David Millar is one of the best cyclists Britain has ever produced. He is also an admitted drug cheat. Although a good percentage of the public assumes that every professional cyclist is a cheat, today the sport is probably cleaner than it’s ever been, and Millar has played a big part in helping it clean itself up.
This is the kind of complicated story that the media doesn’t really like very much, hence the stupid coverage of the possibility of Millar’s lifetime Olympic ban being lifted, something that he has not sought, but which has come about because of a separate legal challenge to the legality of the BOA’s policy of lifetime bans.
Millar is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful guy, and his story is fascinating. It’s a surprise to find that his early experiences of being a pro cyclist were rather less organised than one might assume. He was largely left to construct his own training programme and travel arrangements and found it difficult to get the right equipment from his then team, Cofidis.
Today, teams like Team Sky have every single element of a cyclist’s training and preparation under microscopic control, so it’s interesting to see how slapdash methods were even as recently as the 1990s.
There’s also a darker side to this laissez-faire approach, which allows the rider to do things behind the team’s back, or for the team to have plausible deniability if a rider gets caught doping. The testing regime for cyclists is now far stricter, so the idea that a cyclist could simply disappear for a few weeks before the season for secret training is now impossible. But at the start of Millar’s career, this was the standard way to avoid testing; just turn off the mobile and keep a low profile and you were good so long as you weren’t caught red-handed.
Millar’s explanation of the subtle pressure that a team can exert on a young rider is fascinating. At no stage was there ever a conversation along the lines of “hey David, we’d like you to start using EPO”. Rather, they questioned his commitment to correct “preparation”, a loaded word that is used as a code for doping. “Have you done everything possible to prepare? Are you properly prepared?” Doping is simply seem as part of being a professional. Everyone else is doing it, so isn’t it wrong that your results should suffer? Aren’t you letting your teammates down?
Eventually, Millar succumbed not only to the vitamin injections he had previously resisted but also to the lure of outright cheating. This involved him visiting a doctor in Italy and following a regimen of EPO injections and hard training. When returning from his purdah, his performances were markedly improved.
Unlike other riders, though, his cheating did not last very long. He was arrested in Biarritz while having dinner with David Brailsford, now Performance Director of British Cycling and General Manager of Team Sky. Although this was embarrassing for Brailsford, who has a hardline anti-doping stance, he stood by Millar.
Since being caught, Millar has, unlike other exposed cheats, admitted fully what he did and become a forceful and eloquent advocate of clean cycling. Because of his doping ban, he’s not eligible to race with Team Sky or, as I mentioned above, the UK Olympic team, even though he’s now known to be clean. He accepts this, and is quick to emphasise the fortunate position he’s in as a professional cyclist. At no stage does he try to shirk responsibility, and he’s excellent on how the culture of silence about doping is so harmful to the sport in general.
Millar’s book is very well-written, insightful and paints a fascinating picture of what life is like inside a pro cycling team, and is one of the only honest accounts of doping in professional sport available. If you’re interested at all in road racing, or doping in sport more generally, I’d recommend this book unreservedly.
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