Millar emerges clean and sober to try to break the cycle

CYCLING:PERHAPS IT was the eye contact, the body language, or a subtle change in the tone of his voice, but there was something that didn't ring true with David Millar's answer to a question in December 2001. Interviewed at his then-Cofidis team's training camp in St Raphael, France, the 24-year-old Briton was asked about his reputation as a rider who was strongly anti-doping.

His exact answer has faded from memory, but the words weren’t the issue. After the interview this writer expressed unease to a friend who had also gone to the camp. “Something seems off: he’s either covering up for drug use on the team, or else he’s not telling the truth about himself.”

Two and a half years later, it became clear that it was the latter.

Millar had started out clean, winning the opening time trial in his first Tour in 2000 on talent and fitness alone, then over time gave in to temptation and pressure. He eventually started taking EPO and other substances, was accused of doping by a team-mate in January 2004, and then arrested and taken into custody in June of that year.

While he initially denied using drugs, police searched his apartment and found two empty syringes of Eprex, a form of EPO. A confession was followed by a two-year ban, then his return to the sport immediately before the 2006 Tour de France.

Since then he is generally accepted to have raced clean, and is a long-standing member of Wada’s Athlete Committee.

Millar has written about the twists and turns of his career in a book released last month. Entitled Racing Through the Dark – the Fall and Rise of David Millar, it makes for fascinating reading. “The world of doping and the law of silence – the omerta – that went with it were eroding my self respect,” he states early on, speaking about the 1998 season. He talked about distancing himself from “some of the classless idiots who were considered as great champions”, and said that he was convinced he could succeed clean.

While he continued to race well, with those convictions initially strengthened by the Festina Affair which shook the sport later that year, over time something changed. It was partly due to the pressure of being team leader for the Cofidis squad, but that was just one factor.

The net result was he simply gave in. “I was too weary – too weary to fight any more,” he writes about a meeting with a team-mate and one of the team bosses immediately after he pulled out of the 2001 Tour. “All that resistance – all the fighting I had been doing, all that idealism which first came so naturally and had slowly grown into a futile and isolating stance – was now behind me.”

Millar took several big victories “charged”, including the final time trial in the 2003 Tour plus the world time-trial championships that same year. Caught in mid-2004, he returned two years on and won a time-trial stage of the Vuelta that September. His first words in the post-race press conference were delivered with passion and force and, unlike his answer to a question nearly three years earlier, were far more convincing.

“Today was a purely physical test. I won, and I am 100 per cent clean. Some people may not believe me, but if you know me you will believe me after what I am have been through,” he said, referring to the depression and alcohol dependency he suffered after his sanction. “I love my sport and I want everyone to know that you can win the biggest races on bread and water.”

Millar’s insistence is that over recent years the sport has improved. He accepts some riders are still doping, but believes the majority of the peloton is far cleaner than it was in the past. He argues the UCI’s biological passport has improved things, and made it possible for more riders to race clean than before.

The Scot will compete in this year’s Tour as part of the Garmin-Cervélo team, a squad with arguably the best reputation in the sport of the ProTeams and, as he does in the book, he talks frankly about what he and the sport went through in the ’90s and ’00s.

While cycling is yet to prove the worst is behind it, Millar asserts there’s a very significant difference to before. “The young riders turning pro now don’t have anything like the same pressures as in the past,” he told this writer in April. “If I’d started now, I simply wouldn’t have to make the same choices.”