Bad Blood (9 page)

Teenage girls, perhaps more hopeful of a glimpse of Ryan Giggs, Joey Barton or Cristiano Ronaldo, look unimpressed as Millar throws some unfamiliar and decidedly uncool shapes.

We are both, to paraphrase Lance Armstrong’s words about David and his love of partying, drunk on our ass.

I had seen David do many things, but I’d never seen him dance before. Through a fog of beer and wine, I watched him duckwalk his spindly frame into a ball, before exploding back to his full height in spasms of exuberance. Like a crop-haired Russell Brand, he shimmied across the floor towards me, unshaven, wide-eyed, gurning dementedly. I lurched back onto my seat and prayed for this breakneck night of excess to end.

‘’Nother one, Jez?’ he bellowed in my ear, as my head slumped further between my shoulders.

David likes a drink. So do I. But this uneven contest was the shipwreck of an interview that started out innocently enough in David’s loft apartment. Chris Boardman was also there, and the three of us sat talking, sipping chilled beer as dusk fell over the Pennines. After Boardman had gone home to his wife and kids, I realised too late that I should have followed suit. Instead the evening degenerated into a sad spectacle – at least on my part.

What is it about top athletes that allows them to tie one on and then shake it off the next day? Once, after a night spent celebrating a friend’s birthday in his favourite Biarritz bar, we’d followed Millar on a training ride into the Pyrenees, only to bale out after the first mountain pass when the photographer lost his breakfast on the ladder of hairpin bends.

That night in Manchester, deep into his off-season, David was in his cups. I couldn’t keep up. So what did I learn from this experience? I think the key message to pass on is never drink with Olympic-level athletes – many of them are also Olympic-level drinkers …

I liked David Millar immediately, perhaps because he was so different to other athletes that I had met. He was irreverent, intelligent and funny, with a big smile, angular good looks, and an open nature. He was interested in the world beyond his sport, and beyond The Race.

Even now, four years after he was banned for doping in 2004, I can’t help but feel protective of him. Perhaps it’s because underneath the ‘it’s all good’ bravado, there remain occasional glimpses of a defensiveness and vulnerability. These days, he’s developed a thick skin, having been kicked from pillar to post in the aftermath of his ban.

From our first meeting at the Tour of Switzerland in 1998, it was clear that Millar loved cycling. He had an encyclopaedic
knowledge
of the sport’s recent history. He was seduced by the travel, the glamour, the romance and the danger of the European scene – and, crucially for somebody who had spent a nomadic adolescence, by the same sense of belonging that first reeled me in.

‘I love bike racing,’ he said. ‘I love it when it’s really extreme, when it’s raining and snowing. Even on days like that, it’s your job to finish – even when you’ve fallen off and are covered in blood, or have broken a bone. That’s the ethos of the sport – if you can pedal, you carry on.’

He lived in a small flat amid the faded grandeur of surfer’s paradise, Biarritz. Being some distance from the spring circuit of Mediterranean races and lacking a major international airport, it was an odd choice for a professional cyclist. Most riders lived in clusters in towns like Nice or Toulouse. Given his maverick nature, his leaning towards a solitary life and his ambivalence towards the professionalism of his job, it suited Millar well. He became an adopted son, a local hero – ‘
un vrai Biarrot
’.

In fact, the Atlantic resort, close to the Pyrenees, buzzy, quirky and with good nightlife, was ideal for him, as he cultivated his image as a latter-day English eccentric. After he won his first yellow jersey in the 2000 Tour, the French press christened him ‘Le
Dandy
’. Millar loved it.

In the autumn evenings, the racing season over, the wind whipping up the Atlantic rollers, he would shut himself away in a restaurant with local hero André Darrigade, a former Tour de France star. Darrigade had become a local newsagent, and Millar would listen, rapt, to stories of the Tour when it was still a dashing Hemingwayesque event for oddballs, rogues and renegades. The influence of past stars such as Darrigade and, to a lesser extent, mythologised characters such as five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil, who drank champagne, played poker, had numerous complicated romances and drove fast sports cars – sometimes all on the same night – all shaped Millar’s devil-may-care outlook.

Yet when I got to know David better I realised that while he loved the romance of the sport, a part of him increasingly resented the demands it made of him. I could sense his internal conflict and his yearning for a more normal life. At those times, often when he most felt the pressure to achieve success, he was at his most volatile and vulnerable.

When he won the prologue time trial in Futuroscope and took the yellow jersey on his very first day in the Tour, David wept. He hugged his mother Avril, his tears wetting her ‘It’s Millar Time’ T-shirt. One French regional newspaper called him
procycling
’s ‘
chou-chou
’ –
procycling
’s darling.

My darling – and yes, before he fell into the viper’s nest, David was.

David Millar liked to train hard and play hard. His first flatmate in Biarritz, fellow British pro Jez Hunt, struggled to keep pace with Millar’s demands for challenge and entertainment, both on and off the bike. Another British pro, track-racing veteran Rob Hayles, moved to Biarritz briefly, but was soon exhausted both by his racing schedule and the 24/7 demands of life with Millar.

David was different to the other riders, many of whom had grown up in quiet French towns, or in the backwaters of Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and Italy. He sought acceptance, yet he remained independent and stood out from the crowd. He was middle class and exotic, and try as he might, it showed. His father flew long haul for Cathay Pacific and his mother successfully became CEO of her own business in central London. David could have gone to art school, studied photography or slipped into the easy money of the expat business community in Hong Kong. Instead, he chose to become a professional cyclist, simply for the love of it.

Lance Armstrong, briefly his teammate at Cofidis, was an early professional contact who became a friend. Like David, Lance came from a broken home and like David, he had a difficult, in Lance’s case near non-existent, relationship with his father. But
where
David was vulnerable and inconsistent, Lance was ruthless and raging, both brutalised and brutal.

Their parents’ divorce was traumatic for both David and his sister Fran. They spent much of their adolescence flying backwards and forwards between Avril in London and Gordon in Hong Kong, at that time still a playground for middle-class kids. Yet he was rootless after his parents split up, not living in one place or the other, one of those sullen preteens in airports with a label hanging from their neck. Finally, he settled in Maidenhead in Berkshire, where his mother lived.

But Avril worried about her teenage son and encouraged him to make friends. He joined a cycling club and almost immediately won races. Soon he was competing at a high level, both in the UK and abroad. Through all his travels, David had become something of a chameleon. He was eloquent, moody and thoughtful. But he was also a boy racer, a posh lad, a drinker, a ringleader and a good talker, able to walk into a group and quickly find what was needed to fit in. That skill helped him when he first moved to France.

When he arrived at the French-sponsored Cofidis team, another set of expats – Tony Rominger, Lance Armstrong, Bobby Julich and Frankie Andreu – were part of the all-star set-up, although when they left (Armstrong dramatically in exile because of his cancer, Rominger forced to retire, Andreu and Julich to other sponsors) Millar once again found himself isolated.

He had to fit in somehow, so he became an entertainer, the cute lead singer to what had become an anonymous backing band of journeymen professionals. After a couple of early wins, he found himself in demand.

There was the yellow Land Rover he’d driven down to Biarritz – ‘
so Breeteesh
’ – the designer labels and the dyed hair. He was soon on the covers of magazines, the peloton’s Robbie Williams. Somewhere along the way, as he yearned for acceptance in a world in which he was always likely to be an outsider, David Millar mixed up being a professional cyclist with being in a band.

In 2003, clad in Great Britain’s team colours, his hair chopped and bleached, David stood on the podium, eyes closed, listening to ‘God Save The Queen’ as he celebrated his win in the World Time Trial Championship in Canada. Hours later, he and a group of fellow pros began a forty-eight-hour bender that took him to a suite in the Bellagio and to a wild party that became the talk of the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas.

Dishevelled and red-eyed the morning after, he stumbled late onto the
procycling
stand at Interbike for a meet and greet with the magazine’s readers. His tousled state left most of them wondering how on earth he had won a world title in the first place.

As 2003 ended, David appeared to have it all. Paul Smith, thinking of using him as a model. Cofidis were dangling what was in essence, with bonuses, a million-euro contract. He was a world champion who talked of the importance of respect from his peers and saw himself as one of the bosses in the peloton. David’s life had become a high octane, high-wire act, fuelled by his charm, energy and opportunism.

But he was living on borrowed time. In June 2004, Millar lost everything. He had never failed a drugs test, but, detained and questioned by the French police and an investigating judge, he admitted that at certain key periods in his career he had doped himself with EPO. The police followed the path to his door opened by the testimonies of Philippe Gaumont, his former Cofidis teammate. In his book
Prisoner of Doping
, Gaumont described his own initial flirtation with drug use and then detailed his subsequent immersion in institutionalised doping. Published in France in 2005, as
Prisonnier du Dopage
, Gaumont talks movingly of Millar, his young British teammate, tormented by his parents’ divorce, by his vulnerability, by the expectations placed upon him and by his nomadic lifestyle.

‘He was fragile,’ Gaumont wrote, as he detailed Millar’s excesses, fuelled by the boredom of his hotel room at training camp.

Gaumont described the relationship between Millar and Cofidis team doctor, Jean-Jacques Menuet. ‘There was a strong link between them, because of David’s difficult childhood,’ he wrote. ‘I say difficult, but maybe that’s not the right word. David’s parents had means … and, for a cyclist, you could say that he’d had a rare education. He had studied and could have gone to art school, if he hadn’t chosen cycling … He spent his teenage years left to himself, shuttling between England and Hong Kong. He always gave the impression he had something to prove.’

Gaumont’s compassion towards Millar contrasted sharply with David’s own description, as the Cofidis scandal grew, of the Frenchman as ‘a nutter’.

‘I believe,’ wrote Gaumont, ‘that Millar felt bad about cheating. It gave him a bad conscience, but like many of us, like me at any rate, he no longer knew how to stop. To forget about it all, I saw him take refuge in drugs and medication … It’s funny but when I look at him, he reminds me of myself. The more the seasons passed, the more he lost his innocence.’

Gaumont’s litany of his own chaos, self-abuse and addictive behaviour was unflinching. He was equally unsparing of others. He detailed widespread use of cocaine, ephedrine, Stilnox – plus EPO for racing – and described the curious prudishness of some of his own teammates who were appalled at his post-racing recreational drug use, but blithely encouraged doping in the hunt for results and financial rewards.

When the Cofidis scandal broke in the spring of 2004, Gaumont was the principal whistle-blower, pouring out his trade secrets to investigating judge, Richard Pallain. In March that year as he raced for Cofidis in Paris-Nice, Millar was paranoid, melancholic, defensive. I spoke to him in the start village at Digne-les-Bains. He was dressed up and ready to race, but I could tell that his heart was no longer in it, as if he knew what was coming.

Gaumont, as Millar and others kept telling me, was ‘a nutter’,
a
loose cannon who had lost his mind. But as he said it, I could see his anxiety. He rambled on about phone taps and security cameras and my heart sank when, as I stood there in the spring sunshine listening to him, I finally realised that David too, had fallen from grace.

‘You’re talking about absolute bullshit from this lunatic Philippe Gaumont,’ Millar said. ‘That’s what it is and it’s hard to express to people the degree of bullshit this is. Then you see a newspaper listening to him …’

And a journalist, Dave, like me, listening to him.

Millar admitted that he liked Philippe Gaumont. ‘I got on really well with him,’ he said. ‘It just baffled me. He’s in trouble and he’s gone for the guys in the team who’d hurt the team most: the leader and the management.’

Spring turned to early summer. Millar carried on racing, anxious, empty-hearted and fearful, protesting his innocence, blaming the ‘nutter’.

Gaumont, meanwhile, carried on talking to the judge.

The clock finally stopped for Millar Time early on a June evening.

David was seated at a table in a Biarritz restaurant with GB team performance director, David Brailsford and his partner. Outside, in the car park, a saloon car slalomed to an abrupt halt.

The French drugs squad had arrived from Paris, Gaumont’s testimony to Judge Pallain ringing in their ears. They were on a mission to rein in the excesses of this young foreigner. They marched into the restaurant, stood over the table and ordered Millar to follow them outside.

‘We’d had a first sip of wine,’ Millar remembers, ‘and three guys turned up, showed their badges and said, “David Millar – come with us.” They took me out into the car park, took my watch off, my shoelaces, any jewellery I had, my keys and phone. I started speaking in English and asked for a translator … and they said, “If you want a translator we’ll put the cuffs on you.”’