How I Won the Yellow Jumper (16 page)

We rerecorded the interview, inserting the correct colour. I thanked him again, and entered a position of negative equity with respect to Robbie McEwen. I am still not sure I have broken even.

The following year McEwen allowed the cameras to film him having his wounds dressed. He'd fallen a few days prior to that, and had huge areas of skin missing from his thigh, hip and buttocks. It made for extraordinary, excruciating viewing, which we actually had to debate whether or not to screen; in particular the moment he stepped under the shower, and screamed, yes, screamed, as the water spilled across his open wounds. A showman, perhaps a show-off. But all the better for it.

He was also capable of moments of Napoleonic anger. I recall a deluge in Arras. It was 2004, Stage 4. This time, McEwen was indeed wearing yellow. Or as far as I could tell, for it was the kind of rain that not only blurs the image for
the TV cameras, it soaks your eyesight too, water bouncing off your head, and streaming down your nose. The team time trial that day was won with a sapping degree of inevitability by US Postal. In effect, it killed the race as a spectacle. The following morning
L'Equipe
ran a cartoon that featured two French cycling fans under dripping umbrellas watching Armstrong's blue train whizz past them. One is turning to the other, and asking, rather demoralised, ‘Yes, but do you think he'll win in 2005?'

McEwen's Lotto team had ridden a stinker. They crossed the line in disarray. With sodden, miserable expressions, they rode on into a congested run-out area. The barriers ended fairly soon after the finishing line, and the riders were almost immediately confronted with the prospect of teetering on their precious bikes through throngs of underwhelmed and very wet locals, with thighs and lungs scorched raw from the exertion. I was positioned at the sweet spot, that area defined after much deliberation, but by common consensus among my small crew, to be the most propitious place for eliciting sound bites from riders too weary to care or too naïve to get away. The run-out area is cycling's equivalent of no-man's land, neither totally public, nor restricted to the accredited members of the Tour. It's like the lanes of traffic in and around multi-storey car parks where no one is quite sure who has priority or right of way, and, if push comes to shunt, who has jurisdiction.

Sure enough, McEwen appeared in the middle distance, free-wheeling at jogging pace through a parting sea of kagools and umbrellas, with his helmet dangling loosely from his left hand. As he skimmed past me, I thrust an ITV microphone his way and muttered something approaching a formal declaration of surrender. I knew as well as he did that there was no point in talking to the proud sprinter who hated time-trialling's rigours with a passion and who had just seen his anaemic team give
up without so much as a whimper. I pointed my microphone in his direction with as much conviction as a Quaker would point a machine gun.

A thick, rain-heavy thunder cloud rumbled overhead as the miserable man slid past me with a face that reflected its greyness. I noticed a teenager in a huge yellow rain-poncho lurch forward and try to swipe his water bottle. He failed, and McEwen barely noticed. The kid wasn't alone. A couple of yards to his right, as McEwen sped past, an accomplice in a brightly decorated blue poncho also tried his luck. He was more precise and his grip on the precious plastic flask was more robust. McEwen felt the tug on his frame. Stopping abruptly, he leant over the frame of his bike and lurched towards the offender, snatching the bottle back from the Artful Dodger, who looked suitably humbled. McEwen rounded on him, castigating him in fluent French, before remounting, and, after a couple of pedal turns, noticing that his bottle cage was bent, dismounting again, and unleashing a tirade of Flemish, uncertain clearly as to the provenance of his assailant, before finally settling on the discourse-ending ‘Fucking idiot!'

I applauded him inwardly, from the comfort of my raincoat, which had been so rained on that the following morning I threw it in a bin outside the Gothic wonder of Amiens cathedral.

David Millar doesn't tend to throw things. But he does allow words to tumble out. Mercifully, now that he's reached his mid-thirties, he's started to grow out of the post-teenage phase he indulged in, in which every post-ride analysis was peppered with US-based teenisms. ‘Awesome ride, but I'm thinking, like, dude – you're well maxed out here. Freaky.' That was pretty standard fare in 2003.

So too was a bronchitic cough that used to preface each and every interview with him by the side of the road after a stage.
Collapsed in the footwell of his team bus, or bent double by the barriers just past the finish line, he would gesture to us on our arrival that he needed a second or two to compose himself, before rattling out the most terrifyingly varied sequence of rasping coughs, spitting two or three times, fake vomiting, retching and then turning towards us with eyes on stalks in anticipation of the question to come. We renamed his team ‘Coughidis'. We were funny like that.

Spluttering or not spluttering, Millar was in constant demand in those days. Young, gifted and articulate, he was sought after not just by us, who claimed him as the only Brit on the race back then, but by the Americans, too, as well as a host of other nations queuing up for a word. He was often a highly prized guest on the ‘Velo Club', a live post-race show on France Télévisions, broadcast in front of an enthusiastic audience from a huge collapsible studio erected near the finish line each day. His opinion, even then, was worth hearing.

These days, for right or wrong, David Millar is the philosopher king of the peloton. The bitter experiences behind him have left their mark, no doubt about it. But they have also knocked the petulance out of him, and made him into a thoughtful, patient correspondent. Few riders during the Tour de France will sit with me and discuss exact types of EPO, its availability, detectibility and effectiveness. Millar will.

I think back to the moment in 2004 when he took the first tentative steps towards rehabilitation. He had been summoned by magisterial order to the court rooms in Nanterre, in the west of Paris, where an investigation into his case had begun. It was two days before the start of the Tour. Millar would be playing no part. He had confessed to taking EPO and was about to begin a two-year suspension.

We had set our alarm clocks early and driven down from Liège to be there. Arriving just after the session had begun, we set up shop outside the main entrance to the courtroom,
and waited. Five hours later, we were still waiting for Millar to emerge. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went inside the building. Quickly enough I established the exact location of the room in which his hearing was taking place. It was all happening behind an anonymous door leading onto a wide, empty corridor on the fourth floor of a tall building. Every now and again, smartly dressed state functionaries would come and go from room to room. But otherwise I had the corridor to myself. There was a wooden bench outside the magistrate's office. I sat down, and within minutes I was asleep.

Some time later, I awoke. The door had opened, Millar and his lawyer were already halfway to the lift. In the seconds before I understood where I was and what was happening, I caught sight of Millar, unfamiliar and curiously young-looking in a suit, glancing back at me, white-faced. I caught him up as he was getting in the lift to go down. His lawyer held the doors open for me. We travelled down the four floors together in silence. Then, as the doors opened, Millar turned smartly on his heels and exited through a pre-arranged back door. His lawyer went outside to hold an impromptu press briefing, sparking panic in Woody, who was still a hundred metres away, on his way back from buying some sandwiches for lunch.

Millar's two years in the wilderness cost him his best years. They almost undid him. Yet his honesty has dragged him through to the other side much the better for it. He's become the archetype of what TV types cynically call ‘good value'. Millar ‘on doping'. Millar ‘on Armstrong'. Millar ‘on time-trialling'. Millar ‘on cheese/Pink Floyd/haemorrhoids'.

The last time I talked to him at any length, he was hobbling across the restaurant terrace of a Novotel somewhere near the Alps. Mechanical problems early on that day had meant he'd been dropped by the race, and had ridden solo for 160 kilometres just to avoid elimination. He had finished stone last.

France Télévisions had a new trick up their sleeves. Every evening, back at the riders' hotel, they would conduct a long interview with the ‘lanterne rouge' of the day, before bestowing upon the unfortunate rider a red jersey to symbolise his last place in the race. The riders were expected to find it all riotously funny.

We too were waiting for Millar that evening. From the far side of the terrace we watched on as the preening French reporter conducted his surely-far-too-long interview. He then rounded things off by commandeering two of the Novotel's receptionists to march out in front of the camera to present Millar with his new red jersey before forcing him to pose podium-style with a girl on either cheek. It was excruciating.

Yet by the time Millar hobbled over to where we had set up, he had not only shifted gear but language too, ditching his fluent French for his languid English. We sat down for ten minutes with him, with the camera rolling, during which time he gave us as memorable an account of the suffering of a Tour rider as I have ever heard.

Millar's travails bookended my first Tour. From his near miss in the Paris Prologue, to a filthy wet time-trial victory in Nantes, his failure and success framed the scales of emotion that the race could elicit. I was impressed. So much greater, then, was my disappointment when I learnt of his doping. It abruptly called into question the veracity of all that I had witnessed. For some time I was left uncertain of what my attitude should be towards David Millar. Instinctively I liked him, yet there was that absolutist voice in my head, which always nagged, ‘Doper!' But Millar himself has offered up over recent years such a convincing, clean version of himself that it is hard, even for his most obdurate critics, not to feel a little warmth towards his gung-ho approach, and self-awareness. Judgements harden eventually. His solo attack on Stage
1 of the 2007 Tour from London to Canterbury when he stayed away through colossal crowds in Kent was typical of the instinctive, passionate rider he was becoming. ‘Spine tingling', was how he described that particular suicidal breakaway. It was.

But it wasn't until Stage 6 of the 2009 Tour into Barcelona that I realised fully what cycling now meant for him. Part of a breakaway, which seemed doomed to be caught, Millar had decided to attack with twenty-eight kilometres remaining. With ten kilometres to race, it looked fleetingly like he might have cracked them. In fact, he held the race at bay right up until the flamme rouge, and only then was he engulfed. Afterwards I was delighted to hear him tell of his pride and pleasure in the ride, rather than his disappointment.

‘Riding into Barcelona, with a million people on the streets. Wow. It was special.'

Experts at the game, then, Millar and McEwen. They are both men with sufficient savvy to remain in firm control of their media images. But they are also men with enough character to warm to the task, and to bring the bike race into people's front rooms, for which I am forever grateful to both of them. It makes my job a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

And perhaps, thirty years from now, someone will think back to childhood summer evenings, and Phil Liggett calling home Millar and McEwen.

I was standing by the side of the pitch in Lyon. The Stade Gerland, the strangely moulded concrete and white-rendered home of Olympique Lyonnais, was slowly filling with fans. The evening had just started to turn chilly after a day spent in spring sunshine checking out Lyon. We'd had lunch in the Brasserie Georges, the converted railway station, which is now a noisy restaurant. A few hours before kick-off, I'd had a perfect coffee outside, in the company of Peter Drury. We'd watched on as songbirds, heading north again from Africa, stopped off to try and snatch biscuits from sports reporters' tables. It had been a fine day, in a fine city. I was warmly anticipating watching two good football teams tear into each other. It was the quarter-final of the Champions League. It was also 14 April 2005.

I became aware that my phone was buzzing. I looked down and saw that I'd missed a call. It was from Steve Doherty. His
flashing name on the screen puzzled me. I couldn't imagine what could possibly prompt him to call me at such a time. I normally wouldn't hear from him until much closer to the Tour. So I rang him straight back.

He picked up after one ring. ‘I've got some very bad news. Glenn Wilkinson is dead.'

I didn't know what to say. Steve elaborated.

‘He died at home. His funeral is next week. Just to let you know.'

I stared across the pitch. PSV Eindhoven players were warming up close to me. Guus Hiddink was standing sentinel, watching his charges snapping the ball around in tight groups. Dew was settling on the grass, picked out by the xenon-white wash of the floodlights. The evening was gearing up for its drama.