Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (36 page)

I suggest we leave the drugs until we have ordered – seared scallops with garlic butter for him, smoked salmon for me, followed by cod with Padrón peppers and chorizo for both of us – and ask him what it was that first attracted him to cycling. He says he took up mountain biking in his teens, having gone to live with his airline-pilot father in Hong Kong, but then, aged 15, road cycling began to fire his imagination.

‘I started learning about the sport, reading about it, and I was just enchanted,’ he says. ‘It seemed romantic but also tragic – people would be winning but then lose it all, or crash but fight on, break bones but get back on their bikes and try to finish. Just getting to the end was seen as an achievement in itself. It’s somehow old-fashioned, gladiatorial …’

Masochistic? ‘Absolutely – it’s all about suffering. Often the best guys are just those that can suffer longer, who don’t give up. And it’s so easy to give up, when you’re on a mountain and it’s really hurting. We go through a lot physically.’

And, so … the attraction? ‘Well, they say it’s like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer – when you stop it feels great.’

He describes a race in Switzerland in which 200 riders started but only 15 finished: ‘The course went up a mountain, then down the other side to the finish, and it started raining, then snowing. On the descent it was so cold my fingers couldn’t work the brakes and guys were
crashing off at all the corners. When I crossed the line, I was hypothermic and started having full body convulsions.’ I nod sympathetically, my mouth full of rich smoked salmon.

Millar, 34, is wearing a charcoal-grey Paul Smith jacket, funky thick- rimmed glasses, slicked back hair and a deep tan. When he began to become known in cycling, French newspapers nicknamed him ‘le Dandy’ – ‘I hated that!’ he protests – but he still looks more like someone who works in graphic design, fashion or film. The tan comes from living and training in Girona, Spain, but he is in London for the launch of his autobiography,
Racing Through the Dark
, the pages of which drip with visceral descriptions of the agonies of cycling.

In it Millar describes how, having decided to give himself two years to see if he could make it as cyclist, he moved to France – alone, aged 19 and unable to speak French – to join an amateur team. If unsuccessful, he would return to the UK to go to art college, but it soon became apparent that suffering was something for which Millar had a prodigious talent. His amateur performances were so strong that five professional teams tried to sign him, he went on to win a string of races, then in 2000, on the first day of his first Tour de France, he won the stage and ended up in the leader’s yellow jersey. But behind the scenes, the dream was turning nasty: on the eve of his first pro race, a rider he was sharing a room with started discussing how the team was asking him to dope for the race. Shocked, and with no one to turn to for advice, Millar called his mum back in England.

‘It was heartbreaking. This was what I’d always dreamed about and suddenly my eyes were opened. I made the decision quickly that I wouldn’t dope, that I would stand by my own value system, but you’re in this weird situation because you can’t really tell anyone. Who would I tell – my team boss? They don’t care; they know what’s going on. The sport’s governing body? They know what’s going on. I didn’t have any friends, so I called my mum.’

The fact that cyclists have taken drugs is hardly news – but Millar’s book reveals the jaw-dropping scale of the abuse. On his second race he noticed that other riders had their own little medical bags with ampoules and syringes and would keep disappearing off to the bathroom. Deliveries of ice would turn up at odd hours to protect supplies of erythropoietin, or EPO, which boosts red blood cells. One rider fell
from his bike, fracturing his wrists, but was using so many drugs that he was able to carry on for another 200km, and finish in the top 10. So was anyone not on drugs? ‘There were clean riders but the real question is, “How many clean guys were winning?” And the answer to that is very, very few.’

Amazingly, Millar did manage to win some races and was promoted to team leader, but more often he was congratulated at the finish line for being ‘the first clean one back’. ‘At first I’d be pleased, take it as a compliment, but then it kept happening. It chips away at you, there’s this gradual degradation of your ethical standards. I felt like it was me against everyone else, and eventually I started to question why I was fighting so hard. I thought, “All I am is a professional cyclist – why am I being so stubborn when nobody cares?” ’

His fall from grace came, he says, during the 2001 Tour. Injured and exhausted, he had abandoned the race on the mountainous stage to Alpe d’Huez, wracked with guilt about letting down his team. That night an older rider and a manager came to his room and suggested that he might like to ‘prepare’ properly for the next big event, the codeword for doping. Had they been waiting for his weakest hour?

‘Well, I think they had been waiting for the right time but here’s the thing: I think they thought they were helping me. In some weird way I think they thought, “Let’s start making David’s life easier, let’s stop him traumatizing himself all the time by trying so hard.” I think they wanted to put me out of my misery.’

Our cod arrives – plus Millar’s side order of chips and a second bottle of wine – as he tells me about the effects of EPO, taken for a few weeks before competitions, far enough in advance that it isn’t detectable during races. In short, the drugs do work – they can ‘turn a donkey into a racehorse’, as one of his teammates put it – but they also killed any sense of satisfaction. ‘My epiphany came in that police cell: I realized I was about to lose everything and it didn’t bother me, not in the slightest. I’d come to hate cycling because I blamed it for the lie I was living.’

Banned from professional cycling for two years (criminal charges were eventually dropped) Millar severed ties with the European racing scene, and moved back to England, to a cottage in Derbyshire. On long solo rides through the Peak District, he started to enjoy riding again and, within a year, was plotting his comeback.

Aware that he would always be associated with drug-taking, he realized that he would have to become an anti-doping crusader as well as a rider, proving with his results that it was possible to win clean. Some critics found this conversion rather too convenient, his new-found zeal hypocritical and his excuses self-pitying. After all, he hadn’t voluntarily owned up to his misdemeanours but been caught.

To the casual observer, fighting drug abuse in cycling might seem a lost cause. This year’s Tour starts amid yet more scandals. Lance Armstrong, a seven-time Tour winner and still the world’s most famous cyclist, is facing a doping investigation by the US Food and Drug Administration, and has been denounced by several former teammates. Meanwhile Alberto Contador, winner of last year’s Tour and favourite for this year’s, is the subject of a legal battle over a positive drug test.

Perhaps it’s inevitable in a sport that demands such super-human efforts that there will always be temptation. Speaking of which, would he like a pudding? Some dessert wine? Yes and yes – gooseberry crème brûlée and a glass of Sauternes for him, Eton Mess and Muscat for me. The car arrives to pick him up – it is 3.30pm – but he shoos it away, saying we need more time.

So is there any hope? What Millar says next is perhaps the most shocking thing about the entire story: ‘Today ours is the cleanest of all the endurance sports.’ I almost choke on my meringue. Really? ‘You can go into the sport now as a young rider and never encounter doping, never see a syringe … Of course we still have the anomalous cheaters you get in any walk of life but they are a minority – for a long time they were the majority.’

How has this come about? Is it the result of technological advances in testing or various campaigns by the World Anti-Doping Agency, on whose committee Millar sits? ‘To be brutally honest, it’s simple economics. If they want to come into cycling, sponsors need to know the team they are funding is clean, otherwise the risk is just too great.’ For years, sponsors would come in for a few years, get burnt by a scandal and pull out. Today, at least three teams – Garmin-Slipstream (which Millar played a key role in setting up), Sky and HTC-Highroad – make being clean a key part of their image. They ensure their riders deliver on that promise by constant blood-profiling and by providing support for young riders.

And so to the big question: is it now possible to win the Tour de
France clean? ‘Yes, I think it is, but that’s a very recent development.’ How recent exactly? Even after a two-hour, two-bottle lunch, Millar spots the bear-trap. ‘Well, I wouldn’t like to put an exact year on it …’ he says, smiling.

Does he regret, I wonder, not being born a few years later, into a clean sport and now that, instead of having to move to France and fend for themselves, young British riders have perhaps the world’s best national development programme? In some ways I would love nothing more than to be 18 now, going straight into the British Olympic programme, winning medals on the track, then moving to on the road. But [then] I’d have been just another pro-athlete – well-off, successful, fêted and egotistical … Having lost it all, I understand how fortunate I am.’

In the five years since his comeback Millar has won stages of the Vuelta and the Giro (Spain and Italy’s equivalent of the Tour), and become the only Briton to wear the leader’s jersey in all three. But perhaps a greater achievement is that rather than being shunned for breaking the previous generation’s
omertà
on drug use, he has emerged as an unofficial spokesman for the professional
peloton
, the eloquent voice of experience. When Belgian rider Wouter Weylandt died in a high-speed fall in this year’s Giro, it was to Millar that the
peloton
turned, and he later met race organizers to discuss safety. ‘Obviously,
the circumstances were horrible, but it was one of the proudest moments of my career.’

The car is back, and this time Millar has to go. We say our goodbyes and, as I sit in the now empty restaurant, I think how differently it could have turned out. Floyd Landis, stripped of his 2006 Tour win after testing positive, protested his innocence for four years and has ended up discredited. Star cyclists Marco Pantani and Frank Vandenbroucke moved on from performance-enhancing drugs to recreational ones and both were dead before the age of 35.

It could have gone that way for Millar too but instead he will be starting the Tour as a pivotal figure in the sport, and even stands a chance of taking the yellow jersey after the time trial on day two. Then the rather long bill arrives. I just hope our lunch hasn’t scuppered his chances.

5 OCTOBER 1996

Over oysters and sea bass, the
FT
learns about one of Europe’s most controversial public figures, the former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

By Lucy Kellaway

Dear Mr Attali, I would quite understand if you had no wish to have lunch with the
Financial Times
. However, I should assure you that readers of the
FT Weekend
are intelligent people who are interested in articles about intellectuals …

It was a nice try, but I was barely expecting a response let alone an acceptance from Jacques Attali. After all, it was this paper’s unflattering coverage of his private jets and the quantity of Venetian marble in the headquarters of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development that cost him his job as president of that bank three years ago.

Yet barely had I sent the letter than I received a fax saying that Attali would be willing to have lunch, so long as I came to Paris. London, he explained, was not his favourite place.

It was a beautiful autumn day as I strolled along the Champs-Elysées on my way to Chez Edgar. Inside, the restaurant was dark red; traditional. In halting French I told the fat madame at the door that a table was booked for two in the name of Attali. ‘Jacques Attali?’ she said, her face expressing admiration, awe.

A little late, Attali hurried in, hair swept back, looking pleasantly
scruffy, a sprinkling of dandruff on the shoulder. ‘Champagne?’ he asked. That would be lovely, I replied.

Attali surveyed the busy surroundings and greeted a couple of friends. ‘Actually I am, in a certain sense, the origin of the success of this place,’ he said, his accent heavy and his diction idiosyncratic.

‘I’m sure you remember the
Rainbow Warrior
saga,’ he continued. ‘The minister of defence was a very close friend of mine – he had to quit. I was not happy about it. I wanted to say we are still very good friends.’ So Attali, who was then adviser to President Mitterrand, phoned Chez Edgar, a well-known haunt of journalists. He told the patron that the two of them wished to be seen eating lunch there that day. Thus, a tradition was born.

‘This is not the best cooking in Paris, but it is not very expensive. If I had invited you I would have taken you somewhere else, but this time you are inviting me.’ He picked up the menu and turned past the
prix fixe
to the à la carte, and chose oysters and sea bass. Our orders were taken by
le patron
himself, who greeted Attali like a long-lost friend, and shook my hand with considerable enthusiasm. ‘You like fish?’ he asked and suggested that I too had the sea bass. Noticing that it was FFr190 (£25), and being a cheapskate, I said I’d have the tuna, which was only FFr115.