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  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.”’

  Millar felt a rising sense of dread. ‘They were drugs squad. They’d driven down from Paris that day, couldn’t find me at first so then, when they finally found me, they were pumped and they were angry. They were treating me like I was a cocaine dealer. They were pretty rough on Dave Brailsford and his girlfriend too, and she was heavily pregnant. They took me back to the apartment. They went in with a gun first, as if somebody was going to hit them with a back wheel, or something. They sat me down and I wasn’t allowed to move, while they searched the house. It took them four hours. I said to them, “Why are you here?”’

  Millar says he was systematically humiliated. ‘They were criticising my lifestyle, using a classic good cop/bad cop thing. It was psychological warfare. The bad cop literally hated me. He was saying, “You’re not a good person – we know that. You take three paces and I will bring you down like you’re resisting arrest.” It was deliberate. I felt completely violated.’

  Finally, the police found what they had been looking for.

  ‘The syringes were sitting on my books on the shelf in the bedroom,’ Millar recalled. ‘It said Eprex’ – an EPO brand name – ‘on them. Yeah, I was really trying to cover my tracks … I’d been sure that they wouldn’t find anything but then when they got into the bedroom, I started worrying. I knew there was something on the bookshelves. I started thinking “Oh fuck …” By then, it was past midnight. They took me to Biarritz prison and left me in a cell on my own for twelve hours.’

  But why, given his growing paranoia over phone taps and secret filming, did Millar keep the empty ampoules of EPO on his bookshelves? Was it to prick his guilt every time he came home from a race, to remind him of the innocence that had been lost on his journey from young hopeful to world champion?

  Gaumont was sure he had the answer. ‘David had kept the syringes even though he knew I had talked to the judge about him and that he was being watched. He told Judge Pallain that it was to never forget that he was a cheat. Knowing David and his sensitivity, I am sure that this is true. I am sure too that, unconsciously, he wanted to be caught – so that it could all stop.’

  BURN THIS

  JULY, 2005, CENTRAL London, on a warm summer evening two days after Lance Armstrong’s sixth successive Tour de France victory.

  Unshaven, gaunt and with tired eyes, David Millar sits at a pavement table outside a bar in Leicester Square, trying to explain it all away. I am listening to him, but I can’t help thinking ‘So Gaumont wasn’t such a nutter after all, then Dave …’

  I want to understand, empathise. Fran, his sister, sits beside him, sipping a beer, smoking, occasionally biting her nails. It’s only afterwards that I see her presence as a display of solidarity with her vilified brother, the dope cheat. She doesn’t say much, just listens and shares the burden of shame and guilt.

  David’s new life as a self-confessed doper is evidently not easy, however. He tries to play it down. He shrugs, smiles, cracks jokes, still, albeit half-heartedly, the entertainer. At times he laughs a little too hard and long. I sense he is being ‘economic’ with the truth and still protecting others, while also blaming himself. Later, I learn that his father Gordon had slapped him full in the face over his use of drugs. Now he hangs in limbo, awaiting punishment.

  Millar vacantly sips a beer. Across the square, a crowd is building outside a cinema, awaiting the arrival of a clutch of celebs. Passers-by crane their necks. Camera crews set up their equipment. The scene is not unlike the world Millar has now been exiled from, of barriered streets and autograph hunters, of fans waiting patiently, lining up for a snatched glimpse of their heroes.

  But David is nobody’s hero any more. Because of that night in Biarritz, because of the syringes on the bookshelf, his world has collapsed. Dragged from his cell to the chambers of Judge Pallain, he confessed to doping himself. He was sacked by Cofidis, thrown off the Great British Olympic team for the Athens Games, pursued by the French taxman and sent scurrying back home to England. He is a million miles from that suite in the Bellagio. The British cycling establishment has pilloried him. Millar has been in a lonely place, forced even to sleep on his sister’s sofa. ‘I’ve realised who my real friends in cycling are: Baden Cooke, Matt Wilson, Stuart O’Grady, Bobby Julich and Lance. They have all been in touch. That’s all, but then a lot of them would probably be scared of calling me …’

  Lance, says David, was ‘lovely to me, he was really good. We talked for ten or fifteen minutes. He was saying, “Keep your head high, it’s not the end of the world.” He offered help – he said if I needed anything, that I should call him.’

  David Millar had once been the great white hope of British cycling, the flag-bearer of a youthful new generation of professionals who had learned t
he lessons of the post-Festina era.

  Looking back though, I realise that prior to his bust, he had always sounded ambivalent. ‘Drugs are going to be in sport as long as there’s so much money involved,’ he told me in 2000. ‘You have to make a conscious decision whether to enter into that or not. I’ve decided I’m not going to enter into that.’

  Yet even then, after just two years as a professional, David had sounded unsure. ‘I don’t know why,’ he added. ‘It’s nothing to do with being a “really decent guy”. But it just defeats the purpose for me. I’m a professional, but there are lines that have to be drawn.’

  Yet in the end, the decision to dope had been taken easily.

  ‘I went from thinking one hundred per cent that I would never dope to making a decision in ten minutes that I was going to do it. It was an accumulation of things. I wanted to be accepted and to justify my status. Success gave me more power and the ability to control things. But there are so many reasons. It’s not black and white. We could talk about it for days, about all the little things, the things in my psychological make-up, the choices I have made.’

  The choices …?

  ‘I could have been a lot easier on myself by going to live in Nice, but I always wanted to be my own person. I’d train really hard on my own in Biarritz and then hit a slump. There was no “meet the guys at ten in the morning and go and train”. If I didn’t feel like riding my bike, I didn’t ride my bike.’

  And then David Millar says this, which, given the wrecking ball through his life his arrest became, is perhaps the saddest thing of all: ‘I could have had a good career without doping – it is possible.’

  When he finally appeared in court, in late 2006, David Millar stuck to his original statement. He repeated what he’d told me, that doping came through facing up to his ‘responsibilities’, and thinking that he owed something to his team and sponsor.

  ‘I was getting paid a lot of money to guarantee my results. The management made it clear that I had a lot of responsibilities. But the first time I doped it had nothing to do with money. I didn’t even understand my contract very well at the time. I didn’t even know that I could have had a one hundred per cent increase in my salary with twenty more UCI points. I blame myself – I assume responsibility for what I have done. But I feel let down and taken advantage of, because Cofidis took a lot of liberties. They screwed up. They can remember how I arrived at the team, nineteen years old. I was so naive, so naive. It was my dream and I didn’t realise how good I was. They had nothing for me.’

  Cofidis, he says, must have known that he was flirting with disaster, yet they did not intervene. ‘They’re not stupid,’ says David, as he signals to the waiter for another beer. ‘They were running a professional cycling team.’

  Did doping become a safety net to ensure results when you were short of training or out of form?

  ‘No – this is the paradox. When you boost your performance artificially you become ten times more serious than you have ever been. You don’t screw up. You say, “This is no longer sport – this is my job.” The moment you dope, you become ten times more professional.’

  THE CLEAN MACHINE

  JULIAN CLARK SITS in a gastropub in Kent, fiddling with his club sandwich. There is an uncharacteristic pause. Normally Julian talks non-stop, but today, he is choosing his words carefully. Memories of his three years managing the Linda McCartney Cycling Team are flooding back.

  Most of them are not good.

  Clark has an extraordinary story to tell. Almost single-handedly, he converted a weekend shopping trip to Sainsbury’s into a groundbreaking opportunity in international sports sponsorship. His whimsical idea of creating a British cycling team that could race the Tour de France became a reality. Julian drove the Linda McCartney cycling team to the brink of European success – and then steered his runaway train into a precipice.

  Julian once sent me a draft for a book called Debt, Drugs and Eating Meat, which is a blunt but accurate summary of his journey from infatuated cycling fan to bankruptcy and breakdown. He has always been a seat-of-the-pants character. He finished racing in motocross in 1990, after a bad crash left him with a blood clot on the brain. He was only twenty-five. After a year’s recovery, he started racing in triathlons. ‘I enjoyed the bike-racing part the most,’ he recalls. ‘Various people told me that I was strong on the bike and that I should do some road racing.’

  He adjusted well to serious competition. ‘I was a fourth-category amateur but I rode a race called the Les England Memorial down in Bletchingley and Chris Lillywhite, John Tanner – all the relevant elite riders in Britain – were there. I’d already had a win in a second-cat race, but that day I got into a breakaway with Lillywhite and the others and was still there at the end, before I blew up – big time.’

  But Clark had earned their respect and he and Lillywhite became friends. ‘They all came and talked to me afterwards and said I was strong, so I started training with Chris, because we lived locally to each other. I was completely smitten with the sport, overwhelmed. I thought it was fantastic. I’d come from pro racing in motocross to cycling and I wanted to be a pro bike rider.’

  During his time in motocross, Clark had taken managerial roles and proved adept at attracting sponsors. Now, as an established rider on the parochial British racing scene, he wanted to do the same in cycling.

  ‘In March 1998, Tracey and I were wandering around Sainsbury’s in Cobham. I was just looking through the frozen foods, saw Linda McCartney’s brand and realised what they were about. I thought her brand and cycling would be a great match. So Tracey and I sat up until whatever time it was that night, putting a proposal together for the sponsorship of a cycling team and sent it off.’

  Incredibly, they struck gold. ‘Less than two weeks later we met with Paul McCartney and the deal for 1998 was done.’

  Fuelled by his good fortune, Clark didn’t hang about: he tracked down a group of British professionals who were racing abroad, met them at a café in Cobham, and promised them a job. Three weeks later, he had a team car from Rover, six riders (including himself in the role of player/manager), a clothing sponsor and a schedule of racing, which included some brief European sorties.

  ‘We’d got back from the Tour of Slovenia, only our fourth race, and were racing in Gloucester. But we got a call that night saying that Linda had died.’

  Despite Linda McCartney’s death, the sponsorship deal remained intact. ‘We were told that Paul wanted the team to carry on as Linda’s legacy. She had always been very hands-on – there were pictures of us all with her published in the Sun – she was very taken with cycling. She said to me, “I want to see this team in the Tour de France.”’

  Clark says that although some of the momentum was lost with Linda McCartney’s death, the team’s ambitions grew. Further sponsors came on board in 1999, as did a new directeur sportif, Sean Yates. Motorola, keen to promote the advantages to families of their communication equipment, was one new sponsor.

  Clark and Yates put together a new squad of fourteen riders. Julian became general manager, running the team full-time, as the riders competed in a mixture of Premier Calendar races in Britain and a few B-list races abroad. Slowly but surely, it was all coming together.

  Yates, a stage winner in the Tour de France and one of the most highly regarded British professionals, had been nudging towards his fortieth birthday when he came out of retirement to race in the Tour of Britain for Clark and the team. ‘He did a good job for us,’ Clark recalls, ‘and brought us a lot of publicity.’

  I knew Yates well. He was one of the first riders I interviewed. He could be monosyllabic and blunt, but we got on well enough and became friendly. For the final phase of his career I ghosted a Yates column. When he retired, he invited me to his house on the edge of Ashdown Forest for dinner, opening a choice bottle of wine as we talked across the dining table. His knowledge of the races and riders was detailed and analytical, his view of racing pragmatic and unromantic. When that
seam of conversation ran dry we would talk about gardening, his other great passion.

  Occasionally he would be more animated. In the uncertain atmosphere that followed the Festina Affair, relations between us became more awkward. For one of the columns, I asked him for his perspective on doping. After what had happened, would he want his kids to go into bike racing? I asked.

  Yates quickly grew exasperated. ‘I’m sick of this shit,’ he blurted. ‘We’re all just trying to do our jobs.’

  By British standards, Yates was a high achiever, with veteran status in the European peloton, a reputation for brutal self-criticism and some good connections. In the final few years of his career, he had ridden for the Motorola team alongside a youthful Lance Armstrong. On the European circuit, they were often room-mates. Yates had shown the young Texan the ropes, staved off his bouts of homesickness, calmed him down when he got hot-headed and developed his tactical awareness.

  Little by little, Yates rounded the rough edges off the redneck, giving him a new understanding of European etiquette. They became so close that Lance even came to stay at Yates’ house in Forest Row, training with the Englishman back and forth on the climbs through Ashdown Forest.

  With Yates on board, it all seemed to be coming together. Julian began dreaming of European success.

  ‘The whole ethos was that we were the “Clean Machine”. There were the vegetarian foods, we were eco-friendly – these guys can win on a lettuce, that kind of thing. McCartney had even written a song, “Clean Machine”, for our website.’