The Racer

by David Millar

  Two months after the close of the season we are riddled with self-doubt, wondering how on earth we can even start another Giro d’Italia, Tour de France or Vuelta a España, let alone finish one. And forget about competing. Those are a strange few weeks, and not very enjoyable, so usually it’s good to be in the gym pretending to be an athlete, although it has to be said we barely look like such to the regular gym bunnies, who see the skinny-fatguy standing there doing hundreds of reps with essentially no weight on the bar. It probably looks like we’re on some rehabilitation programme.

  Last autumn I realised I should get back in touch with my old coach, Adrie van Deimen, as I needed somebody to help me get back into the right head space. It used to be so easy for me to switch into a focused training period. It would be an extreme change, in that I would essentially isolate myself and go into hiding, which allowed me to switch my persona to what I needed it to be. I can’t do this any more – it requires being fundamentally selfish, as you have to become totally self-obsessed. Everything in life has to fit around the training, diet and rest, and when I say everything I also mean everybody.

  Being the father of two boys has changed that for me. I love spending time with them, and I want to help my wife when I’m at home. She’s the one who spends the majority of the year looking after the two of them single-handedly while I’m off pursuing my passion. And although it’s my job and I’m paid very well to do it, it’s also what I love doing. I don’t think it’s fair that I then come home and carry on being totally self-obsessed. But, equally, I’m beginning to see that state of mind as a failing, too – disrespectful to my teammates, irresponsible in terms of my team responsibilities. All this is the primary reason I decided to make this my final season. I can still race – that’s a given for me – it’s the training that kills me now and if I can’t train properly then I’m not getting the best out of myself, which is what I’m paid to do.

  This aside, I also know I can do what is expected of me in my final year. I am a road captain now and that holds different responsibilities to a leader who is expected to bring in the big results. There are only a handful of people in the professional peloton who have raced more than me at the top level. I know myself well enough that when the big occasions arise I can be relied upon. I have proved this throughout my career, and trust my team to trust me on that. We’ve been through enough for us to have this mutual understanding.

  Fundamentally, I’ve always been a driven, ambitious person. This is the biggest difference between being an old pro and a young pro – my job is now clearly defined and recognised, pragmatism has taken over from ambition. Am I falling into the trap of complacency? Have I become comfortable, dare I say, content? This is not a good place to be as a professional cyclist.

  The Goals

  So, racing head on. The goals for this year. Each one of these targets has a reasoning behind it. I’m standing strong on them (rather than opening myself up to the usual mind-bending I am so susceptible to when it comes to my calendar). They all have a personal value to me: in my final season I am determined to close as many doors as I can. Paris–Roubaix has been my nemesis throughout my career. This year I am determined to race it with full commitment and be done with it once and for all. Although this is a personal mission I am fully aware my role in the race will be that of loyal teammate – there are no delusions of grandeur here, simply a desire to remove its proverbial monkey from my back once and for all.

  The Tour de France is my race, the one that got me into bike racing. If there was no Tour I’d never have fallen in love with the sport. My relationship with the Tour goes beyond the actual racing. I have become friends with the people who work on it – to the degree I no longer shake the hand of ex-director Jean-Marie Leblanc or current boss Christian Prudhomme but greet them with the very French familial kiss on the cheeks. We are friends, we share a history and mutual respect. I’ve always dreamt of my final time on the Champs-Elysées, my family and friends there to share my farewell to the race I loved so much. It will be one of the most important days of my career. And it seems almost fate that this, my last Tour, also starts in the UK, in Yorkshire no less, where my father has now relocated from the Hong Kong of my youth. It is the perfect scenario.

  The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow is a gift like no other. For one of my last ever races to be in the city where most of my family are from, where I will be racing for only the second time in my career in a Scotland jersey, seems too good to be true. The fact it comes straight after the Tour de France, when it’s a given I’ll be at my strongest, makes the possibility of victory realistic – if not, at least there’s always the chance to honour the jersey of my home nation.

  And then the Vuelta a España, which is my favourite race, in the purest sense, in that there aren’t the emotional attachments that the Tour de France carries. The Vuelta is simply the race where I can be a bike racer without the stresses and expectations or responsibilities of other Grand Tours. I can race for the sake of racing. It’s always been that way for me; I can’t imagine a better way to end my career with my team than to be allowed to race for fun.

  And, finally, there are the Worlds – the completion of everything, finishing where I began among the people I’ve known the longest in the cycling world, the Great Britain national team. The fact the race is in Spain, my adopted home, makes it all the more special. I’ve always taken great pride in racing for Great Britain, and they’ve stood by me through thick and thin. They are the people among whom I feel most at home. It feels right that the last time I race as a professional will be in a GB jersey.

  ‘Good winter?’

  It feels so good to be back in a race. There’s only so much training I can do before I get bored of it. I bought my first road bike as a fifteen-year-old in Hong Kong because I wanted to race it. I’d never thought about doing anything else with it. The reason I rode it outside of races was to train myself to go faster in the races. That’s just the way it was.

  As I’ve got older I’ve learnt that a bike ride is maybe one of the great ways to spend time with a friend, or friends, yet I treat that as something totally separate to my racer self. There are now two distinctly different cycling personalities that exist within me: the racer and the gentleman. The latter has come with maturity and does not race; the other is still, in essence, the fifteen-year-old boy who bought that first bike in Hong Kong – only with over a thousand professional races under his scarred and sun-damaged skin.

  The first race of the season brings with it a new lease of life. We’re back in our natural habitat, on the road with our teams, staying in mostly mediocre hotels, finding comfort in the routine. It’s in total contrast to the last time the peloton was together in the final races of the previous year, when everybody was on their last legs, physically and mentally, wishing it all to stop so we could go home and curl up in a ball, away from the mediocre hotels. Now, the peloton is fresh and ready to go, everybody actually seems happy and motivated to be there. This is unusual behaviour, to say the least.

  There are new sponsors, different colours and designs of kits, new riders on old teams, old riders on new teams. Everybody is chatty and curious. The conversation always goes something like this, with slight variations, in roughly a dozen different languages:

  ‘Good winter?’

  ‘Great. One of the best I’ve had.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. You get good weather?’

  ‘OK. Went on training camp in December, got the Ks in. Took it easy over Christmas, massive January.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. What’s your race programme?’

  ‘This, Tirreno, Classics. Usual!’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  Two minutes later, bump into another rider you kind of know:

  ‘Hey, man! How was the winter?’

  ‘It was awesome, racked up the kilometres!’

  ‘Yeah, me too. You get good weather?’

  And so on …

  This line of questioning isn’t confined to the
first race. Oh no: it can go on till April. We’ll call it the Pro Cyclist Early Season Ice Breaker. As a rule of thumb the start of the season is over after Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the last of the spring Classics. So from the Tour de Romandie on it’s best to stop asking about the winter and start asking how the start of the season has been. The thing is, this is a two-edged sword, because although you’re showing willing by engaging and driving the conversation, you are also risking alienating the target by revealing your total indifference to their results. Because if you actually cared, even a little bit, you’d know exactly how their early season form had been. Often it’s simply a desperate gamble in order to fill the silence, but, if handled wrongly, it is a silence neither of you will ever need to worry about filling again. For example:

  ‘Hey, man, how’s it going? You do the Classics?’

  If you have to ask this question it means the pro you’re talking to has had a shit start to the year, because if they’d had a good start to the year you’d have noticed their presence somewhere. So if you ask this and they say, ‘Yes, all of them,’ you’ll find yourself a little stumped. This is the worst possible answer you could have expected, only you didn’t expect it, because you never really cared, and so didn’t plan your moves that far ahead.

  From my experience the best way to handle this situation (because it arises, there are enough quiet moments: signing on, standing on the start line, the ever-rarer relaxed time in the bunch when chat is possible, when you find yourself next to a fellow racer with whom you cross wheels enough to merit engaging with on human terms) is to be vague. Remove specifics, allow yourself wiggle room, ask more generic questions like, ‘How you doing?’ or ‘This race/weather is amazing/sucks.’ Or, a personal favourite, ‘What’s new?’ That’s the ultimate Open-ended Ice Breaker – you needn’t know anything about what they’ve been up to.

  A few to avoid include:

  ‘Is this your first race this year?’ It could be their fortieth race, in which case you’re reminding them of how invisible their start to the year has been, which sets the wrong tone immediately.

  ‘What races have you done so far?’ Again, there’s the risk that you’ve raced with them numerous times already and simply haven’t noticed.

  Then there’s the ultimate faux pas, never to be used under any circumstances: ‘Have you put on weight?’ Every professional cyclist has a weight obsession – we have to, it’s an integral part of the job. If somebody is looking fat, never, ever, remind them of this. Of course, it will be brought up behind their backs at every opportunity, yet there shouldn’t be the slightest mention of it to their faces: that wouldn’t be cool.

  On the other hand if somebody is looking fit, i.e. skinny and ripped and tanned, then it’s totally acceptable to bring this up – in fact, it is encouraged: ‘Wow, you look super-fit. You going for this?’ To which they’ll reply, almost without fail, ‘Thanks! Yeah, training’s been going well. We’ll see how it goes here, I feel good.’ This laid-back attitude is a thinly veiled attempt to hide the fact they’ve been living like a monk for months in preparation for that very race and if they don’t perform well they’ll probably have a mild nervous breakdown before slipping, riddled with neuroses, into a hole of self-doubt which could take them weeks or months to recover from. The honest answer would have been, ‘Ouf, thank you, I’ve been working so hard for months getting ready for this race. I’m going to be devastated if I don’t go well.’

  As we get older we learn to manage the pressure better. The weight of expectations, internal and external, is lightened. When we are younger everything is so important, because racing is the most important thing in our lives, we’re too young to understand there is more. For many of us life has been a steadily ascending spiral of success and respect, we’ve yet to endure any significant failure, and, of course, if we don’t know failure we can’t fully appreciate success. For this reason we never fully take the time to soak up where we are or how we’re doing. Everything we achieve is considered another step up the ladder towards greater heights.

  If we are lucky (fundamentally, I think there is a lot of luck involved, there are too many variables that we cannot control to ever be arrogant enough to claim we are the sole architects of our success) we will have a career long enough to grow beyond that narrow mindset of youth. It is only time that can give us the opportunity to experience more and mature into a state of mind where we can appreciate that where we have come from is just as important as where we are going – and as we get older and live through more we begin to separate things: what was once all-encompassing can be but a footnote at another point in our lives, and vice versa.

  This is the same in all walks of life, I’m sure. Except as racers we appreciate this more than most; our lives are lived at a higher rate – they have to be as we only have a finite amount of time in which to maximise the genetic gifts we’ve been lucky enough to discover. Ten years, I’d say, and that’s roughly it for us. From eighteen to twenty-eight is when most of the ascending takes place, then we plateau for varying lengths of time, and then, in a relatively short period of time, maybe one to three years, we endure the endgame slide through mediocrity to has-been. It’s quite an intense ride. I think most of us only come to terms with it years later.

  I’m more fortunate than most in that I have had what feels like two careers played out in three acts: it began with the classic rise and fall, which led to two years banned from the sport, and culminated in a renaissance-like second chance. It’s safe to say I have lived through dramatic failure, and it’s for this reason that when given the opportunity to come back I seized it with the deep-down knowledge that I was lucky to have it and should respect and appreciate it for what it was: a second and last chance to do it all over again, the right way. So, contrary to many of my peers, I have had a slightly different sense of what it is we are doing. I know it’s not real, and I know it will end, and this has helped me prepare myself for the inevitable farewell that all of us have to confront eventually.

  The Suck (2)

  The first race is a shock to the system. The initial excitement at being back on the road with the guys is quickly diminished when we find ourselves unable to unlock our eyes from the rear wheel in front of us, moving at what feels like warp speed. That’s what it feels like: warp speed. Everything shrinks down to a small visual point of focus, and so everything in the periphery is out of focus and flashing past in abstraction. Let’s not confuse this with the famous ‘Zone’ (or ‘Flow’ as it likes to be called these days) that athletes describe. This is ‘the Suck’. I’ve seen guys so deeply in the Suck that they lose control of their bike and crash, and don’t feel a thing except relief that it’s stopped.

  Every pro cyclist has had a moment in their career when they were so deep in the Suck that they wished a crash upon themselves. A puncture or mechanical isn’t good enough because then you have to chase back on; a crash allows you to let go of the race. This is a fundamental problem we have: we don’t give up, even if we puncture or our bike breaks, we have a spare bike and a mechanic in, or on, a motorised vehicle behind us ready to rescue the situation. I don’t think anybody truly understands how different being rescued in that situation is from being saved from any other. Sometimes crashing feels like being saved.

  Our first races are a harsh reminder of this. In the four months preceding, when riding during training, we have allowed ourselves to forget the suffering of racing because we are in control of the speed and exertion, ergo the suffering. Yes, we’ll push ourselves, but there’s only so far we can go, we become accustomed to managing our own efforts, which reminds us, importantly, that most of us aren’t true masochists. We don’t actually enjoy the suffering, it’s simply a shitty by-product of doing what we love, i.e. racing.

  It’s our ability to manage the suffering that defines us. I’ve heard it said so many times about great bike racers: ‘He won’t stay down.’ ‘He knows how to suffer.’ ‘He’ll get back on his bike.’ ‘He’ll be ba
ck.’ There is a theme. It’s an ability to be rational when everything hurts, because that’s what it comes down to: being able to rationalise with yourself that everything is fixable, not giving up and thinking everything is lost. Ultimately, it’s an absence of self-pity when shit gets bad.

  In these first races everything hurts. Probably the most common thing I’ll hear myself and others say to each other during these first races is, ‘Fuck. I forgot how hard it is.’

  Fortunately, I’m on the Mallorca programme. This is like a gift of a first race compared to most others.

  There’s Mallorca, then there are three other common options to start the year:

  Tour Down Under

  As I’ve already said, Down Under is out of the question for me, although supposedly it’s a great race and allows for some good training in the sun, away from the European winter – if you are so inclined to spend some time there before or after the race, which I would, but only if I wasn’t racing in between. There are some places in the world that I simply can’t imagine racing my bike. Australia is one of them.

  Tour Mediterranean

  This can be put under the generic banner of French early season. Nothing has changed in the twenty years I’ve been racing there. It can be summed up quite briefly:

  1. Cold, probably windy.

  2. Maybe a little low budget, certainly a bit shabby round the edges.

  3. A strike. Could be farmers at the side of road, maybe riders in the road. Neither tend to have much effect.