Racing Through the Dark: Crash. Burn. Coming Clean. Coming Back.

by David Millar

Overview

WORLD-CLASS CYCLIST, Tour de France stage winner, and time trial specialist David Millar offers a vivid portrait of his life in professional cycling—including his soul-searing detour into performance-enhancing drugs, his dramatic arrest and two-year ban, and his ultimate decision to return to the sport he loves to race clean—in this arrestingly candid memoir, which he wrote himself.

As a young Scottish expat living in Hong Kong with his father after his parents’ divorce, Millar showed early promise with mountain biking and BMX. Two wise local cyclists took him under their wings, encouraging him to concentrate on road racing. Millar proved a ready convert. Racing Through the Dark offers the winning account of his climb through the ranks—first as an amateur and then as a pro, riding for the French team Cofidis. Among his early triumphs were several stage wins in the Tour de France.

From the moment Millar turned pro, he began to see hints of the unethical measures that many— maybe most—of the other pros were taking in order to race at the very tops of their games . . . and beyond. At first, he felt that he was immune to temptation, that he could win clean. But the ugly pervasiveness of performance-enhancing drugs and the seemingly universal attitude that condoned it began to corrode his willpower. Racing Through the Dark details his eventual capitulation, his subsequent arrest and two-year ban from cycling, and his remarkable comeback as a clean cyclist who is now doing his utmost to keep performance-enhancing drugs out of the sport he so loves.

Filled with thrilling descriptions of the world’s most spectacular courses, Racing Through the Dark captures the pure joy of cycling and includes some of the most vivid accounts of racing ever written by a true insider.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501133657
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	10/24/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

World-class cyclist David Millar turned pro in 1999. A champion time trialist for team Garmin-Cervélo, he has raced in nearly every major international cycling event, including the Tour de France, Vuelta a España, and the Olympics. He lives in Girona, Spain with his wife and son.

Table of Contents

Foreword David Brailsford, CBE xi

Biarritz, 2004 1

Barcelona, 2009 4

1 My Early Years 13

2 The Mess 21

3 Flying Ball Bicycles 26

4 Chasing a Dream 40

5 "Quot?" 47

6 The Professionals 59

7 Childhood's End 71

8 Tow de Dopage 88

9 The VDB Show 97

10 19:03 Millar Time 110

11 La We en Jaune 122

12 The Fall of Dunkirk 130

13 2001: An Odyssey Begins 152

14 La Vida Dopado 158

15 My Personal Jesus 165

16 Chains and Rainbows 180

17 Game Over 192

18 Côte des Basques 202

19 Judge Dread 208

20 Shaken, Not Stirred 221

Terry Across the Mersey 233

21 Life in the High Peak 237

22 La Roue Tourne 251

23 Time Trials and Tribulations 262

July 2007 283

24 The Persuader 287

25 Keeping the Faith 309

July 2010 323

26 Dave the Brave 331

Acknowledgments 339

List of Illustrations 341

Index 343

Editorial Reviews

World-class cyclist Millar examines his tarnished quest to the top of his sport in his stunning memoir, going from an impassioned Scot amateur in Hong Kong to a highly competitive professional corrupted by drugs on the way to victory. He describes his confused youth with his divorced father, smitten by bike riding through the lush parks of Hong Kong. Whether it’s the Sydney Olympics or the Tour de France, Millar willingly shares with the reader the tortuous pressure of racing, the burning pain in the legs and lungs, and calls the competition “intense, excoriating, wonderful.” Unlike other cycling pros implicated in doping scandals, he writes candidly about Michele Ferrari, “the guru of sport doctors,” and the permissive environment surrounding performance-enhancing drugs, noting some guys pushed the existing limits. Following his humiliating arrest by French authorities, Millar surveys his win-at-all-cost attitude, teams with fellow antidrug racers Doug Ellis and Jonathan Vaughters to campaign against doping through strict adherence, and has an amazing 2006 comeback. Anyone interested in the grueling world of the men in professional cycling ought to read this candid, courageous book of Millar’s journey from regret to redemption. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Engagingly straightforward recollections of a champion athlete who succumbed to the dark side of illegal performance enhancement. Cyclist Millar was a contender for the British Olympic team when he was arrested in 2004 by French authorities as part of their investigation into the Cofidis racing team. Unlike many athletes, the author chose to cooperate and was forthright about his disgrace. While accepting responsibility for his actions, he notes a willful blindness throughout the cycling establishment--"Cofidis had fundamentally failed when it came to preventing doping"--and he tries to convey the enormous pressures faced by neophyte athletes. Millar rose quickly as a young amateur cyclist, and his passion is evident in the focus on the technical side of racing. He portrays competitive cycling as a macho, closed society under close scrutiny. However, he writes, cycling officials tolerated an insidious culture of performance boosting and "recovery" that started with obscure, quasi-legal measures. After a few physically tortuous years of high-stakes races, the use of illegal substances came to seem inevitable, though the guilt and stress destroyed the happiness he'd found in riding. After he came clean to a French judge and the British Cycling governing body, he was banned from competition for two years (and banned from the Olympics for life). His forthright tone makes his downfall seem relatable: "I had become completely removed from my sport…I wasn't an athlete anymore." He ultimately received an opportunity to redeem himself with a smaller team, Saunier Duval, making his comeback at 29 in the 2006 Tour de France, just as the event was roiled by yet another doping scandal. Such events support Millar's core argument that only candor about the seamy aspects of high-stakes athletics might allow problems like doping to be addressed. Will appeal to cycling enthusiasts and readers who seek an honest explanation of the scandals sullying the sport.

Kirkus Reviews