by David Millar
James and I had given ourselves one more night in the apartment, to ready ourselves for the drudgery of the return journey As the rain poured down that evening, I joked that Biarritz was crying because I was leaving.
Perhaps because of the turmoil, or because I’d become increasingly nocturnal, I couldn’t sleep. I’d left my longboard out, intending it to be squeezed into the truck at the last. I pulled my clothes on and decided to go out for one last skate.
It was the dead of night, about four in the morning, and as quiet as the winter nights when I’d often had the town to myself. I sat outside the unfinished house that I’d never spend a night in, then rolled down to the corniche of the Côte des Basques, so beautiful in the darkness and the rain, the way only Biarritz can be. I skated all the way down the corniche, memorising every moment. It felt so peaceful.
Finally, I wandered through town and back up to the apartment, remembering all the good times and promising myself that I wouldn’t forget them. It was the goodbye I’d never given Hong Kong.
James and I set off early the next morning. It was only about 300 kilometres to Santander, but the route was tortuous, with barely any flat road. The truck was so overloaded that we would slow to an agonising 60 kilometres per hour as soon as we climbed uphill.
Massive lorries would grind their gears angrily behind us, then overtake, horns blaring. It was painful going. Eventually we got to Santander, but as soon as we were in sight of the port we knew something wasn’t right. There were no cars lined up waiting, and more worryingly, no sign of a ship.
I started to feel anxious. ‘Check the tickets, James,’ I said. ‘It was today, right? Midday?’
James fumbled in his manbag. ‘Yep, all looks good.’ Then he scanned the horizon. ‘So where the fuck is the boat ...?’
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘This isn’t good.’
There were storms in Plymouth and the crossing had been cancelled. We’d have to wait for the next scheduled arrival. It was Thursday and the next sailing would be Monday. James was panicking. The chaos of my life had started to get to him.
‘Dave – I’ve got to get home, we’ve got to get out of here. Seriously, this is too much.’
We had a snack. Over pizza, I faced up to the challenge that lay ahead of us.
‘Well, there’s no way we can go back to Biarritz,’ I said. ‘Not after all the farewells.’
James agreed. ‘So what do we do?’
‘Drive,’ I said. ‘Head up to northern France and get a crossing there.’
‘Yeah, good plan,’ he said perkily. ‘How far is that?’
‘Oh,’ I mused, ‘it’s about the same as going to the fucking moon in that truck.’
Twenty-eight hours later, dazed and confused, we pulled up outside my sister’s place in Shepherd’s Bush. Then we went to the pub. James somehow made it back to his place in Primrose Hill that evening, although he went a little mad, locking himself out and losing his takeaway curry.
The next day, with help from France and her fiancé Matt, I emptied the contents of the truck into a storage facility in Fulham. I grabbed a holdall of clothes and locked the door. Everything I had from the last nine years of my life in France was padlocked away in that warehouse.
Ten months earlier, I’d celebrated winning the world title by flying to Las Vegas and partying in a suite in the Bellagio. Now home was the floor in my sister’s living room.
20
SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED
I could count on one hand the number of days I’d been sober since my arrest.
Drinking had proved to be the best way to cope with everything falling apart. It fuelled indifference. It shut out the world. Nothing seemed that important when I was drunk. I had drinks for certain times, drinks for certain places and drinks according to who I was with. I was becoming an expert. I was becoming a lush.
My old faithful, whenever I found myself in a decent establishment, was the dry Martini, although it had to be very dry. I was very particular about that. I was beginning to think that maybe James Bond had been similarly soaked in booze. No wonder he was so cool, so indifferent – he was drunk the whole bloody time.
Back in London, I didn’t have anybody to share my constant inebriation with. Even I couldn’t face drinking on my own. I also felt bad about hovering, like a black cloud, around the new home of my sister and Matt. Fortunately, they were saved from more Martini-fuelled moping when I was invited to Scotland to stay with the Major.
I’d met the Major the year before, a few weeks after the World Championships, at Harry’s insistence, when we both happened to be passing through Paris.
The Major and his better half, Caron, were driving to Mallorca and, on the way down, intended to stay the night chez Harry. I was attending a sponsors meeting and was actually booked on a flight to go back to Biarritz, but didn’t really have anything better to do, so hung around to meet them.
The Major was in his mid-fifties, while Caron was perhaps ten years younger. She was a wonderfully chic Glaswegian, a quite incongruous mix, brought up in a rather bohemian artistic family, her father a successful architect and her mother a talented artist.
Caron spoke fluent French. Her mother had decided a year in Paris would be good for the kids, although the kids only learned of this when they realised their mother wasn’t driving the Citroen 2CV home from school in Glasgow, but on to Paris – and without their father.
The Major is one of the last great eccentrics. Born and bred in Edinburgh, he lived in probably the biggest house in the city, a mansion built for the treasurer of the Bank of Scotland in 1900. Set on the top of a hill and with a winding drive up through the grounds, there was no gate and the gatehouse at the entrance was boarded up. The Major only lived in one wing of the vast residence, having converted the ballroom back to its former glory and the adjacent drawing room into his bedroom.
He was immersed in the motor racing world and owned numerous cars, including some Ferraris, yet his favourite car was a 1990 Mazda 323. He was obsessive about cleanliness, and was almost always the first up, no matter how wild things had been the previous night.
Everybody was known as‘old boy’, and he possessed an anecdote, or a solution, that was appropriate to any dilemma you put to him. There was no problem too big or too small that he couldn’t fix. He moved with purpose and conviction, never dawdling; there was always departure point A and arrival point B.
‘No fucking about old boy,’ he’d say.
He and Caron were a breath of fresh air. I didn’t know anybody else like them and we became firm friends almost immediately during that first meeting in Paris. They knew how to have fun, were chatty and witty, and seemed to be able to adapt to any situation. I thought they were the epitome of fabulous. They were also perfect company for me during what was becoming a more and more depressing period. I knew if anybody was immune to my black cloud then it was the Major and Caron.
I spent a few weeks up in Edinburgh with them, the longest time I’d spent in Scotland since I’d left as a child. Surprisingly, given all that had happened, it felt like home. The two of them were fiercely proud and protective of me, and I would never cease to be surprised by how every Scot I met treated me as one of their own. It felt good to be Scottish. I fitted in and felt much less of a nomad.
The Major was in the process of retiring from the business world and was shutting up shop before he left to live in Monaco and Mallorca. This meant he was in a bit of a transitional phase himself, which allowed us to drift around together. He was finally fulfilling everything he’d ever worked towards, but I’m not sure he was really ready to leave Edinburgh.
We were perfect pals for a few months, both at each other’s disposal at any time. I got to know Edinburgh, my father’s home town, inside and out. After all the places I’d been to, it would be Edinburgh, where it all started, that would help me rediscover myself.
I saw in 2005 with the Major and Caron in Mallorca. My mainly liquid diet was keeping the weight off so I may hav
e still looked like a pro cyclist, but I had become completely removed from my sport.
My body had changed significantly. I was losing that athletic sensation of being in total control of it, a sensation I had always had, except when I’d been injured.
My body and mind were now operating as different entities – I wasn’t an athlete any more. That epiphany woke me up to how much time had passed. I hadn’t done any exercise in six months, I was smoking sporadically and drinking massively. I’d discarded the one thing I always considered to be wholly mine, to be untouchable – my athleticism. It was this, more than anything else, that made me break out of the drunken cocoon I’d been calling home.
Soon after the New Year, my appeal against my two-year ban was heard at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne. A few weeks after my disciplinary hearing the previous August, with hopes of resuming my career hanging by a thread, I had succumbed to Paul-Albert’s sagesse and the advice of others and given the go-ahead for an appeal to CAS in a bid to reduce the length of my sanction.
CAS transcends all borders and governing bodies and gives all sports-related cases a fair and just hearing. It has the power to overrule any prior decision and to lay down binding rulings on anything from disciplinary sanctions to commercial contracts. In short, whatever CAS decided had to be respected and adhered to.
The hearing took most of the day and was held in a beautiful old house above Lake Geneva. It was a long way from Judge Pallain’s shabby hothouse in Nanterre. The British Federation had hired barristers to defend their decision and I was represented by Paul-Albert and his team. But I also had a few supporting testimonies from people in British Cycling, making it all a little confusing for the arbitrators.
We were reasonably confident that I would receive a reduction in my sanction, as the British Federation had dated the start of the ban from the hearing in August – not from the date of my arrest by the police in Biarritz. This was only a difference in time of six weeks, but it meant that my two-year ban made me unavailable for three Tours de France. If it was dated from the time of the arrest, I’d only miss two.
We pushed hard for it to be reduced at least to the date of my arrest. In fact, we hoped to receive a six-month reduction, and I had this in my head as a realistic expectation.
That would mean that I would be banned for 2005 but able to resume my career in time for the 2006 Tour. I had started thinking about my future. After the hearing, I headed back to England and awaited their decision.
I’d listened to Dave Brailsford’s recommendation to live near Manchester. The only place I knew near Manchester was Chapel-en-le-Frith, in the Peak District, where Mike and Pat Taylor lived.
So I knocked on the very same door that had welcomed me in a decade before, when I was the 18-year-old kid from Hong Kong, hoping to secure a professional contract.
They were as welcoming as ever.
‘David!’ Pat said warmly, when she opened their front door. ‘Come in, love. Cup of tea? You must be hungry.’
Then came the familiar call down the hallway.
‘Mike! David’s here.’
Nothing had changed. I stayed with Mike and Pat until I found myself somewhere to live. They were as kind, generous and supportive as when I had first started out.
I rented a little attic apartment called ‘The Flat’, above a doctor’s surgery just a few miles down the road in Hayfield. It just happened to be the same village that Rob and Vicki Hayles had settled in after leaving Biarritz. This was a stroke of good luck that I can only describe as a godsend. I went down to London, hired the cheapest man with a van I could find and helped him unload the contents of the storage unit into the back of his little truck, before trundling up north.
Having a place of my own and all my stuff back was a big step forward. Until then, I had been a hobo, calling in favours. I was very house proud and the first thing I did was unpack all my books and put them in my bedroom, in pride of place, just as they’d been in Biarritz before the police had torn the place apart.
I unpacked the furniture I’d bought for the dream house, finally taking it out of the cardboard boxes that had carried it all safely from Florence to Biarritz to London, squeezing it into the flat in Hayfield. It had cost me more than the equivalent of two years rent for ‘The Flat’. Never again would I spend that much money on furniture, I was quite sure of that.
I loved Hayfield. Nick Craig, one of the UK’s greatest ever cyclo-cross and mountain bike riders, lived there with his family. Rob introduced us and we hit it off. Nick and his wife Sarah had lived their whole lives within a 10-mile radius of Hayfield, yet they seemed more open-minded and worldly than most people I knew. They just treated me as the bloke who lived above the surgery. It was exactly what I needed.
In fact, everything about Hayfield and the Peak District was what I needed. More than ever, I understood that much of my life was based on shite. I also began to realise how it was abnormal and unhealthy to be treated as I’d been treated before.
I had a big wake-up call when I went to open a bank account in Buxton. I waited in the queue, then sat down with a trainee, filling in forms and explaining that yes, professional cycling was a paying job – at least, for some anyway. It was a million miles from my visits to the bank in Luxembourg, when Hubert, my banker, would pick me up from the airport, keep the bank open for me and then wine and dine me.
Nor was it like visiting the Crédit Lyonnais in Biarritz, where they had posters of me on the wall and everybody treated me like family. I began to see what a fool I’d been. How the hell could I have thought any of that was normal?
A few days later, Paul-Albert called. CAS had made its decision. They’d only reduced the ban by a few weeks, the bare minimum of what we’d hoped. I was distraught. The one bit of hope that I’d allowed myself was now gone. I’d convinced myself that unless the ban was reduced by six months, it would be impossible for me to return to racing. No team in their right mind would take me, after two years without racing, straight to the Tour de France.
Although the ban now expired in June 2006, any decent team would want to see that I’d got some racing miles banked before sending me to the Tour. That meant that I wouldn’t be able to return to the Tour until July 2007.
What the fuck was I going to do? All my talk about quitting the sport and doing something else was bullshit. I had to admit that now. Cycling was all I knew. Time out of the professional sporting bubble had shown me that we were blessed to be where we were, doing what we were doing. I was so angry with myself for making life so difficult.
What an idiot I’d been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.
Over the New Year, I had committed myself to a road trip with the Major. We planned to drive to Mallorca from Edinburgh, via Paris and the Barcelona Grand Prix. I saw it as a final hurrah. I knew that after this trip, I would be leaving that life behind.
I had a video camera and intended to chronicle the trip for posterity. Unfortunately the batteries died before we’d made it down the driveway in Edinburgh. This may have been just as well. We persevered, caught the ferry from Edinburgh to Zeebrugge, then raced to Paris to meet up with Harry.
We parked, had lunch and set about enjoying ourselves. By the time we got back to Harry’s, early the next morning, the car had gone. The Major was appalled. Thankfully, it had been towed, rather than stolen. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to have parked in front of the Greek embassy.
Later that day, we were off again, en route to Barcelona. Our advance planning hadn’t included maps or a satnav All we had was a compass, as I had convinced the Major this would be a perfectly adequate way of finding our way around Europe. I was asleep after completing one of my driving shifts when he woke me, soon after we’d passed Montpelier.
Inevitably, we were lost.
‘Millar . . . Millar! WAKE UP FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’ he bellowed.
I woke with a start. ‘What? What’s going on?’
‘We’re lost. There are no more
signs for Barcelona.’
‘I told you, head south,’ I said calmly. ‘Look, we’re going east. How long have we been going in this direction?’
‘Fucking compass,’ he snorted. ‘We were going south. Right, you’re in charge, old boy. Use that bike racing knowledge of yours and get us to Barcelona!’
We did everything we could to get there, but we didn’t make it in time. After missing the race in Barcelona, we set off for Mallorca, scraping onto the ferry at the eleventh hour, the last car to board. The Major remained cool as a cucumber.
‘Only way to travel!’ he said rakishly. ‘If the road’s not bumpy, then where’s the fun old-boy . . .?’
Our grand tour culminated at the Monaco Grand Prix. Harry invited me to the race and the Major and Caron joined us there.
The Major’s favourite car was the classic yellow Ferrari he kept in Monaco. I went with him to pick it up from storage, principally because I spoke French, but also because it gave us an afternoon to lark about.
It had been stored in a garage in Menton since his last visit. When we arrived, he strode in like he owned the place, but he hadn’t been there for such a long time that the car was tucked away in a dark corner.
As soon as he set eyes on the Ferrari, I knew it meant something special to him.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ he whispered reverentially. ‘I love the old girl,’ he said, gently running his hand over the bodywork. It was all quite sweet. I left the two of them alone.
Before long, we were rolling back along the coast on our way back to ‘The Monte’.
‘Have a look in the glove box, old boy,’ he said. ‘There should be some eight-tracks. Caron got them for me, let’s give them a whirl.’ I couldn’t decide. Frank or Elvis? I went for Ol’ Blue Eyes.
