From The Sunday Times
June 28, 2009
In the shadow of Mont Ventoux
"Soon we were on the flat again and heading for Barcelona. Again I conserved my energy and waited for the Pyrenees. Before that, though, we had the stage which finished at the top of Mont Ventoux, the Giant of Provence. This is a great mountain stuck out in the middle of nowhere and bleached white by the sun. It is like another world up there among the bare rocks and the glaring sun" — Tommy Simpson: Cycling Is My Life
A guy walks into a restaurant with his sister for lunch and there are eight blondes sitting at a table. Sounds like the opening line from a joke, right? But what if the guy was David Millar? And what if the restaurant was in Putney? And what if his sister, Frances, happened to know one of the blondes: “Hey! Is that Nicole?” And what if Nicole and her brother started dating? And what if everything in his disastrously crumbling world suddenly turned good? They’d make it into a film, right? They’d call it The Fabulous Destiny of David Millar. It would be sad and moving and yet strangely uplifting. And nobody would believe it.
Scene 1: exterior, mountainside, daytime
The month is July 1967. The 13th stage of the Tour de France has taken the riders to the summit of Mont Ventoux. In grainy black-and-white images, the camera follows the Englishman Tommy Simpson as he battles to reach the summit. He is weaving drunkenly across the road.
•
Millar (voiceover)
“I have been a professional road racer since I was 19. At 32 I am now older than Tommy Simpson was when he died. He was in his 30th year when he collapsed 1km from the summit of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. There is a memorial to him on that spot, and every time I pass it I am in the habit of doffing what in my younger days was a cloth cap, but has since become a helmet, to his memory. It is a memory I hold closer than most, because he is a person I can relate to more than most.”
Simpson fights with every breath but can go no further. Two helpers prise his fingers from the handlebars and he slumps, exhausted, on the roadside. A doctor arrives and administers the kiss of life but the champion is fading. There is nothing to be done.
Millar (voiceover)
Tommy Simpson and I share many traits and have followed similar paths. I, like him, immersed myself completely in a world that was very foreign to me in the pursuit of a dream. As with Tommy, that dream became life-consuming; as with Tommy, it ended up with my doping. But I have survived where Tommy didn’t.
Scene 2: exterior, Monaco, daytime
The month is May, 2005. Millar is sitting on the sunny terrace of a beachside restaurant at the Monaco Grand Prix, drinking beer with mates. Ten months have passed since he was exposed as a drugs cheat; 10 months of binge-drinking and wallowing in self-pity as he comes to terms with a two-year suspension, the loss of his Biarritz apartment and an £800,000 fine for tax avoidance.
This is the question.
Why me?
Day after day. The beer soothing his pain.
Why me?
He’s about to hit rock bottom.
Lance Armstrong and Eddy Merckx are sitting at a nearby table. It is Merckx’s 60th birthday and Armstrong has invited the legend to lunch. Millar spots them and wanders over but is absolutely blitzed. An hour later, he receives a frantic phone call from his sister. “I’ve just had a call from Lance,” she says. “He said, ‘Hey! What’s going on with your brother?’” “It’s nothing, Frances,” Millar assures her. “Just too many beers.” But when Millar flies back to London she’s hysterical: “Please, David! You’re a mess. You can’t go on like this!” She is the one person in the world he cannot bear to hurt.
A month later he signs an Individual Voluntary Agreement (IVA) and makes the first payment on his tax liabilities. Then David Brailsford invites him to Manchester and encourages him to start training again. Frances is thrilled and suggests lunch at Rockets, a restaurant in Putney. . .
“Your luck’s in, David,” she grins. “A table full of blondes.” “Very funny, Frances,” he replied, moodily.
“Oh my God!” she said. “I know one of them.” That was the moment everything changed. Nicole Downing lived in Henley and worked for a public relations firm. She had never heard of David Millar, the disgraced cyclist, but liked him the moment they were introduced and they have been inseparable since. “I’m at a good place with my life, a happy place, but there was a point when I didn’t think this would happen,” says Millar.
“What would happen?” I ask. “Having a healthy existence, living a real and proper life. We’re getting married, we’re going to have kids, a family hopefully and . . . consistency. A huge amount of that was meeting Nicole and the sort of person she is. She has been really healthy for me.”
WE MEET on a warm Thursday afternoon at his beautiful rented home on the outskirts of Girona. The last payment of his IVA was completed last month and for the first time since his arrest in 2004, Millar has passed what he calls “zero” and is officially solvent again. But not for long. “I have a huge f***ing tax bill to pay here \ this month,” he smiles.
Physically, he is also feeling chipper and a season that started disastrously with a broken collarbone in March has begun to bloom recently with a ninth-place finish in the mountainous Criterium du Dauphine in France. Today, he travels to Abergavenny for the British national championships. On Wednesday he arrives in Monaco for his seventh start in the Tour, where the highlight is the return to Mont Ventoux.
“I’m excited and confident and relaxed, which I haven’t been in a long time before a Tour de France,” he says. “Coming out of the Dauphine the way I did and just feeling as sure as I am in myself, I’m actually looking forward to the whole three weeks and I’m pretty sure I can get something out of it like a win, which would be bloody nice.”
I throw him a copy of Cycling Is My Life, the recently republished memoirs of Simpson (with a superb introduction by Millar). He scans the image of Simpson on the cover — a portrait of suffering on some desolate Alpine climb — and shakes his head. “I’ve always had an attraction to tragic figures,” he says. “I’ve always liked the guys who were geniuses at sport and drifted into oblivion. I didn’t know much about Tommy Simpson until I read \William Fotheringham’s biography and the thing that struck me was how hard the life was and how little gain there was from it, apart from the personal satisfaction. I mean you win a Classic now and you are almost set for the rest of your career, whereas for him it was always the next Classic. They had to keep racing. And none of it was easily earned.”
“Cycling really was his life,” I suggest.
“Yeah,” he concurs.
“Is it your life?”
“Yeah, it is now. It took me a while to accept that it was but I love it and relish it now. I relish the opportunity I have to do this and am brutally aware that I’ve only got so much time left until it is over. I will be very, very lucky to find anything in my life that I take as much joy and monetary gain from.”
“Does that worry or scare you at all?”
“No, because I’m relishing this and know how lucky I am to have what I have, which I wasn’t before. I had no idea before. I was clueless. I think a lot of my peers still don’t and that’s been one of the positive things about everything that’s happened to me.”
“When did you discover that?”
“After being banned from racing and losing everything financially and realising I derive so much pleasure from just riding the bike. That was where I got right back to basics and remembered why I did it all in the first place. I didn’t go to university or art college because I loved racing so much. It was my life. It was nice to get that purity back.”
I tell Millar that purity is not a word we associate with professional cycling, adding: “How do you expect me, as a fan, given all of the drug busts and scandals, to cheer for the sport?”
He answers: “You’ve got to pick the riders and pick carefully and that’s one of the reasons why a few teams now offer this independent programme, like we do, to give fans a reason to believe. We don’t have the right to be believed unless we can prove it. We have to be very proactive and go out and sell ourselves as clean for the next five or 10 years. At the moment, we are in no position to expect to be feted, which is sad because there are a lot of young guys out there who deserve to be feted who have these black clouds over them from a previous generation. But it’s hard when you keep getting let down, that’s the problem.
“One of the reasons doping has always been such a huge problem in cycling is because it does make such a huge difference. It’s one of the few sports where doping gives you a clear advantage because it is so physically demanding, it’s not like football or golf where the difference is negligible . . . for us it is huge.”
One of the criticisms levelled at Millar is that he can’t do what he did when he was doping. I ask him whether he finds that difficult. “Yes and no,” he says. “I still think one of my greatest achievements was winning that time trial in the Vuelta \ when I came back from my ban. That was as good as I ever was when I doped. It was my first time
trial win in a grand Tour. But a part of me does know that it’s never going to be as easy as it was when I took EPO. I have to work much harder now and get everything just right and it has taken me a while to just relax and not try so hard. That’s been part of my problem the last couple of years — thinking I had to prove to everybody that I could do what I used to do, only without drugs. And working so hard that I was pummelling myself and not being able to do it.”
“You are now older than Simpson was when he died,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“In the book’s introduction, you write about the anger you felt before the 13th stage of the 2007 Tour, when there was no commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Simpson’s death. ‘There was not even a mention of his legacy’, you wrote. ‘It was as if Tommy had never lived, let alone died’.”
“Yeah,” says Millar. “I mean, Bradley, bless him, didn’t even know it was the anniversary of Simpson’s death. I think that sums up where we are in many ways. The powers that be haven’t understood that you can’t just scrub it all under the carpet and move on. They’ve got to accept the guilt and remember it for us to learn. If we forget about these guys it’s going to happen all over again 10 or 15 years from now. Nobody ever mentions Chava Jimenez and that cracks me! He was another super-talented guy who ended up doing a lot of drugs and died from cocaine use in hospital. And the fact that can happen to two of the greatest climbers this sport has known within a couple of years means there is something very wrong.”
“Okay, so you’re angry but it doesn’t seem to have registered with the UCI,” I say.
“That’s what’s scary in a way,” he says. “You have got to empathise with the guys that died and if you can’t we’re in big trouble. And that’s why we are in big trouble.”
Nicole arrives back after a long spin on her mountain bike. She too is preparing for Ventoux and will join Frances, her father, Nigel, and 9,000 amateurs in the Etape — a replica of the 172km 20th stage — on July 20. Six days later, she will return and cheer her fiancé next to the Simpson memorial.
“That’s a nice line in the introduction about doffing your cap at the memorial,” I observe. “Do you remember the first time you saw it?”
“Yeah, I think it was 1999 during the time trial in the Dauphine,” he says. “I was going so f***ing slow I couldn’t miss it. I made sure to keep my cap on and then took it off as I passed. I’ve tried to do it every time since. It was nice a couple of years ago. Me and Bradley both did it. I told him to take his helmet off and we rode by, side by side.”
June 28, 2009
In the shadow of Mont Ventoux
"Soon we were on the flat again and heading for Barcelona. Again I conserved my energy and waited for the Pyrenees. Before that, though, we had the stage which finished at the top of Mont Ventoux, the Giant of Provence. This is a great mountain stuck out in the middle of nowhere and bleached white by the sun. It is like another world up there among the bare rocks and the glaring sun" — Tommy Simpson: Cycling Is My Life
A guy walks into a restaurant with his sister for lunch and there are eight blondes sitting at a table. Sounds like the opening line from a joke, right? But what if the guy was David Millar? And what if the restaurant was in Putney? And what if his sister, Frances, happened to know one of the blondes: “Hey! Is that Nicole?” And what if Nicole and her brother started dating? And what if everything in his disastrously crumbling world suddenly turned good? They’d make it into a film, right? They’d call it The Fabulous Destiny of David Millar. It would be sad and moving and yet strangely uplifting. And nobody would believe it.
Scene 1: exterior, mountainside, daytime
The month is July 1967. The 13th stage of the Tour de France has taken the riders to the summit of Mont Ventoux. In grainy black-and-white images, the camera follows the Englishman Tommy Simpson as he battles to reach the summit. He is weaving drunkenly across the road.
•
Millar (voiceover)
“I have been a professional road racer since I was 19. At 32 I am now older than Tommy Simpson was when he died. He was in his 30th year when he collapsed 1km from the summit of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. There is a memorial to him on that spot, and every time I pass it I am in the habit of doffing what in my younger days was a cloth cap, but has since become a helmet, to his memory. It is a memory I hold closer than most, because he is a person I can relate to more than most.”
Simpson fights with every breath but can go no further. Two helpers prise his fingers from the handlebars and he slumps, exhausted, on the roadside. A doctor arrives and administers the kiss of life but the champion is fading. There is nothing to be done.
Millar (voiceover)
Tommy Simpson and I share many traits and have followed similar paths. I, like him, immersed myself completely in a world that was very foreign to me in the pursuit of a dream. As with Tommy, that dream became life-consuming; as with Tommy, it ended up with my doping. But I have survived where Tommy didn’t.
Scene 2: exterior, Monaco, daytime
The month is May, 2005. Millar is sitting on the sunny terrace of a beachside restaurant at the Monaco Grand Prix, drinking beer with mates. Ten months have passed since he was exposed as a drugs cheat; 10 months of binge-drinking and wallowing in self-pity as he comes to terms with a two-year suspension, the loss of his Biarritz apartment and an £800,000 fine for tax avoidance.
This is the question.
Why me?
Day after day. The beer soothing his pain.
Why me?
He’s about to hit rock bottom.
Lance Armstrong and Eddy Merckx are sitting at a nearby table. It is Merckx’s 60th birthday and Armstrong has invited the legend to lunch. Millar spots them and wanders over but is absolutely blitzed. An hour later, he receives a frantic phone call from his sister. “I’ve just had a call from Lance,” she says. “He said, ‘Hey! What’s going on with your brother?’” “It’s nothing, Frances,” Millar assures her. “Just too many beers.” But when Millar flies back to London she’s hysterical: “Please, David! You’re a mess. You can’t go on like this!” She is the one person in the world he cannot bear to hurt.
A month later he signs an Individual Voluntary Agreement (IVA) and makes the first payment on his tax liabilities. Then David Brailsford invites him to Manchester and encourages him to start training again. Frances is thrilled and suggests lunch at Rockets, a restaurant in Putney. . .
“Your luck’s in, David,” she grins. “A table full of blondes.” “Very funny, Frances,” he replied, moodily.
“Oh my God!” she said. “I know one of them.” That was the moment everything changed. Nicole Downing lived in Henley and worked for a public relations firm. She had never heard of David Millar, the disgraced cyclist, but liked him the moment they were introduced and they have been inseparable since. “I’m at a good place with my life, a happy place, but there was a point when I didn’t think this would happen,” says Millar.
“What would happen?” I ask. “Having a healthy existence, living a real and proper life. We’re getting married, we’re going to have kids, a family hopefully and . . . consistency. A huge amount of that was meeting Nicole and the sort of person she is. She has been really healthy for me.”
WE MEET on a warm Thursday afternoon at his beautiful rented home on the outskirts of Girona. The last payment of his IVA was completed last month and for the first time since his arrest in 2004, Millar has passed what he calls “zero” and is officially solvent again. But not for long. “I have a huge f***ing tax bill to pay here \ this month,” he smiles.
Physically, he is also feeling chipper and a season that started disastrously with a broken collarbone in March has begun to bloom recently with a ninth-place finish in the mountainous Criterium du Dauphine in France. Today, he travels to Abergavenny for the British national championships. On Wednesday he arrives in Monaco for his seventh start in the Tour, where the highlight is the return to Mont Ventoux.
“I’m excited and confident and relaxed, which I haven’t been in a long time before a Tour de France,” he says. “Coming out of the Dauphine the way I did and just feeling as sure as I am in myself, I’m actually looking forward to the whole three weeks and I’m pretty sure I can get something out of it like a win, which would be bloody nice.”
I throw him a copy of Cycling Is My Life, the recently republished memoirs of Simpson (with a superb introduction by Millar). He scans the image of Simpson on the cover — a portrait of suffering on some desolate Alpine climb — and shakes his head. “I’ve always had an attraction to tragic figures,” he says. “I’ve always liked the guys who were geniuses at sport and drifted into oblivion. I didn’t know much about Tommy Simpson until I read \William Fotheringham’s biography and the thing that struck me was how hard the life was and how little gain there was from it, apart from the personal satisfaction. I mean you win a Classic now and you are almost set for the rest of your career, whereas for him it was always the next Classic. They had to keep racing. And none of it was easily earned.”
“Cycling really was his life,” I suggest.
“Yeah,” he concurs.
“Is it your life?”
“Yeah, it is now. It took me a while to accept that it was but I love it and relish it now. I relish the opportunity I have to do this and am brutally aware that I’ve only got so much time left until it is over. I will be very, very lucky to find anything in my life that I take as much joy and monetary gain from.”
“Does that worry or scare you at all?”
“No, because I’m relishing this and know how lucky I am to have what I have, which I wasn’t before. I had no idea before. I was clueless. I think a lot of my peers still don’t and that’s been one of the positive things about everything that’s happened to me.”
“When did you discover that?”
“After being banned from racing and losing everything financially and realising I derive so much pleasure from just riding the bike. That was where I got right back to basics and remembered why I did it all in the first place. I didn’t go to university or art college because I loved racing so much. It was my life. It was nice to get that purity back.”
I tell Millar that purity is not a word we associate with professional cycling, adding: “How do you expect me, as a fan, given all of the drug busts and scandals, to cheer for the sport?”
He answers: “You’ve got to pick the riders and pick carefully and that’s one of the reasons why a few teams now offer this independent programme, like we do, to give fans a reason to believe. We don’t have the right to be believed unless we can prove it. We have to be very proactive and go out and sell ourselves as clean for the next five or 10 years. At the moment, we are in no position to expect to be feted, which is sad because there are a lot of young guys out there who deserve to be feted who have these black clouds over them from a previous generation. But it’s hard when you keep getting let down, that’s the problem.
“One of the reasons doping has always been such a huge problem in cycling is because it does make such a huge difference. It’s one of the few sports where doping gives you a clear advantage because it is so physically demanding, it’s not like football or golf where the difference is negligible . . . for us it is huge.”
One of the criticisms levelled at Millar is that he can’t do what he did when he was doping. I ask him whether he finds that difficult. “Yes and no,” he says. “I still think one of my greatest achievements was winning that time trial in the Vuelta \ when I came back from my ban. That was as good as I ever was when I doped. It was my first time
trial win in a grand Tour. But a part of me does know that it’s never going to be as easy as it was when I took EPO. I have to work much harder now and get everything just right and it has taken me a while to just relax and not try so hard. That’s been part of my problem the last couple of years — thinking I had to prove to everybody that I could do what I used to do, only without drugs. And working so hard that I was pummelling myself and not being able to do it.”
“You are now older than Simpson was when he died,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“In the book’s introduction, you write about the anger you felt before the 13th stage of the 2007 Tour, when there was no commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Simpson’s death. ‘There was not even a mention of his legacy’, you wrote. ‘It was as if Tommy had never lived, let alone died’.”
“Yeah,” says Millar. “I mean, Bradley, bless him, didn’t even know it was the anniversary of Simpson’s death. I think that sums up where we are in many ways. The powers that be haven’t understood that you can’t just scrub it all under the carpet and move on. They’ve got to accept the guilt and remember it for us to learn. If we forget about these guys it’s going to happen all over again 10 or 15 years from now. Nobody ever mentions Chava Jimenez and that cracks me! He was another super-talented guy who ended up doing a lot of drugs and died from cocaine use in hospital. And the fact that can happen to two of the greatest climbers this sport has known within a couple of years means there is something very wrong.”
“Okay, so you’re angry but it doesn’t seem to have registered with the UCI,” I say.
“That’s what’s scary in a way,” he says. “You have got to empathise with the guys that died and if you can’t we’re in big trouble. And that’s why we are in big trouble.”
Nicole arrives back after a long spin on her mountain bike. She too is preparing for Ventoux and will join Frances, her father, Nigel, and 9,000 amateurs in the Etape — a replica of the 172km 20th stage — on July 20. Six days later, she will return and cheer her fiancé next to the Simpson memorial.
“That’s a nice line in the introduction about doffing your cap at the memorial,” I observe. “Do you remember the first time you saw it?”
“Yeah, I think it was 1999 during the time trial in the Dauphine,” he says. “I was going so f***ing slow I couldn’t miss it. I made sure to keep my cap on and then took it off as I passed. I’ve tried to do it every time since. It was nice a couple of years ago. Me and Bradley both did it. I told him to take his helmet off and we rode by, side by side.”
