Racing Through the Dark

Crash. Burn. Coming Clean. Coming Back.

David Millar

• Publisher: Touchstone
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451682700
• Year: 2012

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Description
• About David Millar
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword by David Brailsford, CBE
• Biarritz, 2004
• Barcelona, 2009
• Chapter 1: My Early Years
• Chapter 2: The Mess
• Chapter 3: Flying Ball Bicycles
• Chapter 4: Chasing a Dream
• Chapter 5: “Quoi?”
• Chapter 6: The Professionals
• Chapter 7: Childhood’s End
• Chapter 8: Tour de Dopage
• Chapter 9: The VDB Show
• Chapter 10: 19:03 Millar Time
• Chapter 11: La Vie en Jaune
• Chapter 12: The Fall of Dunkirk
• Chapter 13: 2001: An Odyssey Begins
• Chapter 14: La Vida Dopado
• Chapter 15: My Personal Jesus
• Chapter 16: Chains and Rainbows
• Chapter 17: Game Over
• Chapter 18: Côte des Basques
• Chapter 19: Judge Dread
• Chapter 20: Shaken, Not Stirred
• Chapter 21: Life in the High Peak
• Chapter 22: La Roue Tourne
• Chapter 23: Time Trials and Tribulations
• Chapter 24: The Persuader
• Chapter 25: Keeping the Faith
• Chapter 26: Dave the Brave
• Acknowledgments
• Photographs
• List of Illustrations
• Index