by David Millar
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Millar
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
The Racer
Welcome to the Suck
The Racing Calendar
January
I am Light, I am Strong
The Goals
‘Good winter?’
The Suck (2)
Tour Down Under
Tour Mediterranean
Tour of Qatar
Challenge Mallorca
Ryder
The Princess
Loose Ryder
Challenge Mallorca (2)
Stage Racers
Classics Riders
There’s Nothing Quite Like Racing in Flanders
Road Captain
Being Older
Postcards/Killing Me Softly
Film (1)
The Race to the Sun or the Race of the Two Seas?
Big Money C***s
Cav
Film (2)
Team Time Trialling
That Was Then …
La Classicissima di Primavera
Flanders
The Worst Crash Ever
The Theory of Crashes
Tour of Flanders
Scheldeprijs
The Hell of the North
Tyres
Cobbles
Don’t Fuck This Up
Mechanics
Farewell, Roubaix
Not the Ardennes
Not the Giro
Springtime in Catalunya
Bavaria
Early Summer in Catalunya
How to Race a Prologue
The Dauphiné
Fabian
Ryder (2)
Back Home
Tour Preparation
The Nationals (2013)
The Nationals (2014)
The Jersey
Monmouthshire
Charly
Garmin
Not the Tour de France
The Champs-Elysées, 2013
Letting Go
Not the Tour de France (2)
Velo Club Rocacorba
The Style Council
Glasgow
Washed up
The Honey Badger
Nathan
Eneco
Spain, and the National Characteristics of Racing
The Final Grand Tour
Team Time Trial (2)
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Rest Day
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Rest Day
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21 – The End of the Road
The Worlds
Circle Completed
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
What is it really like to be a racer?
What is it like to be swept along at 60kmh in the middle of the pack? How does it feel to be reeled in from a solo breakaway metres from the line? What happens to the body during a high-speed chute? What tactics must teams employ to win the day, the jersey, the grand tour? How does a domestique keep going to the end of a stage once his job is done and his body exhausted? How does a time-trialist maintain his form when every muscle and sinew is screaming at him to stop? What sacrifices must a cyclist make to reach the highest levels? What is it like on the bus? In the hotels? What camaraderie is built in the confines of a team? What rivalries? How does it feel to be constantly on the road, away from loved ones, tasting one more calorie-counted hotel breakfast?
David Millar offers us a unique insight into the mind of a professional cyclist during his last year before retirement. Over the course of a season on the World Tour, Millar puts us in touch with the sights, smells and sounds of the sport – the barked instructions of a road captain in a sprint chain, the silence of a solo training ride. This is a book about youth and age, fresh-faced excitement and hard-earned experience. It is a love letter to cycling.
About the Author
David Millar was a professional cyclist for eighteen years, and was the first Briton to wear the leader’s jerseys in the Tour de France, Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia. He is now part of the ITV cycling commentary team and a key spokesman on anti-doping. His first book Racing Through the Dark was a bestseller and was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.
ALSO BY DAVID MILLAR
Racing Through the Dark
List of Illustrations
Page
1 Ryder Hesjedal and Vincenzo Nibali (courtesy of Ryder Hesjedal)
2 Ryder Hesjedal and Alberto Contador (Ryder Hesjedal)
3 Ryder Hesjedal and Fabian Cancellara (Ryder Hesjedal)
4 Team time trial, 2009 Tour de France (Cor Vos)
5 Aftermath of crash, Tour de France 2012, stage 6 (Getty Images)
6 Tom Danielson (PA); Ryder Hesjedal (Getty Images)
7 Cobbles (Getty Images)
8 In the dust with @Millarmind (Gruber Images)
9 Paris–Roubaix (Cor Vos)
10 David Millar crashes during Paris–Roubaix, sequence of three photos (Graham Watson)
11 Tyler Farrar crossing the line of 2011 Giro d’Italia, stage 4 (Cor Vos)
12 Lachlan Morton (Angus Morton)
13 Critérium de Dauphiné guest passes
14 David Millar with Nicole and Harvey Millar (CorVos)
15 David Millar and Mark Cavendish, National Championship (SWPix)
16 David Millar’s Tour de France bike
17 David Millar beating Santiago Botero in 2001 Vuelta a España, 2001 (Getty Images); David Millar beating Jean-Christophe Péraud in 2012 Tour de France, stage 12 (Reuters)
18 David Millar on the floor after winning Stage 12 of the Tour de France, 2012 (PA)
19 David Millar’s shoes for the 2014 Commonwealth Games (Poci’s, courtesy of fi’zi:k)
20 David Millar and Archibald Millar, 2014, sequence of five photos (Richard Pelling)
21 David Millar and Geraint Thomas 231 David Millar and Ryder Hesjedal (Ryder Hesjedal) 268 Ripped jersey 281 Luke Rowe (Luke Rowe)
22 David Millar and Scott Paterson (James Paterson)
To all my boys – I raced to impress you,
I raced to beat you, I raced for you; that is, until
my two favourite boys came on the scene: Archibald
Ignasi and Harvey Nicolau, you never knew,
this book is for you.
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
‘Ulysses’, Lord Alfred Tennyson
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
‘Youth’, Samuel Ullman
The Racer
There’s something very strange about a last race with your friends. I don’t know if there’s an ideal scenario. Vomiting all over yourself and being dropped certainly doesn’t sound like it would be the one, yet maybe it is. It’s fairly representative of what most of it has been like.
Christian Vande Velde
, Dave Zabriskie and I had raced together over a period of fourteen years, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not so much, yet for us it has been a lifetime. That day, 22 September 2013, was the last time. We got our heads kicked in, yet we managed to enjoy ourselves, because without saying it I think we all knew we were going to miss each other – that they’d been golden days we were lucky to have lived through.
All three of us came into the sport at a bad time, when doping was rife and ethics were something that we knew of yet rarely saw put into practice along the shadowy roads of professional cycling. We came, we didn’t quite conquer, we doped, we sort of conquered, we crashed and burned, and some of us got back up and tried to fix the mess we’d made. It was a common narrative although the actions and consequences were different for each of us, and, sadly, there is enough collateral damage to haunt the sport for many years to come.
We know a lot about that time now. I’ve written about it, and so have many others. I want to write something else, a book that years from now my children can read and see what it was like, what their dad actually did all those years ago, the racer he was. But not only that, I want my friends from this generation to have something that will remind us of who we were. There was more to it than doping. We lived on the road because we loved to race.
Welcome to the Suck
I fucking hate January. It’s always a bastard of a month because there’s no soft tapping it back into the routine, it’s all systems go from the off. November and December is the time for the pedestrian, steady build-up; but it mustn’t be forgotten that all that controlled plodding along is in preparation for having all cylinders firing ready to go now. And right now, at the beginning of 2014, I feel like shit.
Christmas and New Year and then my birthday on 4 January is the worst trifecta possible for staying in shape. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have traversed those ten days without taking two or more steps back as regards my physical condition, and those few times necessitated me disappearing into a hermit-like, full-lockdown state, hiding myself from the world.
I had hoped this year would be better; it was the last one I had to get through, after all. Alas no: we ended up having the whole family over and then friends for New Year. It was lovely for my normal human beingness, yet not exactly ideal for the weakened pro cyclist within me. I managed to keep riding through the whole period, which I have to admit I was impressed with. Unfortunately I lost any sense of routine in the process. I’d used up so much willpower trying to keep myself in check that, come January, when I really needed it, I was spent. This was not good.
I think this is the same for everybody – it doesn’t matter if you’re a professional athlete or a New Year’s resolution gym bunny – the moment the routine is broken it’s a bit of a battle to get it going again. In many ways I feel I bear a striking resemblance to all the people who decide to quit their bad habits and go on a fitness binge then find themselves a month in, letting themselves slip. They wake up one day and realise the fitness binge is over … except I have to keep it going.
The irony of ironies is that this year the team have actually done what I’d been begging them to do for years: that is to postpone the de rigueur January training camp until February. So whereas normally I’d have been all over the opportunity to control my training at home, this year I was left thinking, ‘NO, NO, NO. Why NOW? I can’t do this on my own any more.’
The Racing Calendar
We always set ourselves goals. After so many years we take this for granted – it becomes a routine or, more precisely, a pattern.
The first and most important is the date we begin our winter training. In ‘the old days’ (i.e. pre-1990) it was sometime in January, before gradually becoming 1 January. In the early 1990s it became sometime in December, then before long, 1 December. By the end of the 1990s it was November; into the new millennium, 1 November. Nowadays some guys don’t even stop.
The date we choose to start this process is dependent on our racing programme. If we’re in a privileged position this results from a discussion with the team management rather than an order. I have fallen in the discussion group for many years, although being the person I am – eager to please and duty bound – I tend to be persuaded to do things I wouldn’t have considered before the ‘discussion’.
This year, being my last, has allowed me to be more steadfast in my desires for the upcoming season. I have five principal goals: Paris–Roubaix, Tour de France, Commonwealth Games, Vuelta a España and the World Championships. That means April, July, August and September at my peak. In the past I have tended to phase my start up: 1 November – Phase One – I stop spoiling myself with food, drink, socialising and travelling, and begin riding again, start doing some weight training, get back into the routine – the basics, really. The second part of this winter programme, Phase Two, begins on 1 December; this is when a precise training schedule is put into place. Hopefully by that point I will have achieved a level of fitness that enables me to start training properly, rather than mincing around the Catalan roads stopping at cafés complaining about how much my legs hurt from the weight training that, almost without fail, I will have started far too ambitiously. January is Phase Three: no margin for error, excuses forbidden, action only. Train. Eat. Sleep. Eat, train, sleep. Sleep train eat, train eat sleep. That’s how I always expect Phase Three to be anyway; it gives me comfort during Phase One and Phase Two knowing that Phase Three exists. Perhaps too much comfort.
As soon as we get back on our bikes after our end-of-season break we already consider ourselves to be in the next year; as professional cyclists we have our own calendar. Our summer holiday is October. Our back-to-work-January-feeling is November and December. The only time we sync up with normal civilisation is Christmas, and even then we’re riddled with neuroses about what we eat and drink – or go the other way and overindulge through a lack of self-control and desire to fit in, which leads to deep self-hating guilt – being neurotic is a picnic in comparison. We’re all over the place.
The only thing that gives our life some sense of order is the racing calendar; this is what we consider our constant. It’s a bit like a world map. If you look at one in London then the UK is the middle point; if you look at one in New York then the United States is the middle point. The map is always the same, it is simply altered to fit the eye of the beholder. That’s what a calendar is like for a professional cyclist. We know it’s the same calendar that everybody else sees, only ours has been moved slightly to the left. The centre of our universe is 1 November, it’s where we can reset everything and begin anew. If it’s been a good year you have the responsibility to repeat or improve; if it’s been a bad year then it’s a chance to be better. Everything seems possible on 1 November.
All my life is affected by this phenomenon. If, in conversation, my family or friends refer to a year in the past I have first to think of what that season was like. I’ll have a vague initial emotionally-based reaction of it having been a good or bad season, then I’ll try to remember why that was, the races and results from that year, then the reasons and the feelings. Then I try to figure out what moments I shared with family and friends – that’s always hardest to remember.
1999 – A mixed year.
Initial reaction – Good then bad.
Races – Étoile de Bessèges 4th, Vuelta Valenciana 4th, Chiasso 3rd in snow, bad Tirreno (as usual), Critérium International 2nd by two hundredths of a second to Jens Voigt … No other clear memories of races.
Reasons – Great winter training, regretfully grew a goatee, pinging for the start of the season, believe that maybe the doping has relented after ’98 Festina affair, then realise my teammates are doping and nobody cares, get depressed. Training camp in mountains during Tour de France, where I get drunk and jump off a roof and break my heel. Rest of the year: no racing.
Family and friends – Hanging out with Stuart O’Grady in Biarritz in August getting drunk.
January
; During the whole of my career the start of a new year has meant only one thing: training camp. My first was in Amélie-les-Bains in the Pyrenees with Cofidis. That was in another century, millennium even, definitely feels like a lifetime ago: 1997. I arrived there underprepared, having been in Hong Kong in December visiting for the first time since leaving school eighteen months previously. Needless to say this had not been conducive to my rapidly approaching baptism of fire into professional cycling, and was the principal reason I spent the first part of 1997 getting my head kicked in from every angle.
I spent those first few years as a professional always seeming to be travelling to northern France on my birthday, 4 January. As buzzkills go this ranks among the biggest – apart from one year when I got the French actress Laetitia Casta’s autograph in Charles de Gaulle Airport; that ranks up there as one of the uncoolest things I’ve ever done. I justified it as being my birthday present to myself. Those were the days when pre-season fitness tests were obligatory and done in labs with guys in white coats. Our Cofidis testing was always done at the Amiens university hospital. It still makes me shiver to think about it.
When I was younger, the season didn’t really begin properly till March with Paris–Nice and Tirreno–Adriatico (the two most important stage races of the early season), and so being out of shape in January wasn’t such a big deal. There was still plenty of time to get it together and, being young, I didn’t even require plenty of time to get it together – it would only take me a few weeks to gain respectable condition. It also helped that I was confident as hell back then and didn’t see the point in rushing. I refused to race at the training camps, contrary to many of my teammates, who would test themselves and each other. I didn’t really get that. I mean, it wasn’t a race, so what was the point?
It’s not like that any more. The first important race is the Australian Tour Down Under, held in January. It’s a World Tour event which means there are important ranking points up for grabs. This race has been around for most of my career, but only recently has it become a serious affair – when it first came on the calendar it was legendary for being a fun week of racing and partying. Now it’s just racing, and even that doesn’t look like much fun to me. Temperatures in the 40s, and a super-motivated, no-holds-barred peloton means crashes galore and no hiding from the suffering. To me it was unfathomable to imagine taking part in it back when it was for shits and giggles; now that it’s serious it seems downright alien. January is not made for that sort of thing in my book: total bloody madness.
