a Cofidis teammate, to increase his blood volume and reduce his hematocrit – even then, he was still right on 50 per cent. That, along with the painkillers and cortisone he was using, meant that when he fell off and fractured both his wrists early on in the race he was able to get back on and ride a further 200 kilometres – and, despite being unable to get out of the saddle, to finish seventh. He was then taken to hospital where he had both wrists put in plaster. His performance was hailed as ‘heroic’.
Meanwhile, I was finding it very hard to get the condition I had had at the beginning of the season and increasingly felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I decided I would race in the Isle of Man week in late June, partly for fun, partly because I needed an ego boost.
Even then, it didn’t quite work out. Chris Newton smashed me in the National Time Trial Championships. After the race, I was heading out to train on two laps of the Isle of Man TT course as prep for the Manx International a couple of days later, when a cocky little Manx kid came up and asked me for my autograph.
‘Awrright?!’ he said. ‘You must be disappointed . . . !’
‘I am a bit, just not fit enough at the moment,’ I said. ‘Are you from here?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘we live here. I’m a cyclist too. So’s me brother.’
I was impressed. ‘You race at all?’
‘Not that much yet,’ he said, ‘I’m too young.’
‘Ah, you’ve got plenty of time, just have fun, don’t take it too seriously till you’re older.’ I signed a racing cap for him.
His eyes lit up. ‘Me pals are gonna be sooo jealous . . . !
‘And, erm, can we get a photo please? Sorry to ask, I know you must get this all the time.’
‘It’s no hassle,’ I said. We posed together. I put my arm around his shoulder.
The same cocky kid knocked on my hotel room door when the 2007 Tour de France started in London. He gave me a framed copy of the photo of the pair of us, arm in arm, taken on the Isle of Man that day.
‘Thought you might like this, David,’ Mark Cavendish said, a sly grin on his face.
10
19:03 MILLAR TIME
The road climbed sharply once more. I wearily lifted my backside out of the saddle yet again and cursed. Bobby Julich, riding alongside me, sensed my disbelief.
‘Are you having a fucking laugh?’ I spat, at nobody in particular. ‘This is nothing like what it looks like on TV.’
Bobby shrugged. ‘It’s not called La Doyenne for nothing.’
Bobby and I were riding in the Belgian Ardennes, reconnoitring the route of the brutal and unrelenting one-day Classic, known as the Doyenne–Liège–Bastogne–Liège. I was on the back foot, struggling for form, after losing most of the second half of the 1999 season to injury.
I’d lost ground the previous summer, when those of us not racing for Cofidis in the Tour had been sent to an altitude training camp in the Pyrenees. Having spent weeks looking forward to the summer season in Biarritz, I found myself locked away in a miserable mountain-top town. It put me in a petulant frame of mind, and after our part-time mechanic had wrecked my very expensive SRM power training cranks, my mood worsened. I was trouble. I’d never partied during a camp or a race before, but now I did. In fact, I partied like it was 1999 . . .
It was my teammate Janek Tombak’s birthday on the last night of the camp and, despite the dead-end atmosphere, we made an effort to celebrate. We found ourselves in some empty, shitty disco drinking vodka. Janek had some Stilnox and offered me one. I paused, and then took it, more out of curiosity than anything else, but it didn’t take long for the effects to hit me.
I don’t remember much after that, but I do remember trying to break back into the hotel by climbing over the roof and going through a window. When that didn’t work I decided to jump off the roof, ending up in a crumpled heap, having hit the ground with such impact as to explode the air bubbles in my Nike Max trainers.
Janek and I both thought it was pretty funny, but I wa
sn’t laughing the next morning when I woke up with a massively swollen ankle that I couldn’t put any weight on. I hobbled around and tried to pretend it was fine, but it was a lost cause. After X-rays, an ambulance took me back to Biarritz.
The team manager at the camp told everybody that I’d simply fallen down some stairs. In fact, we covered it up so well that even Alain Bondue refused to believe me when I told him the injury was really bad. I even got sent to a race while I was on crutches.
It took six specialists to figure out what was wrong. After more X-rays and an MRI scan, I went to a doctor in Monaco who diagnosed it from the first X-ray that had been taken. It was a clean fracture of my heel.
I lost the second half of 1999 and was unable to ride properly until November that year. But after losing so much time, I was hyper-motivated and locked myself away in Biarritz on a comeback mission. Returning from injury is hard, though that’s not really due to the injury itself, but more to do with your head coping with the total inability it has to make the body do what once came easily.
More often than not, injuries occur when you’re close to your peak fitness, so the last memories you have – the last performance markers you have – are of elite performance. Comebacks are at the opposite end of the scale, which is humbling for a professional athlete, but it also makes coming back an interesting and affirming experience.
The best thing about a comeback is that expectations are low. It’s one of the rare times that you live without that constant white noise of expectancy, be it external or internal. There’s only one goal, and that’s getting back to top fitness.
Pro cyclists face up to an obligatory ‘mini comeback’ at least once a year. It’s called December. As soon as the professional season ends at the beginning of October, most of us take a month, maybe more, completely off the bike. For the majority of my career I’ve taken two months off the bike and done zero exercise – no cross training, nothing. I’d just travel around seeing family and friends, meeting up with the people I didn’t see the rest of the year, catching up on all the good times I was convinced I’d missed.
