by David Millar
It’s a ramp back up on to Rivoli. The first corner was commandeered by the Norwegians years ago – they’ve made it their own to the point of it now being referred to as the ‘Norwegian Corner’. They’re brilliantly raucous, faces painted, Viking helmets galore; their cheering and chanting clearly amplified by a day of drinking under the Paris sun, they set the tone. Skimming the barriers as I take the apex I’m nearly deafened by the noise; all I glimpse is a sea of red, then it all opens up and I’m faced with the spectacle that is Rue de Rivoli. Thousands and thousands of people are going berserk. Flags of all nationalities are waving, the kilometre-to-go arch is in the distance and there’s me in the middle of the road, dwarfed by it all.
I’m way above my limit. There is no point in holding anything back, it is simply a case of trying to stay out in front for as long as possible – it turns into the most spectacular individual time trial of my career. The sprinters’ teams controlling the peloton have happily left me out there, using my speed as a reference, yet we all know that I’m going to slow down at some point. There’s no way I can hold them off.
After being off the front for nearly forty-five minutes I can feel my strength start to go and my speed to drop. Going round the Arc I can see the peloton closing in on me. I know it will soon be all over. I am relieved; I’m beginning to hurt everywhere again, my mind is no longer able to overcome my body. I give one last big push down the descent, skimming the gendarmes, feeling the crowds. I look at the big screen and can see the powerful peloton approaching, ever closer behind. I want to make it through the tunnel, selfishly wanting Rivoli to myself, just one more time.
I make it to the entrance of the tunnel and glance over my shoulder. Somehow I’ve held my gap, even increased it a little. I can see I have more than enough to make it not only through Rivoli but back up on to the Champs. Thankfully, and I don’t know why, I decide to stop thinking about the effort, and the race, and just start soaking up the moment and the emotions …
I’ll never forget those final few kilometres. I made sure of it, yet I had no idea it would be the last time I’d ever race there. It was as if the race had said, much like Flecha, ‘You can go now, David.’
Letting Go
Being back at the Tour on the other side of the barriers allowed me to see the race through different eyes. For starters it forced me to watch it, which I may not have done if I’d been in Spain wallowing in self-pity. It also stopped me being angry – because, believe me, I was so bloody angry. But it was such a joyous occasion, and being in the UK made it so much more fun than if it had been in France – everybody was so enthusiastic and happy to see the Tour up close and real – it was such a novelty, I couldn’t help but join in.
I wished I was racing, of course; there was no escaping that. To have raced on British roads in front of British fans and my family in York would have been such a perfect way to start my last Tour de France. I’d have enjoyed every kilometre, and raced with such pride. I wasn’t racing, though, and being there watching from the outside, surrounded by people who didn’t really know much about professional cycling and saw it through the eyes of relative newcomers, made me appreciate how many incredible experiences I’d lived over my racing career. So few people had got to do the things I’d done. The Tour de France was behind me now, I’d had a good run, and, in hindsight, the perfect ending. It was time to move on. I had to let it go.
Not the Tour de France (2)
When the Tour left the UK I left with it. While they returned to France, I headed home to Girona. I switched my focus to the Commonwealth Games, less than a month away. Presuming I’d be at the Tour, Nicole had already planned for her and the boys to be in the UK during July. Everything was booked; it made no sense to cancel it. In fact, it worked out better for me as I could go on full-mission mode.
I rented an apartment in the Pyrenees and went about organising a ten-day training camp. I’d had a week off the bike, so needed and wanted to get back into it as quickly as possible. I felt like Bear Grylls. I was my own man now. The team and I had next to no contact, which wasn’t all to do with me losing my shit so badly at the non-selection for the Tour but also because all our team’s resources were being used at the Tour de France. I’d always taken for granted the fact that at the Tour we had double the number of team staff, more vehicles, bikes, clothing – more everything.
Those of us not doing the Tour were left out in the wilderness to fend for ourselves. This suited me down to the ground. I liked going rogue; I’d built a career on it (for better or worse). My sister, on the other hand, wasn’t so keen on it, knowing that, in truth, Bear Grylls and I have nothing more in common than the letter ‘a’ in our first names. She worried I’d starve myself to death or train myself to destruction, so she kindly offered her services as my resident chef and all-round life coach. So, just like the old days, France and I went on boot camp.
La Molina was our destination of choice. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive from Girona so logistically was a piece of cake. We bought a juicer, as we reckoned that was a regime-like thing to do, loaded the cars up with bikes and accompanying paraphernalia and set off for the mountains. The next ten days were brilliant.
The first day, I made the grave error of meeting up with José Hermida, one of the world’s best mountain bikers, who happened to live near where I was staying. I’d wanted to do an easy three hours to break myself in. I told him this, so he arrived on his mountain bike knowing I was on my road bike. This was a great relief to me as José is a training monster – he was clearly trying to slow himself down in order to cater to my request to take it easy; bringing his mountain bike was the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight. He still killed me. I emailed Christian VdV afterwards to tell him about it. He replied, ‘For the love of God. Never. Ever. Train with Hermida.’ Needless to say, I took heed of these words of wisdom.
It only took me two or three days to feel good, then I began the block. I knew the roads well – the first time I’d trained up there was in 1999 with Cofidis, the infamous training camp which concluded with me drunkenly jumping off a roof and breaking my foot. Apart from my ban through 2004 and 2005 that was the last time I didn’t do the Tour. One day I rode by the very hotel where we’d stayed and whose roof I’d jumped off. It was empty and derelict. It truly did feel like a lifetime ago.
* * *
July, 1999, Font-Romeu training camp with Cofidis at this hotel, passed it while training this morning. Kinda weird.
* * *
France and I found our routine quickly: I’d wake up and get dressed into my cycling kit immediately, no procrastinating. France would make juice (spinach, celery, ginger, carrots, apples, berries … they got crazier, or, should I say, braver, the longer we were up there) and porridge. We’d have coffee then, between 9:00 and 9:30 I’d set out training.
While I was gone France would do her day job of putting out fires for Team Sky, hoping all the while that nobody noticed she was in the Pyrenees looking after her brother. Then she’d maybe pop down the mountain to the supermarket, and always have some crazy regime lunch ready for me on my return. My weight had not budged since before the Tour. I was still holding seventy-six kilogrammes, which made me angry all over again about not being in France, because it meant my body had clicked exactly when it was supposed to, even if it had left it till the last possible minute to do so.
I loved being up in the mountains. I felt young again – in fact, I was looking younger by the day, it was the weirdest thing. After my bike riding and lunch we’d sit and watch the Tour de France on the computer. It was like afternoons of old when France and I would sit and watch bike racing and I’d explain everything to her – only in the meantime she’d helped create, build and manage one of the biggest cycling teams in the world, one which had produced two British Tour de France winners. She had become one of the most important people in British Cycling, ergo global cycling. Thankfully, I could still teach her things about racing. I still had that.
Once the racing was done we’d go for a sauna. Not because we liked it – we both fucking hated it – but it was part of the regime. We’d begun advocating it on Garmin in 2008, way before anybody else, but like most things we pioneered we let it slip. It was based on the latest sports science at the time, which had actually originated from military testing, preparing soldiers for extreme heat, where they’d noticed unexpected performance increases.
As in the winter, the training we do throughout the year is about overloading the body to a degree that it adapts and recovers to handle the same load a little better next time. The sauna is effectively a training session, it provokes hyperthermic conditioning. The body adapts to handle the heat – increased blood flow, better temperature regulation, higher plasma volume, more red blood cells, etc. All of these are key ingredients in making a better endurance athlete. In theory you are supposed to do this directly after a training session in order to increase the stress on your system, but we couldn’t do that as the sauna didn’t open till 18:00. The first day I could barely do ten minutes, the last few days I found thirty minutes bearable, something unimaginable only a week earlier.
In the evening we’d have a total regime meal then go to bed soon afterwards. It was one of the best training camps of my career.
I found it easy to motivate myself so soon after my personal Tour de France non-selection drama because of how much I wanted to perform in Glasgow. Suddenly my biggest objective of the year had shifted to winning the Commonwealth Games road race. I was realistic about the time trial: my results over the preceding two years made it clear I was no longer a contender when it came to that discipline, but I still believed that if I worked hard enough and wanted it enough, come the day I could be one of the strongest road racers in the world.
There had been sparks of what I was still capable of in the previous year, but the last real flash had been at the 2012 Tour de France. A Friday the 13th no less. I clearly remember being on the start line in Annecy, talking to my old teacher from Hong Kong, Charlie Riding. He’d made it a tradition to visit the Tour in previous years to see his old student.
Mr Riding had been the only person in Hong Kong who had told me to do it, to chase my dream; that maybe, just maybe, there could be a reality beyond the reverie. I never forgot that, and he clearly hadn’t either.
I sat there on my bike, one hand on the barrier, awaiting the neutral start, Mr Riding and his wife and two boys on the other side, among all the spectators. We were chatting away, and in his usual way he said, ‘So, you going to give it a go today, Dave?’
I can remember pulling my head back and almost laughing, ‘No way, Charlie, I’m wrecked!’ I asked him if he’d seen the stage. There were two category one mountains in the first seventy kilometres. And it was the longest of the race. ‘No way. Bugger that,’ I concluded.
Argh, as soon as I said it I could see the disappointment on his face, never mind those of his two little boys. I tried to recover it: ‘I’ll see how it goes. You never know, right?’ Charlie took this better; the boys clearly weren’t that bothered. I don’t know why I’d been worrying about them in the first place.
It turned out that I was strongest of the guys who wanted to win the stage that day, which was ironic because I had probably been the least interested in trying. I even let the break of nearly twenty riders form before bridging up to it on my own, so uninterested had I been in fighting it out beforehand. I crossed the two mountains within myself. There were only five of us left at the summit of the second, and I still didn’t feel like I’d gone too deep within my reserves. I rode a very clinical stage, winning it in a sprint against Jean-Christophe Péraud.
I punched the air, just as Cyrille Guimard, my old directeur sportif at Cofidis, had taught me: ‘Only raise your arms after you’ve crossed the line, David. You’ll slow yourself down and open yourself up to those coming up from behind if you sit up before.’ I had made exactly the same salute when winning my first Grand Tour stage in the 2001 Vuelta a España.
That day in 2012 I stopped worrying about losing and started caring about winning. In 2001 it had been about me proving to the cycling world that I was more than a time trialist. Eleven years later it was about proving who I was and what I represented. The deeper I got into the stage, the more I became aware I was going to win (bar broken chains or slipped chains or bad chainrings or no front derailleurs), the more I realised the responsibility I carried. This was the year we’d had the ghastly early crash that had wiped out the majority of the team and all our general classification hopes; as a team we were on our hands and knees with all pre-race objectives eradicated by Stage 6. Due to that loss of hope I was given carte blanche to race for myself. I hadn’t had that opportunity in years. I’d been testing myself in numerous breaks up to that day, and could feel myself getting stronger as each stage passed.
I’d never race for the win unless I considered it to be a realistic chance. I used all my breakaways up to that day as reconnaissance of who was strong, practice at making it into the break, and training my body to handle the specific workload required to win a stage. Considering how much of an emotional racer I generally was, I could at times be incredibly cold and calculated. Friday 13 July 2012 was one of those days I switched off my emotions and read the race like a book. Crossing the line I shouted the exact same thing I’d shouted in 2001: ‘FUCK, YES!’ Back then I’d got off my bike like cock of the walk, proud to show everybody I was more than a time-trial specialist. Come 2012 all I wanted to do was lie down.
It’s become my favourite photo from my career. I can remember lying there on the ground with my eyes wide open looking up at the sky. I was so wired from concentrating for so long that I couldn’t close them. The sky was bright blue, mottled with clouds that drifted across with an indifferent serenity. I could have been lying on the deck of a boat. It was the absolute antithesis to my surroundings. For the first time in hours I wasn’t thinking about the wheel in front of me, the wind direction, the climb coming up, cadence, what I should eat, how much I needed to drink, other racers in the break, each of their strengths and weaknesses, what I knew about their palmares, and how to expect their plays in the final, what was on the radio, the time gap behind, or the fear of losing; am I strong enough to beat them in the sprint? Or should I attack them? All of that was behind me now. Not only could my body relax, but, more importantly, I could switch off my mind. I’d done it. I’d crossed the line first. I wanted to enjoy that moment, I wanted to have it to myself, no matter how brief it was, because ultimately it was just a moment among hundreds and thousands of others – yet I knew straightaway that it was one of the most important of my long and tumultuous career.
I didn’t own the day, which is how I would have felt when I was younger. I no longer had that privilege. I’d handed that back years ago – that was my debt for having been given a second chance. I was an ex-doper, and as long as I raced I had to remind people of not only that but, more importantly, that I was now a clean rider. When I win I consider it an obligation to confront my past and the sport’s past; to not skirt around it, but to draw attention, not only to where we have been, but where we are now, and the direction we have to go in in the future. I think that’s the only way I, and cycling as a whole, can be taken seriously.
As if I needed reminding of this, the cycling universe decided that I should win on the anniversary of Tommy Simpson’s death in the 1967 Tour de France. An anniversary I held dear but had given up on anyone else caring about since the 2007 Tour de France when – even though it was the fortieth anniversary, and the year after Floyd Landis’ infamous non-victory – nobody had even mentioned it. As recently as then it seemed people would rather forget Tommy Simpson burning up, when to me it seemed more relevant than ever to remember it. That Friday 13 July 2012 was my moment to remind people of something I felt we shouldn’t forget, because that’s where we come from, and we must make sure we never return.
Lying there on the ground, surrounded by photographer
s and press, team staff, anti-doping chaperones and race organisation, I was fully aware that the second I raised myself off the ground my moment would be over for ever. I tried to make it last as long as possible, which wasn’t long considering I was lying a few metres beyond the finish line, not the safest place for a brief meditation on life. Once I got up I had to become another version of myself – the doper turned anti-doping crusader. I don’t remember much of the next hour of interviews, podium protocol, anti-doping control, more interviews – I’d been racing for six hours in thirty-five degrees-plus heat. I’m not sure how I even managed to be so switched on: my hands were cramping in the press conference, I remember that.
One of the first interviews I did was with Ned Boulting. Listening to it again, I’m surprised to hear myself still breathing heavily:
Ned: You’ve done it. You’ve waited a good few years to make that kind of statement on the Tour de France again, haven’t you?
Me: Yeah, that’s why sometimes when bad luck happens it actually turns into good luck, because for the last few years I’ve been at the disposition of the team. I haven’t had the liberty to do things like that. Because we lost our GC hopes I’ve been allowed to do what I want, so I’ve taken advantage of it.
Ned: Time after time we’ve seen you in breaks and it hasn’t quite worked out. I think of Barcelona in 2009 and that kind of ilk, but you got it perfectly tactically today, didn’t you?
Me: I was determined. I was just saying to Marya [Pongrace] before, as soon as I got in the break, I was just, ‘I’m gonna win today, I’m gonna win today, I’m gonna win today.’ In my head I gave myself no options. I was going to do whatever it took.
