The Racer

by David Millar

  The first ninety kilometres are on big rolling roads. They’re familiar to me as I lived in this region of France for a year back in 1996. We ride within two kilometres of where I lived – right past the supermarket I used to trawl of an afternoon in an attempt to fill the countless empty hours. It is bizarre to think of the nineteen-year-old me living there, fresh from Hong Kong, naïve as hell and more ambitious than perhaps I’d ever be again, clueless about what awaits him in the years ahead. A part of me wishes I could stop and warn him, just speak to him at least. Tell him it won’t be anything like his dreams. Then it’s gone, already behind us, in the past again.

  Ahead of the first sector, things begin to get nervous; this is our first red alarm. Being at the front into this is so important, because we are still a complete peloton – more than 200 riders, and many among that 200 don’t want to be here, and will be looking for a way out from the first sector onwards. Getting stuck behind a scared or unwilling racer is a bad place to be. These first sectors are very much where the culling takes place.

  Something special happens when we hit the first sector. No matter how much you think you are prepared for the race, how ready you think you are, mentally, the moment you hit those first cobbles and you start to get thrown around, and the clattering and shouting begins, and the race stretches out, and the dust begins to cloud the air … you are hit by the fact you’re racing Paris–Roubaix and, even if you’re grimacing on the outside, you can’t help but smile on the inside. The only other time I’ve had this feeling is when arriving on the Champs-Elysées on the final day of the Tour de France. For me, the sight of a peloton stretched out in a cloud of dust along a narrow cobbled road surrounded by fields is as magisterial as that most iconic of Paris boulevards. I think it’s fair to say that the Tour de France and Paris–Roubaix are the two most iconic races in cycling.

  For the first time in my career I am totally at ease on the pavé. I barely even notice those first sectors. I don’t think about the line I need to be taking; I just can’t help but be on the right line all the time. The sensation of floating is real, for a change I can’t help but select the right gear – something that’s not easy on the cobblestones as it’s hard to judge gradients and anticipate or feel changes in speed. My cadence is always smooth, and not once do I feel like I’m fighting my bike. Most surprisingly my hands and wrists don’t hurt in the slightest. I don’t need to hold on for dear life, I have the impression of caressing my handlebars, guiding my bike through sector after sector rather than wrestling with it.

  That’s until the dark red alarm – the Arenberg Forest, where the floating is rudely interrupted for 2.4 kilometres. I’m caught up behind a crash a couple of kilometres before the entry to the sector, which means I’m going in badly placed – not that this makes any particular difference to me, it is going to suck hard even if I enter it in first position. I am prepared for it being bad, but it’s worse than bad; it’s horrible. At one point, where the pavé is at its worst, it feels like riding over logs; there is next to no sensation of momentum – if I were to stop pedalling I would come abruptly to a stop. I can see this happening to guys – either from puncturing, or other mechanical issues, or a crash, or simply having stopped pedalling and stalling on the spot. It is next to impossible to get going again; the only way I can describe it is to imagine emptying wheelbarrows full of bricks on to a road and then riding over them, on a road bike.

  Coming out of Arenberg is a joy. In fact, from here on in, as the race gets faster and therefore harder, each of these transitions from cobblestones to tarmac elicits a moment of euphoria. Coming under the banner to signify the end of each sector we give ourselves a moment of respite, a drink from our bottles, a look over the shoulder to see how many have made it, then bottle back in the cage, head down and back into the race.

  The crossing of the Arenberg is the first indication of who is strong. Without fail the best guys will be leading out of the forest – it’s rare to see a Paris–Roubaix winner exit the forest far from the front, even though it’s still 100 kilometres to the finish it’s pivotal. Everybody considers the race to begin here.

  Surviving Arenberg and still being in the front part of the bunch is a first for me. I begin to feel confident that, at worst, I will make it to the finish; at best, I could be with the leaders in the final. The relief I feel makes me realise how worried I’ve been. I now begin to enjoy the ride even more, able to really appreciate it without the fear of failure that has been dogging me – without me knowing it – for so long.

  Right up until twenty-five kilometres to go I’m feeling good. There’s only Sebastian and Johan left from our team, and both have told me to do my own race as they aren’t feeling strong enough to be counted upon. It is beyond strange for me to be up there with the specialists, holding my own. I’m having one of those days where I don’t understand why there are so few of us at the front when it appears to me we haven’t really gone hard yet. Then on the sixth sector I make the stupid mistake of riding the gutter instead of the central crown. My front tyre punctures halfway through the sector. In hindsight I can see this was a clear indication of fatigue setting in, because it was the wrong line to take.

  By the time neutral service get to me I’m out the back of the group. As often happens in these situations, the wheel change isn’t the smoothest, yet it is still quicker than waiting for my team car, because by the time I’m on my way again there is still no sign of it. I set off in pursuit, with team cars and motorbikes flying by me. Once I get up to speed I jump in behind the first vehicle that is nearby to get some respite in its slipstream. We are on a small country lane, weaving left and right. I’m trying to keep a cool head. I keep darting looks over the roof of the car or through the rear window in order to see what is coming up. This isn’t the safest of manoeuvres at the best of times.

  This is not the best of times.

  I can see a ninety-degree left-hander coming up and know the team car I’m following will try to hold its speed in order not to hinder my chase. The directeur sportifs driving the cars in the convoy try to treat everybody the same – it would be considered incredibly bad form to compromise a rider’s chase because they’re from a different team. This is also the reason to try to keep friends among all the teams. Although none of the directeur sportifs will treat you badly behind the race, if you have friends you’ll see the benefits when you’re in trouble. I’ve been racing for so long that many of my peers have retired from racing and are now driving the team cars. Fortunately, I’m on good terms with all of them, some of them even being great friends, so this is never a bad thing when you’re in trouble, behind the race.

  I come into the left-hander at full speed. I’m fairly confident of my ability to make it round, which is stupid as I don’t take into account I have a new front wheel, with a different tyre at a different pressure. I have no idea how I stay upright as the front tyre has no grip. My front wheel slides across the road, and I only just manage to avoid going down hard, but in the process I lose all my speed and veer off the road.

  My team car finally makes it up to me. The timing is good, yet also bad, because if they hadn’t been here at this exact moment I would have had a few moments to regroup and would have forced myself to adapt to the front wheel. As it is I’m so shaken I tell them I want to change the front wheel back to a trusted one I’m familiar with. It is the wrong decision, as stopping for a second time effectively ruins my chances of making it back to the group I’d been in. It’s only six kilometres to the second most important sector in the race, Carrefour de l’Arbre, and the race is at full tilt up ahead.

  I realise I’ve made a mistake quite quickly, and as soon as this hits me I become aware of the fatigue I’ve been hiding from myself up until that point. The moment my head goes my body follows suit. Knowing the front group is disappearing up the road I sit up and wait for the next group – all hopes of being in the final with the leaders gone, I go back to the best of the worst-case scenarios: simply finish
ing.

  Then it all goes wrong. The next group catch me and I don’t even try to fight for position. I drift to the back and think, ‘I’ll just ride in.’ With my head disengaged from the race I lose the focus and ability to float that I’ve had up to then. I find myself in last position going over Carrefour de l’Arbre, feeling like the fish out of water I’ve been so many times before at Paris–Roubaix. Coming round a nondescript right-hander at a pitiful speed the bike disappears from under me, I smack down on the floor, legs and arms everywhere. I lie there on my back for a moment and can’t help but smile. For a moment I’d thought I was a Roubaix hero – now I was back to zero. The tables had turned unbelievably quickly.

  I can’t even describe it as a crash, it’s more like the cycling equivalent of tripping up. I get back on the bike and receive a push from one of the spectators. It takes me a while to clip into my pedal – the cobbles are bouncing me around so much, by the time I lift my head I can see the group I’d been with has gone. I decide there and then that I’ll ride to the finish solo, I’m not interested in hanging on to any more groups that come up from behind – it feels more honourable to be riding in at my own pace, allowing myself the opportunity to appreciate my first and final arrival into Roubaix. Two more groups come by me, both of which I deliberately let go. I want to enter the velodrome on my own in order to give myself the chance to really soak it all up. It doesn’t matter how far back I am now. It isn’t just that it is my first Paris–Roubaix finish, it’s also the fact it’s my last ever Monument. I’m never going to race a northern Classic again. I won’t say this makes me sad, because they’re bastards of things, but it does make me nostalgic.

  I enter the velodrome, and my vision of having a lap and a half to myself is just that: a vision. There’s a small group who’ve come by me with a couple of kilometres to go. I let them pass, not wanting to have to speak to anybody or share the moment. Unfortunately I don’t let them get far enough ahead, because as I’m coming round to complete my first lap they are blocking the track, having just finished. I’m going to have to come to a near stop and ‘sorry, excuse me’ my way through them in order to continue the final half-lap to the finish line. I can’t bring myself to do this, and I’ve convinced myself that I’m so far back maybe I don’t have to do the full lap and a half because of this back-marker confusion. I don’t want to have the lasting memory of finishing Roubaix being me unclipping and politely asking some guys if I can squeeze through.

  So I pull off the track. Nicole is in the centre waiting. This is possibly the only time that she has been right there, at the finish. Thank God she is – firstly, because it is such an important moment for me, but, probably more crucially, because nobody else has the heart or courage to tell me I still have half a lap to go. After five minutes, and a couple of brief interviews, Nicole taps me on the shoulder and tells me I’d better put my helmet back on and get back on the track: ‘You’ll be DNF otherwise. Marya just told me.’ Marya Pongrace is the team’s press officer. I had noticed her being a little uneasy about me standing there.

  Eventually I did it, all romance gone, nostalgia-free, just riding round that most famous of velodromes like a moron, wishing I could crawl under a rock. Farewell, Roubaix.

  Not the Ardennes

  Roubaix signified the end of the Flanders Classics, and the following week would see the Ardennes Classics begin – these run from Sunday to Sunday and include three races, Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne and the oldest Monument of them all, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, aka La Doyenne. These are hillier than the races of the previous weeks. Modern-day general classification racers will try to avoid the Flanders Classics like the plague, considering them too dangerous; completely unsuited to their more refined racing style. An arsenal of weaponry is required to win a Flandrian Classic, whereas, arguably, fitness alone is the key to success in the Ardennes. An Ardennes winner must be strong and light, yet have the confidence to hide their power behind their weight.

  All three of the Ardennes are decided in a very intense and relatively brief finale among those who have endured the previous six hours of climbing and descending. There’s little danger, and not much positioning; the roads are safe and fast. What the Ardennes lack in danger and madness it makes up for in workload. Liège is considered to be the hardest of all the Monuments because of the sheer physicality of it, but it’s as safe as houses. Nobody goes to Liège thinking they’ll crash.

  This year I’m on a break during the Ardennes – this is the gift I get for having spent nearly a month in Belgium. The team is flipped, both staff and riders are rotated out, the stage racers come in for one of their brief forays into one-day racing while the rest of us head to our homes to rest and recover and prepare ourselves for the next part of the season.

  Not the Giro

  I’d had a few requests for my final season: Paris–Roubaix had been one; the Tour de France, the Commonwealth Games, Vuelta a España and the Worlds were the others. The final one – perhaps closer to a demand than a request – was that I had total, unequivocal exemption from taking part in the Giro d’Italia.

  The Giro is a special race. I mean ‘Il est spécial’ in the French sense; i.e. the ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ sense. I’d done it for the first time in 2008, the Tour and Vuelta always having been my Grand Tours of choice. The Giro had never really held any great attraction for me, largely because I wasn’t a big fan of racing in Italy, more than likely due to my nemesis, Tirreno–Adriatico. I never enjoyed the Giro the way I did the Tour and the Vuelta. The course was almost always the hardest of the three, and it often seemed the stages were mapped out to make our lives as difficult as possible.

  Then there was the bad weather – almost a certainty considering we’d be heading into mountain ranges in May, where the risk of snow and rain was still high. There was also a constant sense of chaos about the whole organisation – much like Italy as a whole – we often felt like circus performers at the whim of a cruel ringmaster. It was the Giro that set the trend for having mountain stages right up until the penultimate day of the race, something that we have grown used to in all Grand Tours these days, yet is a relatively new development.

  I came close to winning a road stage in my first visit to the race. I didn’t because I snapped my chain one kilometre from the finish, when convinced it was wrapped up. I was so angry I threw my bike as far as I could, hurling it spinning over the barriers, ironically dwarfing any sense of achievement over the win I remain convinced was mine. It made me feel that Italy and I were truly not made for each other. I should have understood then, but I’m not known for my quick learning, unfortunately. And little did I know worse was to come.

  Mainly due to the fact that I’d written a book over the winter, 2011 had been a classic slow start to the year for me. I was so bad I was sent home from Tirreno–Adriatico before the race started: a new low, even by my own low standards for that particular event. I returned home and trained with the sole ambition of being good for the Giro, something I’d never done in the past, as normally I arrived in Italy a broken man from the Classics.

  We took a young team and unsurprisingly didn’t display our usual prowess in the first day’s team time trial, finishing what, at the time, was considered a lowly fifth, at twenty-four seconds from the winners. I’d been the strongest member of our team so knew I was ticking over well. There were only two stages I was aiming for – Stage 3 and the final day’s time trial. Stage 3 was the perfect finish for me, hilly and technical, and I was reasonably certain a break wouldn’t make it to the finish – on day three everybody is still fresh and motivated and the general classification is so close that the peloton will be under tight control. There was no point in going for a long breakaway. I decided to gamble everything on the finale.

  I was so motivated I decided to wear the new speedsuit our clothing sponsor Castelli had developed. This went against everything I stood for, as it meant I was sacrificing style for speed. Back then these were the first-gene
ration all-in-one road jersey and shorts combo. They’re almost the norm these days, but back in 2011 they were still a little risqué in the looks department. I rolled up to the start in the piazza of Reggio Emilia. I was one of the last riders to arrive there. I saw my Girona training partner, Michael Barry, so parked up next to him.

  ‘Hey, man.’ Michael looked at me and immediately noticed the speedsuit. ‘Whoa, you going for it today?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I am.’ I looked at the 200-plus riders parked up in front of us. ‘Fuck, I can’t believe I’m going to have to beat all these guys.’ It was a weird realisation to have, but it was true: it was one thing lying in bed the night before studying the maps and profile and finish, planning how I’d win it; it was a completely different kettle of fish lining up and seeing what stood in my way.

  One hundred and thirty-three kilometres later we crested the major obstacle of the day, a climb much like the Turchino Pass in Milan–San Remo. I’d never left the top ten on the ascent, and was in complete control of what I was doing, waiting patiently to attack in the last ten kilometres, where the last hills served as ideal launch pads.

  The descent was fifteen kilometres and technical. The bunch was already broken up from the climb. At the very front there was no particular sense of urgency or danger, which is why I’d made sure I was there. It was easy to imagine how fast it would be behind, with the peloton being whiplashed by the concertina effect and the groups furiously chasing back on. I had no doubt the peloton was stretched over a few kilometres by the time we arrived at the bottom on to the coast. This was good for me, as already half the peloton were eliminated before I’d even done anything.

  There were only two climbs standing between us and the finish. Both were relatively small, the first being three kilometres, the second just one. At the bottom of the first climb a strong attack went. I felt so good that I immediately jumped across with it – as is often the way when you feel that good, you don’t panic. I sat on the back and spun a small gear, doing no more than the absolutely minimum required while my breakaway compatriots smashed themselves.