Larry is writing a preview I am assured.
In the meantime here’s an interview with David Millar from the Guardian. Haven’t read it yet but Donald McRae is a smashing writer:
[indent]David Millar: I’d be surprised if Bradley Wiggins made Tour top 10
David Millar has a terrible hangover. On a sunlit morning in Soho, just after 10, not too many hours have passed since he collapsed on a hotel bed after the launch of his riveting book about cheating, doping and his return as a clean professional cyclist. The tall and angular Millar, wearing a dark jacket and thickly framed glasses, walks gingerly through a boutique hotel and groans.
“I got so drunk last night,” he says, his quiet voice muffled further by a dry mouth and bad head.
Millar slumps in a chair and guzzles the first of many bottles of water in an attempt to quench his raging dehydration. A desire to celebrate a book which might emerge as the best sporting read of the year is understandable. Few sportsmen even read their autobiographies, let alone write them with Millar’s gritty lucidity, but the 34-year-old loves books as well as bikes. “Just before I started writing, I read JG Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life,” Millar says. “I was enchanted by that book, by its simplicity and the way it retold such a complicated life.”
Racing Through The Dark opens with Millar in a prison cell in Biarritz, seven years ago this week, at the outset of the interrogation which exposed him forever. Now, in the midst of his second life, with his mind turning towards the start of the Tour de France on Saturday, Millar talks with raw feeling. And his weary eyes glitter when he is asked a question he does not really answer in his book. He might write about “the epiphany of confession” – but would he have admitted doping if he had not been caught?
“No, no, no,” he murmurs, the mumbled reply offset by his echoing emphasis. “It required that judicial intervention in those extreme circumstances for me to confess. It was so wrong I didn’t feel it was humanely possible to own up to it. So when they forced it out of me it was an epiphany of sorts. I thought, ‘I can do it. I can confess. I can escape this lie.’”
Millar outlines a chilling alternative to his confession and two-year ban for taking EPO (erythropoietin). “It would’ve been a descending spiral. I would have become more and more self-destructive. I would probably have ended up, a couple of years down the line, ODing. It could have gone that far. No doubt. It could’ve killed me. Look at José María Jiménez and Marco Pantani [two tainted cyclists who died with cocaine in their system]. They destroyed themselves. That could’ve been me.”
Millar succumbed to doping in a sport riddled with cheating. “I reached a point where it was easier to give in, to let go, than to keep fighting. I did not have one single person telling me to keep myself clean – and so, when it happened, I just said, ‘OK, that’s it. I’m one of them now.’”
He kept the syringes which helped him win the World Time Trial Championship in 2003 as “a poignant souvenir” of his drug-taking, hiding them away in a bookcase that was torn apart by the police. It seems strange to keep a memento of shame. “The poignancy comes from the fact it represented a certain phase in my life,” Millar says. “Subconsciously I just planted them there.”
An amateur psychologist might suggest that, deep down, Millar wanted to get caught. “It’s all amateur psychology,” he says with a shrug.
In contrast to far more reluctant confessors like Floyd Landis, Millar has voiced his guilt and a desire to help a tarnished sport escape systematic doping. “I’ve just been purging myself – and emptying it all out. I wanted to stay in this game and help the sport. What Landis has done is quite irresponsible. I think any doper who is caught has a duty to assume responsibility for speaking out against it. This should be part of the rehabilitation process. It’s only right we should be considered first as ex-dopers. We should be border-line vigilantes when it comes to education against doping.”
In the book there is a telling photograph where anger and disdain etch Lance Armstrong’s face as Millar “lectures” him for seven minutes on cycling’s dirty trade. “Lance is very powerful,” Millar says. “But I was so consumed I thought I could get through to him. In the photo you can see he’s thinking: ‘Do I have to listen to this…’”
More accusations now surround Armstrong – with the most damaging revelations apparently made by a widely respected cyclist in George Hincapie. It has been alleged that Hincapie has informed a Federal Investigation that he and Armstrong gave each other EPO. “It just keeps going,” Millar says. “It would’ve gone on forever but for the fact this Federal Investigation might give us some closure.”
The supposed Hincapie revelation, if true, would underline Armstrong’s guilt. “Mmm,” Millar nods, “that’s what it points towards. But there’s no hard evidence yet.”
Does Millar expect Armstrong to be exposed as a proven cheat? “I have no gut feel. He could get off scot-free or he could be charged with everything he’s been accused of. At least a decision will be made.”
Millar skewers Bradley Wiggins’ character unflinchingly and yet his appraisal of Armstrong is ambivalent. He acknowledges the discrepancy and admits his judgment has been compromised. “Lance always treated me with enormous respect – and care. He was one of the few people who called me up during my ban and worried about me. When I was a kid he wanted to put me on his team. He’s been like a big brother to me at some points. He’s also quite loyal – and that seems incongruous. It’s not what you expect from Armstrong and that makes it still more attractive. I’ve always thought of him as being more complex than he appears.”
Wiggins, in contrast, is flayed. Why does Millar feel such anger towards his fellow Briton? “We [the Garmin team in 2009] made him. We basically rode him into that fourth place finish in the Tour de France. It was not a one-man show. Itwas a team effort. He wouldn’t have hit the top 10 if he’d been on any other team so that’s why I was so pissed off with him. He never once gave us the respect we deserved. Mark Cavendish understands the game – Brad doesn’t. He’s a natural-born leader, Cav, whereas Brad has no leadership skills. The way Cav is with his team-mates helps make him an incredible rider.”
This interview takes place before Wiggins’s notable victory in the Critérium du Dauphiné but Millar’s caustic perspective bears repeating. Asked if Wiggins will make the top 10 in the Tour next month, after his humbling 24th place last year, Millar is unequivocal. “No. I’ll be very surprised if he made the top 10 of the Tour again. Very surprised.”
This past weekend Wiggins won again, in the British national road race championships, but enduring questions about his leadership of Team Sky remain. “They’re locked in a four year mega-buck deal with Brad,” Millar says. “It always causes background noise in the team when riders are being paid zillions and then do fuck all. It causes bad blood.”
So where does this leave Sky – especially when, earlier this year, Dave Brailsford, general manager of the team, admitted that Wiggins is not a leader? “They’re pretty fucked there. Yeah. They’re going to have to find a solution.”
Wiggins’ improved form suggests a solution might be found. Yet, after their disastrous debut, Sky also need to be much less grandiose in their ambitions. Millar, despite his closeness to Brailsford, sums up last year’s derision towards Sky.
“That was the opinion of them in the peloton. They came across as big-headed and disrespectful. They held the rest of us in disdain for our methods and they belittled us. We didn’t like that. But they had a humbling Tour and made a huge realisation that they had to fit in. They also learnt you can’t reinvent the wheel.”
Millar’s criticism is coloured by acute disappointment that he cannot ride for Sky. He could never be offered a contract from a team which makes much of its “zero tolerance” towards doping. “I would have loved [racing for Sky]. It hurts when I see that team staying in the same hotel as me, seeing people I’ve known for years. It’s my world. Those are riders I should be alongside. But I’m banned.”
Such contradictory emotions epitomise Millar’s tangled relationship with cycling. But in last month’s Giro d’Italia he proved himself a leader of the peloton. During the third stage, which saw Millar retain his lead, a Belgian cyclist, Wouter Weylandt, died after a dizzying descent ended in a grotesque crash.
Millar set the tone for the peloton’s reaction to Weyland’s death by refusing to wear the pink jersey of the race leader and by orchestrating a united reaction fusing anger with sorrow.
“The Giro is not a race I like very much. It feels like we’re treated as circus animals. And this year they went too far. It’s crazy. We’re trying to get rid of doping but they make this one of the hardest races there’s ever been.”
Millar returns to the Tour bolstered by the way he withstood such pain in the race last year. “I’ve never suffered more. I don’t know how I managed to survive it. There was so much pain. Five days after the race I went to hospital and they found three broken ribs – two were completely sheared at the back and another was cracked at the front.What the fuck? I’d been cycling with that for three weeks. That explains the fever I had two days after I broke them. I also had a groin strain and one day I couldn’t even get on the bus. It was horrible.”
Millar laughs now, the memory convincing him that a hangover is nothing. He no longer looks quite so shattered. “I’m excited about my final years in cycling,” he says. “I feel stronger than I’ve ever been – both mentally and physically. I’m racing as well as I’ve ever done. My stature in the peloton is secured. I’m respected. And so, yes, I have a good time out on the road.”[/indent]
