Full transcript: David Millar on London Real
5:35 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is David Millar, one of Britain’s most successful road cyclists, who’s competed in 12 Tours de France, winning five stages and once beating Lance Armstrong in the process in 2004. You were banned from the sport for two years after taking performance-enhancing drugs, and later returned to compete clean. You’re now a key spokesman on anti-doping and are featured in the recent documentary film Time Trial.
6:09 Brian Rose: David, welcome to London Real.
6:11 David Millar: Thank you. As you know, I got on a bike a few months ago because I got challenged to do an Ironman 70.3, and you know, for a lot of people the swim is like a big deal, but for me I found the cycling part just so challenging, and I found that it was on that static bike in the gym, pounding out the hours, or when I was, like, four or five hours and my feet were freezing when I was riding around Regents Park. I was just like, I got a new respect, I think, for cyclists, even though I probably just scratched the surface, but what can you tell people about what drives someone to be a professional cyclist, and what do people not know about it when they just watch it on TV?
6:48 David Millar: Yeah, that’s a good question, actually, because I’m it to be a pro cyclist, pro cycling, or cycling, this what isn’t something you do at school. It’s not something that schools generally endorse. You don’t have a school cycling team or into school competitions. It’s something you have to do outside of the curriculum, outside of there, the societal norms, if you like, which already paints a picture of the type of personality that pursue cycling, where they’re outliers.
7:15 They’re gonna tend to be slightly free spirits, and I think one of the reasons you get into cycling as a kid is to get away from everybody, is to have the freedom. So I’ve always found it paradoxical that these kind of individuals, these loners, they get into cycling, end up doing some races, move up quickly from the ranks of regional to national to international to world class, go to professional, but I get to professional, you’re in this hyper team environment where it’s you can’t move without being with somebody. You share rooms, is you’re on the road the whole time, the teams have strict hierarchies with organization within them, so you’ve gone from where you set off as trying to get away from everybody.
7:56 So actually the most closed sporting experience perhaps possible, and but that’s how you start, and I’ve always found that interesting. I think it paints a pretty clear picture of what you deal with when you’re doing professional cyclists. They’re often quite quirky people, and that’s just a cycle at the psychology. That’s not even going into the physiology of it all.
8:15 Brian Rose: Hmm, and what makes a great cyclist?
8:17 Brian Rose: Did you have to be willing to endure more pain than the other person? I mean, I always look at the ones that finished, and I’m like, you know, sometimes their bodies look kind of the same, and I’m just is it a mental thing? Do they go to these dark places that none of us understand?
8:35 David Millar: Yeah, it’s you have to have the genetic makeup, if you like. I think, cause it is a altering during sports, so you have the best will in the world, and I am a bit of a believer that although you have to be incredibly, you have to have this, the right mental capacity.
8:51 You’ve got to be able to have the genetic, be born with right genetics, be able to kind of have that endurance gene. Now if you’ve got that, then that’s great, but I know dozens and dozens $0.95 the people even with that genetic makeup perhaps are even walking around here or working here and they don’t know they’ve got it. So to stumble across it and then, ray makes it and then work at it, then that’s the next level. and then the next level is those people who fall in love with the work, appreciate that kind of, the dividends, it returns, and then start to challenge themselves.
9:23 And it’s always that, you challenge yourself first. Week start competing. I think start competing against yourself and compete against other people, then you start competing against yourself, and once you get to that mental level, that kind of, that realist sort of, that the upper stratosphere, you only care about compete against yourself, and it’s a journey you’re on, the training, the work loaded, the challenges you set yourself, those objectives, and they’re that, they’re the greatest athletes, the ones that only kind of are in their own sphere and challenging, pushing themselves to the very edge of what they can do and able to compartmentalize that.
9:55 And I’ve always seen that the greatest professional cyclists are incredibly rational human beings, and yet they’re doing, they’re putting themselves in as high-stress emotional situations, physically, mentally, but their ability to rationalize the situation take sums that real kind of super level, and I think that’s the same in all alpha athletes, male and female. They’re able to kind of get to that sort of, I think there’s different names for the zone. They’re kind of the flow state, right?
10:21 And that flow state is that super X-factor that the real mega athletes have.
10:26 Brian Rose: Were you able to get yourself in there, flow state?
10:29 David Millar: I could hit flow state, and it would only happen a handful of times a year. I mean, even at my peak level I could hit flow state maybe five, six times, and flow state was when everything would, you saw myself as a body, you kind of, you disappear into yourself. You’re sort of your inner monologue kind of evaporates to a certain degree.
10:50 Everything becomes one, and you’re seeing things before they happen. You become your body, map becomes perfect. You control everything you can. You’ve lost that panic. You can kind of, community or controlling everything, just fits it.
11:04 Brian Rose: It’s like this kind of state of absolute, yeah, flow. That’s obvious. A flow is there usually some exhaustion before that happens, or can you snap into it at the beginning of a ride?
11:16 David Millar: You can manage it. That’s what I mean.
11:18 You manage the exhaustion. I mean, I get it most often in time trials, which was my speciality, which was a solo kind of point-to-point racing.
11:27 Brian Rose: Is that a short distance?
11:28 David Millar: It could be between five minutes and an hour and a half, depending on the event. You could go from a 3K to a 60-kilometre time trial.
11:36 I could do both at my best, and there you could get to a point where you sort of meditation where you can have micro explosions within the event. You’re fit enough to recover from those, depending on the course. And again, it’s a, those, the goal with the time trial the very best would be to finish it, and if it was three minutes long or 90 minutes long, when you cross that finish line, five and 20, 30 meters after somebody asks you and how was easy? I could have gotten a second faster, and it’s in this, and that’s yet a complete absolute self-belief.
12:13 I go, I never liked people would finish a time trial, find out they’d lost by five seconds. I wish I didn’t. I wish somebody had told me they say, well, you did it wrong, it shouldn’t matter, you should be able to get to that finish line going, I can I’ve got a second faster, and that’s a lovely kind of place to be.
12:29 Brian Rose: Does that mean you’re in pain the entire time?
12:31 David Millar: Yeah, it’s not pain, it’s suffer semantics.
12:33 Bear with me on this one, cuz I’ve thought a lot about this. Yeah, in pro cycling, we have offered different disciplines. The peloton, where it’s a group racing, was a time trial, it’s individual, and the peloton you is you’re with other riders, and they can often dictate the pace. You’re following them, you’re having to counter-attack it’s a very dynamic style of racing. They’re not in that situation.
12:55 If you’re having a bad day, you suffer a lot because other riders are making you suffer, and you’re having to kind of do what they do, not to be out of the race, but the people at the front of the race there who are controlling that are hurting themselves. They’re kind of in control. If you’re in control of anything, you’re hurting, because you’re making that decision. If you’re not in control, you’re suffering, because it’s being put upon you. And now it says, kind of thing, that I can’t see at all.
13:20 You’re forgetting, I’m hurting myself. If you’re hurting yourself, you’re controlling it. I can stop this whenever I like. If you’re suffering, you haven’t got you can’t stop it, and that’s a very clear thing that you get in bike race. In one race you can have that you can be suffering at points, but you got to hang on, hang on, you know it’s gonna stop, and then it’s like, then you’re better, then you can go, then you’re hurting, you’re making other people suffer, and this is kind of, I always liked that, that separation, and trying to make sure I avoided suffering, because most are suffering.
13:47 You disappear into self-pity it becomes a descending spiral of kind of, why not stop? But if you’re hurting, it’s kind of, it’s much different.
13:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, you’re controlling, you. Yeah, it’s a perspective that can make all the difference. Improve, you can, you suffer when you’re alone, or does that only happen in the peloton, that experience of hurt and suffer?
14:05 David Millar: Yeah, training was a lot of suffering. Okay, I especially toward the end of my career, that so I kind of had to stop, ’cause I didn’t, I didn’t like it anymore. Right. I felt like I was suffering. I mean, I’m Ben, I’m negative descending spiral began because you had gone through that journey of, deny, I didn’t like hurting myself anymore.
14:23 Right. That was it, and I think that happens every single pro sight, because that’s why you end up stopping. It’s because you can’t do it. You look back, just if even it could be a year before, or where you were enjoyed smashing races to pieces and hurting yourself, and doing is really hard races, and most of time not winning, such professional cycling is so very, your riders at have a ten-year career, never win a race, it’s a quite a specialized sport in that respect, but yeah, I mean, that’s the moment we started to suffer in training, and that over, that overtook the amount you hurt.
14:55 Always, when it all starts to go wrong, right? It’s just not worth the training anymore. No, kind of goes like that, and that’s probably because your body is deteriorating, and also maybe your brain has gone through that entire journey. I have. I’m over this.
15:08 Yeah, I think it’s a first full mental there’s a little bit of physical, but normally can overcome it, and I used to speak this other ride aliens f***ing German guy the same generation as me, and even his tagline was kind of shut up legs, and you know as I became his sort of thing, t-shirts, because he loved suffering, and we opponent both stopped at the same time in that last year, and we both just couldn’t do it anymore, and we spoke about this in races, and I said I cannot. This other, other theory at the time, I was like, were born with, instantly, certain crept, like suffer credits, right? We’re given them finite amount, finite amount.
15:42 I was like, yen’s, I think we’ve used them up. I think they’re gone now, and he’s a, I said, as I can, I do think I’m a pro cyclist, really successful, and I born with the bigger the more successful of the bigger, the amounts you were born with, but eventually it goes, hey, I gotta go, then you gotta go, and the times don’t lie. No, so you know what’s up, get out.
16:03 Brian Rose: I want to get back to cycling I want talk about the Tour, and a lot of things, but I really wanted to have you on to maybe have a bird’s-eye perspective on dope being involved in all sports, and I know you’re very vocal about it, and you’re a unique guy because you don’t have to be one of these people that can kind of point the finger and say, I’ve never been there.
16:25 You’ve been there and done that, and something that I’m sure was something that was held for you at the time, I would argue, is one of your greatest assets right now, because we can get inside the head of an athlete that’s done it, and we can have an honest conversation, and I think most people probably became aware of this with the movie Icarus when it came out, and they saw that, wow, it’s this, you know, massive potential problem in all sports and actually that movie started off with cycling, which kind of is interesting, and for people that don’t know, watch it on Netflix, but it was, it was all about uncovering what looks to be government Russian doping scandal in the, all the Olympics across most sports, probably dating back 50, 60, 70 years, and so I was wondering before we start this conversation, what did you think of that film?
17:12 And what are some of the things we should know before we talk about this because I feel like sometimes people go into this argument really micro and say, that guy shouldn’t do this, that guy shouldn’t do this but you know, I like to even ask the question, you know, why shouldn’t be drugs, drugs be legal in sports? I mean, we’re getting the best genetics, the best trainers, the best food, the best mentality, of one day we might be gene doping. So these are the questions I have, and I wanted to get your thoughts.
17:36 David Millar: So the first question, gods Icarus I thought it’s a great fun. I thought it was I loved the production values of it as well. He started off as a sort of a fanboy vanity project, to a certain degree, and then once was a great filmmaker, he got found a story. You saw the production values just escalate from the moment that the Russian came in and those Skype calls. You could see, just like, this is gonna be amazing.
18:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I was kind of a senior amateur cyclist, and you wanted to see if he could dope and pass a test and be successful.
18:12 David Millar: Exactly. So it’s, and it’s so that’s a common story in US, and it’s a good point of reference to actually check the actual, the, what doping does, and how much does it work, does it affect you that much now the premise of that film, it turned into a bigger question about societal kind of norms, and and the validity of the Olympics and where our moral compass lies, regards to the kind of corporate nature of sports, and the responsibility that athletes are put upon at a national level to carry their nation and represent a nation, and using sports, Olympics in particular, as a propaganda machine, which, and those are much bigger questions, and so the film was very clever in that respect.
18:56 It went from one man’s quest to see if doping had that much, made that much effect. It’s a very big macro question about what is sport, what are we using it for in today’s society? So I thought that’s a very good film, and I guess it brings us on to, then, doping as a whole. I think it’s always been in sport. This is, you need to understand I think we’d be brainwashed somewhat by the IOC machine, and we’re going back into Victorian times, and kind of moral Christianity sort of about how the muscular Christianity, sorry, of the amateur ethos and taking part is more important than winning, in which is there, but I think it was lost a long time ago, and has been a kind of a very fragile facade for many years, because when we look at the Olympics and the IOC and the fact that they demand over, I think it’s a minimum of 50 million U.S. dollars for the corporate sponsorship.
19:55 I think it’s probably like 150. They have billions of cash in the bank, and yet the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is partly funded by the IOC, receives. Yes, I think if I’m up to date, I need to go upstate. It’s about 15 million US dollars a year from WADA, the other 15 million dollars, IOC will match what the world’s governments contribute to WADA. So in order to be a member of IOC and your nation able to compete at an international level, because IOC is like the United Nations of sport, your country must be affiliated to the IOC.
20:34 Your national federation for the sport. Now, your national federation for sport can’t be affiliated, see, if your country doesn’t have a national anti-doping organization, and NADO, the normally going sports were going to acronym hell. Those NADOs then have to contribute to WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is the overseer of all the NADOs. Now WADA then creates the rulebook, the code as it’s called, but to universalize the standards across the world on anti-doping.
21:04 So whether you’re a British athlete, a French and American and Belgian, a Swiss and African, you have the same rulebook regards what you’re allowed to take home. Lots take now. That only happened in the last 20 years, until 1999 when WADA was created. There wasn’t an international code. Different countries have different rules for what doping was, and different anti-doping methods.
21:25 So going back to that, the amount of funding that these and additives, the national and state organizations, can rally together across the world, is around 15 million US dollars to fund WADA, which sits above everything, which is the global police on doping. IOC then contribute. They will match what all those matters and governments can contribute, such as a total of 30 million US dollars as the annual budget for the International fight against doping.
21:53 Brian Rose: How much money?
21:54 No, that’s one athlete in Premier League football, and so this says almost by definition how important it is to them.
22:01 David Millar: Yeah, that’s how I see it. I mean, that’s a drop in their ocean, and so they’re not actually their money. They’re barely even got a mouth about it. They’re certainly not paying any money into it, and so if we look at that, the, the stage news, and you early ethical level, you see what IOC does to cities and countries with their pick, say barely leave legacies.
22:23 That recent track record is horrific. What they did in Athens, what they’ve done in Brazil and Rio. They go in, they, there’s strong words, but they pillage their kind of the local resources that exploits them, and then leave them there to rot. IOC, see, for me it’s fundamentally flawed, and we yet we look to them as being the bastion of ethics and morals, because they have the Olympic brand, which must be always greater than exactly, and that’s the top of the pyramid.
22:57 Brian Rose: Hmm, that’s the top of the pyramid. Everything else flows down from, so you can understand why everything, by time you get to the bottom, has become even more toxic. Okay, and doping has been around you said even to Victorian times.
23:11 David Millar: Yeah, I mean, I think if we look back here, there’s been, as soon as there’s any medicine, medical cocaine, alcohol, they’re even using back in the day, like strychnine, and with painkillers. So it’s been there and it’s been there for a long time, and it’s slowly, I think when we look at a professional sport today, and this is what I love, it’s the ultimate irony.
23:32 Professional cycling is now at the absolute forefront of anti-doping, because we had the biggest open problem, and we had to fix it, otherwise the sport was going to be destroyed, and it was the economics, if you like, that saved it, because sponsors were not interested in funding professional cycling teams, because it was only bad publicity. So the sport actually inherently had to fix itself in order to attract those sponsors, and he’d opening actually became a money Taizo ball entity within the sport. If your team could prove that it was clean and had a great track record, then you would attract bigger sponsors.
24:06 So as the economics that kind of saved us, and now we’ve been the guinea pigs for the latest testing methods, the EPO tests, be it the blood tests, the, we’re about systems, all these different things that have contributed, and I think today one of the biggest, apart for me, the code that was created by WADA, the international code, which then created the same place, playing field for the whole world. It’s been the ability they access the internet, which is created aware about systems that every athlete can login on, sis is kind of cloud which then tells you where you are during the day, so you can always be found for random testing. So I mean, I could talk for hours on that, because my knowledge is pretty deep, having been on the WADA Athletes Commission for four years and working with Maddow’s for years and being a doper, and as you said, I think that’s, and this is I can, excuse me, if I jump around a bit.
24:58 A lot of people talk about lifetime bans for first-time offense, which makes no sense, because we don’t have that in society at large, and the human condition, the way we learn, is by learning from mistakes, and those mistakes often generate regrets, and those regrets prevent those mistakes happening in the future. If I hadn’t been given a second chance and come back in, I won’t be able to educate people. I wouldn’t have been out of force as much change as I have done since I’d have just disappeared, and this thing would keep happening.
25:28 And so it’s one thing, I mean, don’t get me wrong, not everybody’s gonna have the same will or have the background or the culture that I have, an education to come back in, in the world to do what I’ve done, but I think I’m the greatest example of what a second chance can do and how it can help, and how a lifetime ban to athletes who are generally, it’s not there. So for that we give them kind of complete responsibility for actions, whereas, as often as we saw, was going back to Icarus, it can come from a national source and an international source. Oh, the entourage around you is so big, and the pressure so culturally huge, and expectations, societal expectations, can be overpowering on these young athletes who, when they start, and imagine pro cyclists, when they start they’re trying to ride their bike and get out.
26:14 They never think they’re going to be in the global stage and have to be injecting to fly the flag. That happens because that send drummed into them, and yet when it comes to punishing them, you only punish them. We need to be punishing the entourage around and they tried it with the IOC, as we saw in Icarus, trying to get ban Russia from the Olympics, and we sort of miss that came to you. That’s the only way you start to do it, is by kind of going up the ladder, and that’s what you’re doing in criminal law, that’s what you’re doing in civil law as well.
26:42 You try to look for the cause, not the effect. Okay, so the big thing we should see is the public is, don’t go and persecute the individual. Look at the team and the system. If you’ve done something wrong, you need to be punished, but it’s, and it’s not me. The threat of that punish, for the punishment, then has to be gauged depending on what the crime was and what you can offer to prevent it happening.
27:04 So that’s normally how you, so a drug dealer, they don’t want a person who’s just smoking it or injecting it. They want the person who gave it to you, bought it off. I don’t want that person with the person above them. No, we don’t do that in sport. Of the moment, we don’t do that, usual chamber, that chain of effects, if you like.
27:22 Yes, you should always be punished, but it should be relative to the actions, mistakes you’ve made.
27:28 Brian Rose: In the movie we saw that ultimately no one was really punished. Okay, because the IOC needs to be in bed with all these governments.
27:35 David Millar: Yes, right. So things kind of just moved on.
27:38 Yeah, exactly, because the IOC is a propaganda machine. Their government’s wants it, because it’s a feel-good to their country, to their voters, to the people that keep them in power. And I mean, I know stories of what the IOC are like when they come to cities. I mean, they demand the same kind of, they expect what heads of state expect, regards treatment by nations and governmental officials, because they are essentially a state.
28:06 Brian Rose: And what about the public that watches these events and ultimately pays for these sports and buys the tickets and you know watches the TV shows that appear.
28:16 What, why do we get so angry when someone’s cheating and doping, and yet we want the best of the best? Is this a weird way that we look at ourselves?
28:25 David Millar: Not I think, I think it’s right, and it’s what the viewer should expect from sports. Don’t give it, the essence is right. Olympic essence is right, and that’s what sport should be.
28:36 It should be people, the humans at their best, kind of, on a stage. It’s going back to that Grecian ideal of, it day to day life is quite monotonous, and we’re quite contained, and we don’t get to live those extremes of, of the human condition, and so we try and project that onto these athletes, under these sportsmen and sportswomen, going through these extreme experiences, taking themselves to this kind of this other plane, and then battling against each other. It’s a very human thing to want to watch that, because it is storytelling we build stories behind those athletes or those teams, and when they’re fighting each other, not just fighting them individually, they’re fighting this, those two stories are becoming mixed up, and it’s wonderful.
29:20 I mean, it’s great entertainment, and that’s what sport is, and entertainment at its best should make you feel something, and sport can make you feel as a viewer really something that you’re not going to get in a day-to-day life, and matters, so it’s worth fighting for.
29:36 Brian Rose: What about the testing? I mean, we watched the movie Icarus, and you know, then it opens up with some very key people saying the testing doesn’t work. We watched it pretty much almost not work.
29:48 Brian Rose: We watched, you know, Lance Armstrong, probably the most tested and lean in human history not work. How do we get our heads around these things not being effective, even with all the technology?
30:00 David Millar: So I suppose that’s a bigger question, because whether it’s a world is all away and with the advancements in technology, and you could probably always be tests if you have the right people around you. Even with the wrong people around you, in the case of Icarus, it was the testers that knew how to beat the test, which is the ultimate sure but it’s, I think we got to look further up the chain than that.
30:24 We have to get to a point where it becomes a cultural no-no. So you don’t actually have to get to the testing. If we’re relying just on the testing to kind of stop doping, then we’re being very short-sighted. You have to get to a point where the athletes do not want to take drugs, as that’s talking about whole cultural changes. You know, the societal expectations about education from a young age, about giving them the most positive entourage, as it look after them, like healthy families and villages, if to use that sort of parent tears, that they’re not in these negative spaces surrounded.
30:55 So you get actually get to the point where you can believe in it, where you’re watching the sports. It’s going to take maybe decades for us to really truly believe in all sports again. So I think we’re in the right direction, but that it’s not about a testing. You actually believe in it, because we look back on now, and the end of the 20th century, and the turn of 21st century the dark ages of elite sport, because the athletes basically had to wear tags.
31:19 They had to do this because we didn’t trust any of them, though. When he’s working with this cloud, we’re about system, they were tested, their blood tested, urine tested and because that’s because we got to the point where the actual bigger issue hasn’t been confronted yet, hasn’t been solved, that they’re still, that sporting world that we want to put on that paragon of excellence and the human condition of its best has actually been corrupted by the normal world. We need to now turn into a better world, and it’s not just testing that will do that.
31:50 Brian Rose: But then we go back to the fundamental problem, is IOC that is not a bit well? Is the IOC the problem because it oversees everything else, or is it just the amount of money that’s also involved in professional sport.
32:03 David Millar: Money is a huge thing, like everything in life. I couldn’t twist things very quickly. I feel quite bad bagging IOC so much.
32:10 Something invited to speak at a conference in Buenos Aires in a month, but like you said, I know my points are, they know your voice at all that dictates what a lot of other people do, because they look up the order, and it’s like having that, the patriarch of the family, right? You know, the patriarch of the family is a great patriarch that tends to trickle, to trickle down, if they’re a godfather, mafia bosses, and that tends to trickle down as well. So it’s like everything.
32:34 If you want to change a culture, you can have to start from the top and then set the example, lead. You know, it’s like old war stories, and all these great old stories of old, is there’s always those hero figures that lead people into things for the right reasons, the good kings, if you like, not the shadow kings and is, I need to be a good king, not a shadow king. He’s, cycling kept changing. I mean, his British Cycling changing. British Cycling has changed massively in the space of 20 years.
33:08 It’s gone from being a little cult, niche, weird sport to arguably the biggest sport in the UK, and that’s been done the right way. So that’s a new culture that’s come, that was using the Olympics to in the best possible way. They did a British team. You use all these old-fashioned values, that, and actually applied inter, and moved to science, and then they created the greatest British Olympic team in history with the cycling team. They then transferred that expertise with Sir Dave Brailsford, who led that whole team into the Tour de France changed that, and what they’ve done is actually had huge cultural ramifications in the whole sport, because they’ve proven what’s possible with science, with, by being hyper-rational, by training the athletes in new ways, by actually also looking after their mental health, also creating bigger support networks, more solid sponsors, a better business model.
34:06 And I say yeah, British Cycling has, and that’s again, we’ll go back to the sort of that trickle-down. Teams, what is now Team Sky, has had a massive trickle-down, and before that, the British Olympic cycling team had a massive trickle-down, and it’s good, given a really positive experience to what being a cyclist is in the UK now, from using those platforms in the right way.
34:28 Brian Rose: And all that will lead to less doping as well.
34:31 David Millar: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because that’s again, you’ve got the British system, which is UK anti-doping, new CAD, back to back row names.
34:38 He has a very great, it’s a, it’s one of the real flag bearers of the anti-doping national anti-doping organisations in the world, and then also I think the British culture and sports is a very healthy one when it comes to sort of cheating. Yeah, which is what it always comes down when he’s doping, but it’s actually cheating. It is again semantics, but, and I, and so cheating is pretty big deal in our sport, and I think that’s kind of been the bedrock of how it’s kind of advanced so well here, using all these modern methods, because you speak, these young kids now, I know, in their early twenties, who have gone through the programs, and they’re so far removed from dope, they just can’t even comprehend it.
35:27 It’s not, it’s a non-subject to them. That’s what I was meaning about the fact that you know, the whereabouts is the testing, it makes no difference to them, because they are so culturally removed from it, they can’t fathom it. It’s so ingrained in them that that is cheating, that it’s wrong, and the other, that all those people around them, that they know if they do it, it’s all over. They don’t need those threats, because it’s just this embedded now in that culture, which is amazing.
35:52 Brian Rose: That’s amazing. A lot of people would probably find that hard to believe, because when Lance Armstrong’s around and Tour de France, I mean, I don’t know what the statistics were, but they said if, you know, everyone had been tested the way he had been tested, it would be like number 16 would have won the race, because everyone would have been disqualified. I mean, sport was rife with it.
36:10 David Millar: Yeah, and it can change that quickly with a cultural way of looking at things.
36:13 Yeah, can, because if you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it is the cultural things. Diplomats, Americans have a locker room. If, in the locker room, is considered wrong to dope, to cheat, then that’s massive, that’s a real strong kind of preventative, kind of cultural tool, because your peers know that, kind of, that’s how it feels, and that’s how it’s felt that, when I was racing with Lance Armstrong’s racing, we were in a doping culture. They were peloton.
36:42 He kind of knew people with doping. Kind of people let it fly. It kind of, we knew the system wasn’t looking. Afterwards, we didn’t look after each other. We had a doping culture.
36:51 In people talk about England, Alton, yeah, you work, you can have such cool people would be working with this doctor. It’ll be Chinese whispers, but what a new product was kind of, who’d be on some mystery training camp, what team was all flying all of a sudden. You know, it was just that, was there kind of, and that’s how it went. Now it’s, the offices, a real anti-doping culture in that peloton. You know, there’s people, if something suspicious, they’ll flag it.
37:15 There’s no more systematic doping. If there is, and don’t get me wrong, that always will be, because it’s human nature to cheat at some level, but it’s, instead, as before it was a, if you like, an open culture, where it was a minority that didn’t. Now it’s flipped, that cemented open culture with a minority who dope, and they’re kind of outliers, whereas in the Lance Armstrong era, the non-dopers were the outliers so, this, and that’s happened in the space of 15, 20 years.
37:45 Brian Rose: That’s 15 years. I remember hearing his story, is that because he was, he was originally in the States and doing, you know, one-day races, and then we went to Tour de France, he was over there, and obviously wanted to, you know, kick ass.
37:57 David Millar: Mmm, buddy, I think he looked around his teammates and said, unless we get with this doping program, we have no chance, you guys will go home. He’s the ultimate pragmatist Lance, and Lecter, rationality. Yeah, exactly.
38:08 Super alpha athlete, and you know, you did, he rationalize the kind of the landscape, made the decision and went with it, all guns blazing, and did it better than anybody else, but it’s, and it was that and yeah, that’s, Lance was just took it to the extreme, if you like, just did it better, and because he was better.
38:28 Brian Rose: Well, what do you think people don’t understand about his story, and you know, Lance Armstrong journey, you know, from being there? I mean, you were, you know, you know what it’s like to get up every day and do that stuff to be in that culture.
38:44 I think a lot of people, they look at the story, they kind of judge, they do that but what don’t we know? How would you put it in perspective? I know you worked on, like, a dramatization of some of those events. From, yeah, you wanted to make sure you got a fair shake. Yeah, as a, well, a cyclist.
38:59 David Millar: Yeah, well, it’s pretty hard on making sure that what they did want to portray was softened down. I think what it is with Lance’s, it’s really, such, it’s such a complex character, yet he’s so simple as well. You know, there’s, you kind of want to think, this, lose head and depths, and there aren’t, then you think you know this, he’s such a strange cat, and such in this, and I think that’s what people don’t know. You can’t project what you think you know unto Lance, because it doesn’t apply.
39:32 Lance is truly, is a very exceptional human being, and then you put that exceptional human being into those exceptional circumstances, and it was a perfect storm, and I think we tried to use kind of our own experiences, or what we’ve learned, and tried to project them onto that situation at that point in time, and it’s a waste of time, because that was such a unique moment. The unique moments in sports, with a unique sport, the unique human being, cuz, I do little answer is unique, you know. It’s for better and worse.
40:06 Brian Rose: How so?
40:07 David Millar: It’s just, yeah, because I normally I’m quite good at analyzing people, and I find it very hard to analyze Lance. It’s kind of like blur on him. For me, I don’t understand how, what that is. It’s a, yeah, I can’t quite get my finger on lots.
40:24 It’s one of the very few people in the world that, that is like that for me, and that’s that kind of throws me a bit, like on,
40:31 Brian Rose: I think you said in some ways is very simple. You look at him, and it’s like, I want to win at all costs, and then we’ll win, and I’m gonna keep winning, and it’s about me winning. Yeah, but then, like you said, it can’t be that simple. There’s more complexity there.
40:45 David Millar: Yeah, I mean, he’s, yeah, the race, and I think if you, if you see what’s a day, Brailsford and Team Sky have done with modern cycling, they’ve gone in with a, well, they rationalized everything and figured that a lot of people weren’t doing it this way, so we’ll do it that way and it’s gonna work better, which is what he did, and Lance did that.
41:03 He took that sort of attitude to that doping era. I was a little far. It’s like these guys have done, they’ve done it terribly. That’s like, this is gonna be like, kind of, this is. I think he saw it.
41:13 It’s kind of all that. I think he enjoyed that part of the game, right? I think it wasn’t, he’d gone way above the rights and wrongs of it. He was like this is just like child’s play. These guys are morons, and, he had the kind of the physical and mental capacity to kind of do that, build the right team of people around him, kind of have the very clear sort of objectives and driving.
41:36 He’s an amazing man motivator, and yes, I think it’s quite hard for a scout. Lance, as this, or that because I don’t think it ever cross his mind about right and wrong. You just saw it, his amazing game, not just a sport, a game, and he loved playing. I think he still does, still loves the game, the game of his life just messing with people’s heads, got trying to win some people’s heads, and I think people never felt remorse from Lance, and that’s probably why he’s still persecuted, right?
42:07 Because, yeah, ultimately, dot, not really, sorry, because why should he be right? He was just trying to compete at his game. Night, yeah, exactly. And I think it’s, Lance isn’t a romanticist. Yes, doesn’t really, don’t need doubles and the greatest fear rhetoric, and kind of the natural narrative curves that were used to.
42:26 He doesn’t kind of believe in those or need them, and I think we, as society, like a three-act play, we like kind of rises, falls, redemptions, you know, I don’t think Lance, he thinks he fell, right?
42:40 Brian Rose: So were you surprised how that played out? Were you surprised that he was never actually, because he never tested positive? Mmm, was tested over 500 times? Is that, did that surprise you?
42:53 David Millar: I never tested positive. Yeah, I was arrested, and they found syringes in my apartment, and then I admitted, because it was yen game, and I wanted out anyway, but they, it was possible to beat the system. You know, it was a game. If we’re kind of changing again the kind of wording of it, I think for the, for the top players, and it was that, that was all part of the sport’s, the match nations of the sport. It was, and so yeah, so that the moral compass hadn’t just gone skew.
43:22 It’s been smashed, you know. Nobody even knew where the moral compass was anymore because there was no north, and I think Lance was the best at navigating that. I just kind of saw it all differently.
43:36 Brian Rose: Right? Yeah, and ultimately it was his teammates that kind of got him busted, because it was maybe projecting his go and trying to keep it quiet, and fine, they had enough.
43:48 David Millar: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think he perhaps he’s very charismatic. Lance, and I think he probably thought his charisma alone could keep them in line, but eventually kind of the more time away from him, the more that charisma didn’t have the effect, and they did all start to sort of crumble one by one, and that was, I guess, that was the only flaw in the plan, if you like, was thinking you could control individuals, and but eventually they all kind of realized what they’d done had been wrong, and their morale, their moral compass started kind of like, started to work again, and I think the moment they were sort of seeing north, they’re like oh, hang on a second, I think we did something wrong, they’re right, we better say what’s going on.
44:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, you started competing, you know, because you enjoyed it, and again, you know, doping wasn’t even on your mind, maybe you didn’t even know it was out there, but at some point it became something, because you had to stay competitive, right?
44:45 And because you were getting more and more famous, and I’m sure there’s lots of athletes that are gonna watch this, and they’re gonna maybe come to a point in their career where they’ve got an option to go left or right, and you’ve been there and I was wondering what you would tell them to do in that case? I mean, it’s great if they’re around a British team where there’s a culture of, yeah, we don’t do that, but you know, there can be hard times. I mean, you had injuries, the big expectations, you get to where all the money and the fame is now expected of you yeah.
45:17 Brian Rose: What do you do in that situation? We use left or right, that kind of thing.
45:22 David Millar: You have to stay straight. It has to be so clear, and kind of what you, what you believe, and even at times when you can’t see it for clouds and fog, and because if you do kind of veer off, left or right, then you never get back on it. There’s this weirdest thing, and that’s why I try to explain to younger athletes, do it, and you might get away with it.
45:43 You might kind of get some riches down that road, but it’s never gonna be the good road, because you will then have mental health issues. You’re then gonna live in a lie. You’re going to, you will be found out. Never forget, you will.
