Breaking out of a vicious cycle

CYCLING: Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar, By David Millar Orion, 288pp. £10.99

‘I AM IN a French police cell, below Biarritz town hall. A smell of piss and disinfectant hangs in the air. A drunken man shouts relentlessly in a cell somewhere down the corridor.

“It is six in the morning. The morning of a new life. Only I don’t know what kind of life it will be. What do I feel? Relief, shame, terror, emptiness, loneliness.”

So begins the gripping Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar.

It is late June 2004, just 10 days before the 27-year-old professional cyclist Millar is due to start the Tour de France. But this year there will be no tour for him. There may never be another. The previous night, while sitting in an upmarket restaurant in Biarritz with the chief of Great Britain’s Olympic team, he was approached by two stern-looking French policemen and carted off to the cells. They were investigating a doping ring within his French team, Cofidis, and Millar was a prime suspect.

A search of his nearby home yielded two syringes he had used to administer blood- boosting EPO. Exhausted from the lies, he decided to confess all to the police.

Millar’s book charts the complex web of pressures, mistakes, greed and rewards that led the gifted athlete to this point; to the fall from grace that would result in him receiving a two-year doping ban, being stripped of his world title and his self respect and, for a time, his status within the sport.

The great strength of this book is not just what it details of Millar’s own story. It skilfully and insightfully describes how drugs rotted professional cycling by corrupting it at every level.

He documents a sport in which drug taking is rife, though few test positive. One in which out-of-competition tests were non-existent during his drug-taking days and a quick injection of plasma could mask the illegal substances running through one’s veins if one was called for a post-race blood test.

On turning professional, aged 20, he immediately realised the pro ranks were drowning in blood-boosting EPO, which turned “donkeys to racehorses” and a rider’s blood to “thick soup”.

“There were stories,” Millar writes, “urban legends, of riders setting alarms to wake themselves through the night to do sit-ups as insurance against their heart stopping.”

After winning a stage and spending a brief stint in the yellow jersey during the 2000 Tour de France, Millar returned the following year as his team’s main hope, but crashed and abandoned the race.

Since turning pro four years earlier he had become depressed and isolated. Constantly pressured and reminded that the team’s future depended on him, their leader, getting results, he decided he would salvage his season by doping for the 2001 three-week Tour of Spain.

He was given time off by his team to train and rest in Italy under the guidance of an older team mate, named only as l’Équipier, who would supply him with EPO injections. “I felt that the team’s existence and continuation depended on my performances. The manager and l’Équipier knew that; they understood my sense of obligation. They chose the perfect time to nudge me gently and ease me to the other side. Finally I’d accepted that it was easier to dope than not to dope.”

In Spain he won two stages and a stint in the yellow jersey. While he did not notice any significant difference in his power, he could suffer for longer periods in races and recover more quickly in between those bouts. “It was like having the form of my life day in, day out.”

There followed a string of good results that catapulted him into the top 15 ranked riders in the world, and secured a €400,000 performance-related bonus.

But he had become a wreck, his weight plummeting and his friends and family noticing changes in him brought about by the cocktail of EPO, testosterone pills, cortisone, a mind-boggling range of legal injections to aid recovery, and Stilnox and Rohypnol to help him sleep.

After winning the world time trial title in Canada in 2003 he felt no emotion on hearing God Save the Queenat the medals ceremony. "It wasn't sport any more, just business." He had had enough of drugs. But within months, the French police investigation into drug taking in the preceding years had taken him down.

His story is not without redemption. After hitting the bottle hard for the first year of his drugs ban, he decided to be at the start line of the 2006 Tour de France and duly made it, with a new team.

Since then he has, he insists, raced clean.

He has taken a stage win in the Tour de France, victory in the Commonwealth Games time trial and many other accolades, including a spell this year in the pink leader’s jersey of the Tour of Italy and a stage win in the race.

Just last week he narrowly missed out on recapturing the Tour de France yellow jersey again but will ride the next two weeks of that race in search of stage victory.

A keen artist and lover of books and music, he part owns the Garmin Cervelo team that he now rides for and claims to have fallen in love again with the sport that threatened to beat him. He has even taken on formal roles with anti-drugs agencies.

He has, as this excellent work testifies, seen it all and done it all, full throttle. This is a shocking expose of the corruption at the heart of a wonderful sport. Those who run cycling at every level would be well advised to closely study it, though history tells us they probably won’t.

Conor Lally is Crime Correspondent of The Irish Times. A former racing cyclist, he represented Ireland at senior level