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[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
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1 1 - 0 7 - 2 0 0 5 Bitten by the cycling bug
Sun 10 Jul 2005
WE MET the day after the 2004 Tour de France finished, in a bar in Fulham. David Millar had always had a cool grunge-kid aura, had always looked elegantly wasted, rock star style; now he looked like a man who had not slept for a month. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying, or rubbing them, time and again. It was hard to know what to say: what can you say to someone who has self-destructed as spectacularly and disastrously as Millar had done? A year earlier, the Scot had stepped onto the Tour's prize-giving podium after winning the final time trial of the centenary race ahead of Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich. It was his third Tour stage win in four years. It was confirmation that Millar was the most talented British cyclist in at least a generation. The victory came at the end of a Tour in which the 26-year-old Scot had suffered ill luck and illness, coming within an ace of pulling out, and not surprisingly he looked like a man who could not believe his luck, for all that his designer-label underpants were sticking out over the front of his tracksuit bottoms. Millar's downfall took just 48 hours. On the evening of Tuesday, June 22, 2004 he was a world champion earning half a million pounds a year, heading for Tour de France and Olympic glory, a leading representative of the clean new generation in cycling. Two days later he was a self-confessed drugs cheat, a pariah with his life and reputation in shreds, without a job or a future. In autumn 1996 when he ended his single season as an amateur at the Velo Club Saint Quentin in north France, Millar was that rare thing: a highly-talented Briton being fought over by several pro teams. There were five squads trying to sign up the 19-year-old, who had been competing for all of a season and a half. No Briton had risen in such meteoric style. The winner in the signing war was a newly formed team sponsored by a loan agency called Cofidis. A year before the Festina scandal led teams to clean up their acts and drove doping underground, cycling was drug-ridden, but at 19, Millar had had no time to get into bad habits. He was shocked by what he found. "I came to professional cycling incredibly naïve," he told me in 2002. "Some of the big riders were very open with me, told me the bottom line and I was shocked. It scarred me pretty badly." He was actually relieved when the Festina affair happened in his second year as a pro, because he had become tired of racing against pros whom he knew had lesser ability but who were using drugs. At the start of 2000, he made his position clear. "I think you have to make a conscious decision about whether to enter into [doping] or not. I've decided I'm not going to enter into that." Like Chris Boardman, Millar won the opening stage in his first Tour. It was impossible to avoid being caught up in the symbolism and excitement on July 1 2000. The venue was Futuroscope, a space-age theme park near Poitiers; Millar was the man of the future. Millar's flamboyance earned him the nickname 'le dandy' in French newspapers; having set the fastest time, he had to wait for the favourite, Lance Armstrong, to finish the time trial before knowing he had won. On hearing Armstrong's time was slower, his tears and jubilation were genuine. As cycling awaited the Festina trial that autumn, this rising star was clean, and was open about it. By the 1990s, there were few colourful personalities in pro cycling. The demands of the sport were so great and the stakes so high, that the riders saw less of the world outside. The doping scandals had put a new edge on the relationship between the press and the riders, who were edgier, more reticent. Millar, on the other hand, wore his emotions on his sleeve, was highly articulate. It was easy to empathise when he displayed anger, vulnerability, excitement. He had written a humorous, no-holds-barred column in the magazine Cycle Sport for several years. He had a yellow open-top Landrover and a Subaru Impreza. He was passionately into his music and books. His namesake Robert, who was no relation, was duly impressed. "He's a surfing dude. You can see he has natural talent [and] he's putting up with the inconvenience of training and turning up with clean socks at the start of the race. He's slightly fragile, like a good race horse. He's probably got more talent than I had, or Chris Boardman had." I asked Millar to describe the margin between taking drugs and staying clean. "It's that," he says, and holds up finger and thumb in front of me. The gap between them is half an inch. "I was 100% sure I would never dope, 100%, then all of a sudden it was out of control. Cycling had become my life, the only thing that defined me and I resented that. It was '**** it'. It was like flipping a coin. You don't stop and think. If you think about it, it's game over. "There was no clear-cut explanation. In 2001 I doped for one race, the Tour of Spain. The other seven I won were on water [ie: clean]. I ended the year sixteenth in the world, which for a 24-year-old is huge, and 90% of it was done clean. I was loving it, winning racing, but that wasn't what pushed me to doping that year." The key was the 2001 Tour de France. Millar started favourite for the prologue time trial on Cofidis's home turf in Dunkirk, but the pressure proved too much. His form was not perfect, so he overcooked a right-hand bend in search of extra speed, and slid across the road on his left side. There were no broken bones, just nasty cuts and grazes, and the following morning's start in Saint Omer he was swaddled up like a mummy. What followed the crash was what the French term un calvaire - a journey through pain, a daily struggle to hang on to the bunch. "I was so sick and pissed off," he said. "I was thinking 'Let me go home'. By day nine or 10 I was starting to go mental." Millar left the Tour, did not touch his bike for a week, and partied in Biarritz. Before the Vuelta he left France for two weeks, training hard with motorpaced rides. He bought EPO, the blood boosting hormone discovered during the Festina scandal, at £250 a capsule, and injected it into his shoulder. On the back of his training in Tuscany, he won the prologue of the Tour of Spain, took a road race stage in convincing style, and was within a few seconds of winning the world time trial championship in Portugal. There was no risk of testing positive: the EPO was purely to help him train. Millar believes doping began partly as an act of adolescent rebellion, in the face of his increasing resentment against the demands of his sport and his team. It could, in fact, be considered a form of self-harm, as the worst act he perceived he could be driven to do. "It was like a way of getting back at the team. 'Look what you've pushed me to'. It was like 'I'll show the bastards'." FOR SOME CYCLISTS, THE SACRIFICES ARE automatic, routine, giving a framework to life. Not so for Millar. At times he would fluctuate between living the life of a pro cyclist and living like any other young man. He seemed torn between the need to do something he loves, and the limitations his sport demanded of his life. In 2002, he explained to me: "It's hard to decide what I want from cycling. I'm not prepared to take eight years of my life, be a rich young man at 31 or 32 and find I've missed a whole part of my life. I could walk away from it, but there is nothing else I could do in life that I can do as well as cycling. Very few people find what they are made to do, [but] I miss intelligent conversation, having a beer with someone, [talking] about books you can recommend, music." This dilemma would have seemed self-indulgent to pro cyclists of the past, who had the option of working in the fields or the factory or sitting on a bike. It may also seem self- indulgent set against the hundreds of thousands of pounds Millar was able to earn. But it was deeply felt. For a rider who had doubts about the extent to which he should be "profi", as he would put it, doping was the ultimate professional act. He explained to Jeremy Whittle in The Times: "This is the paradox. When you boost your performance you become ten times more serious than you have ever been." His instinct told him not to dope but by going against what he knew to be ethical and sensible he could prove to himself that he had left no stone unturned in his preparation. Millar had become engaged in 2001, and was devastated when the relationship came to a sudden end towards the end of the year. He returned to Europe with glandular fever, in such a state that he turned up at the team's training camp without a bike. He got through the illness by spring of 2002 with the help of a doctor in the neighbouring Basque country. His stage win in that year's Tour de France, at Beziers, was masterly, and, he insists, it was taken clean. Millar infiltrated the stage-long break, then won the sprint from the remnants, who included a former world champion, Laurent Brochard, and the Spaniard David Extebarria, who already had two stage wins in the Tour to his name. Six months later he was still talking about it with the enthusiasm of a 19-year-old amateur. The next season marked Millar's final descent. He was angry inside as he had missed out on a performance bonus in spite of winning his stage in the Tour. That was, he acknowledges, his own fault for failing to read the contract correctly, but it was another source of frustration. In 2003, he had one conflict after another with Cofidis. They accused him of a lack of commitment, and by June he had decided to assert himself. "I thought 'I'll make them pay me a shitload of money and run this team'. I had to show I could get over the climbs and get on the podium at the Dauphiné Libéré [pre-Tour stage race], I wanted to ensure it, so I went to Spain and prepped for it." What that meant, he explained, was "training bloody hard and doing a certain amount of EPO over 10 days so I could keep doing the training. I was on the programme well, EPO and testosterone patches" - the latter to avoid depleting his levels of the male hormone - "which was big shit for me." At the Tour, he was again favourite to win the prologue time trial, but again disaster struck. He was clear in the lead until his chain came off, and he had to slow down to put it back on the chainring. In spite of the time he lost doing this, he finished second by 0.08sec to the Australian Brad McGee. After being fit enough to try and win a stage in the Alps on Bastille Day, by the Pyrenees, Millar was on his knees, coughing heavily from a chest infection, but a day and a half later he won the time trial into Nantes, equalling Robert Millar and Chris Boardman's tally of three stage wins. It was a fortunate win, in that Jan Ullrich might have won had he not fallen off, while Armstrong might have triumphed had he not been solely interested in gaining time on the German. But Millar's time trial was the second fastest in Tour history, at 33.97mph for the 30.5 miles, and he too had fallen off on the sodden roads leading into the city of Nantes. His world time trial title that autumn was won with the same "preparation" as before, and he says now that he felt "emotionless, I knew I'd won after 15km and was just going through the motions". He still did not understand why he was cheating. "I couldn't explain to myself why I was doing it and it all became very confusing. Going through such a big ethical change from one day to the next is going to affect you on a deeper level. I became unstable. My self-esteem started evaporating. I was living a lie and it wasn't good for anyone." THE POLICE NET CLOSED OVER THAT WINTER. The French drugs squad were keeping a close eye on two Cofidis team members, both from Poland: a masseur named Bogdan Madejak and a young rider, Marek Rutkewicz. Both were taken into custody in January 2004, and gradually Millar entered the frame. Cofidis team boss François Migraine conspicuously failed to endorse him as clean in an interview; he was named by a team-mate, Philippe Gaumont, who was interrogated by police. The police came for him at 8.25pm on June 22, just as he was ordering dinner in a restaurant in the town of Bidart, just down the coast from Biarritz. There were three gendarmes in plain clothes, a little pumped up with the adrenaline of the occasion. Millar had just finished his final preparation event for the Tour de France and had driven home with Dave Brailsford, who runs Britain's lottery-funded cycling programme. Brailsford was keeping tabs on Millar's progress as a potential Olympic medallist, and had been to watch him race in the Route du Sud; he was escorted back to Millar's flat with the rider and the police, and had to look on as the gendarmes took it apart. When searching his flat in Biarritz, the police found two empty capsules which had contained the final doses of EPO that he had taken before the world championships. They had travelled the world in his suitcase: Manchester, Hamilton, where the world championships were held, Las Vegas, and so back to Biarritz, where Millar had found them on unpacking, thought "what the hell has my life come to?" and put them on the bookcase in his bedroom, "the one place nobody goes." Presented with the evidence he initially invented an unlikely story for the police, then finally thought "I can't live with this. It's not 100% my fault but I'm not going to live like this. I could have kept fighting, fighting, fighting, but I'm fundamentally not a good liar." Millar had kept the empty capsules, he said, to remind himself of where he had been. Perhaps, he says, he wanted to be exposed, subconsciously at least. Perhaps it was his equivalent of the mark where a mixed-up teenager might have cut himself. "It had scarred me. I didn't give it much thought but I knew what I was doing." Like most of the British cycling world, I did not want to believe that he took drugs. He had told me in June 2002: "I don't need to dope. I don't have to live with myself doing that". By then, of course, he had already used EPO, though he may have believed that he was not going to do so again. There were other reasons for believing he was 'clean'. He was a bright middle-class boy who raced his bike because he wanted to do so and understood the issues. He was not a poverty-stricken peasant's son looking to escape penury. His results had never included the curious highs and lows that arouse suspicion. But there were grounds for doubt. The ambiguities about Millar had been clear for a while. Yet I did not ask the direct question: do you take drugs? To do so for a sports journalist is akin to asking a neighbour whether he beats his wife. To some extent, Millar's exposure came as a relief to me. Anything is better than doubt and suspicion. At least I knew. But I was angry. Millar had not actually lied to me, but he had answered my questions about doping in a manner he admitted was "ambiguous". Even so, I could not avoid feeling sympathy, given the dire straits in which Millar had ended up. I was angry at the stupidity and self-destruction of the act, not the man, even though he had cheated and deceived. Condemning drug-taking and disowning the drug-taker were two different things. The sympathy towards Millar shown by many cycling fans reflects my own ambivalence about the doping issue. We admire what the men do on their bikes, we would prefer not to know the lengths to which some go to achieve such things. They do these things for themselves - they are driven to win or they merely want the money - but we feel a certain responsibility for what they do, if only for the delight we take in watching a spectacular sprint or descent, or a climber in flight up a great mountain. We can empathise with the temptation to seek moral or physical support at the chemists even if we are adamant it should not be sought. Roule Britannia, by William Fotheringham, is published by Yellow Jersey Press and is on sale at £17.99 |
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