Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar - David Millar

You say the word ‘Tour de France’ to someone and the chances are that their minds won’t be drawn to the endurance, resilience and glory attached to cycling’s blue riband event; they will instead think of people like Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador and Floyd Landis.  Drug Cheats.  There is no sport in the world that is more associated or blighted by the scourge of doping than professional road cycling, and it has brought the sport to its knees many occasions.  Heroes have been cut down and records rewritten as champion after champion has been revealed to have been under the influence of performance enhancing narcotics.  We now appear to have reached the other side of the tunnel, but the stain will never truly be removed.

One such man caught out was the British cyclist David Millar.  Before Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome announced Britain as one of road cycling’s superpowers, Millar was the golden boy of UK cycling.  A Tour De France stage winner and a World Road Race Champion, he seemed destined for Olympic glory and maybe even to be Britain’s first ever Tour de France winner.  That was until in 2004 when he was arrested, admitted to taking EPO – a blood boosting drug – and was banned for two years. Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar is his story.

I have said before that I am not usually one for memoirs.  I generally find them self-serving attempts to justify the author’s actions which rarely offer any kind of genuinely interesting insight.  There are a few exceptions to this, and this book is definitely one of them.  Racing Through the Dark is an honest and sometimes harrowing tale of how the youthful idealism of a young up-coming cyclist can be eroded by the dark under-belly of a sport rotten to the core and in doing so asks some very real questions about how we treat dopers in modern sport.

David Millar is that rarest of beings: a drug cheat who came clean (admittedly while under arrest) and who did not spend years lying to the authorities and the world (see Armstrong, Landis etc).  The book is brutally honest – a truly introspective look into the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of doping.  He does not seek to excuse, merely to explain.  The book takes us from his early years of broken family and infatuation with the sport of cycling, through his amateur and professional career up to 2011 which was when the book was published.  Millar starts as a torch-bearer of the ‘clean cyclists’; someone who refused to dope even while nearly everyone else around him was, yet eventually he succumbed.  It is profoundly distressing to see such a man broken by the pressures and forces us to question what we would have done?  If the playing field is so tilted and your career depends on success, can you really justify not doping?  As he says: “If the riders, governing bodies, teams, race organisers and media weren't doing anything about it, then what the hell could I, a 20-year-old neo-pro from Scotland, do about it?”

Millar’s honest writing style makes this sometimes quite a hard book to read.  It is not particularly pleasant to see such a man fall in so ignominious a way – yet it is the only way that this book could function; no one wants to read a flattering account of a drug cheat.  So many memoirs are so heavily ghost-written that they contain little-to-no insight, or are so rose-tinted as to be completely opaque: not so this. 

Something that I found myself contemplating while reading the book was about the very system of punishment.  The reason for giving bans for doping is threefold: to deter would-be dopers by showing that their actions have consequences, to take them out of the sport so that clean riders have a fair shot, and to re-habilitate them back into the sport.  In this way it is much like the criminal justice system itself, yet the attitude pervasive in British sport in particular is very much a ‘throw away the key’ mentality.  What Millar represents in this book is a man for whom the system has – eventually – worked; a man reformed through a no-nonsense attitude in his national federation and through the humiliation of being caught and the consequences for his career.  It made me question my own ‘throw away the key’ attitude as well, and a book that makes me question my own beliefs in any way is certainly something worth reading.

This book may now be a little old, but it is still worth a read.   It tails off a little towards the end in his redemption arc, but that is the harshest criticism that I can give it.  Cycling fans in particular will love it, but the story of a flawed, fallen hero is so universal as to make it suitable to anyone.  Much like Millar’s career, it is not always easy but thoroughly worth it in the end.

7.5/10

Favourite Quotes

“The past is as important as the future, but we only live in the here and now.”

“The manner in which one loses the battle can sometimes outshine the victory.”

“What an idiot I'd been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.”