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

Description

By his 18th birthday David Millar was living and racing in France, sleeping in rented rooms, tipped to be the next English-speaking Tour winner. A year later he'd realised the dream and signed a professional contract with the Cofidis team, who had one Lance Armstrong on their books. He perhaps lived the high life a little too enthusiastically - high on a roof after too much drink, he broke his heel in a fall and before long the pressure to succeed had tipped over into doping. Here, in a full and frank autobiography, David Millar recounts the story from the inside: he doped because 'cycling's drug culture was like white noise' and because of peer pressure. 'I doped for money and glory in order to guarantee the continuation of my status.' Five years on from his arrest, Millar is clean and reflective and holds nothing back in this account of his dark years.

David Millar was born in Malta in 1977. He has won stages of the Tour de France and Tour of Spain. He is now a part-owner of the Garmin-Chipotle team and a key figure of the World Anti-doping Agency's athletes committee. Jeremy Whittle's Bad Blood was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 2008. He writes on cycling for The Times, Financial Times and L'Equipe. He has known David Millar for 15 years.

Millar is never less than candid in a memoir that is part confessional, part catharsis. * THE SCOTSMAN * His description of that agonising 2010 mountain stage, during which he scoured the depths of his soul while falling helplessly behind the rest of the field, deserves to stand among the great first-person accounts of sporting experience. -- Richard Williams * THE GUARDIAN * His career almost destroyed by a doping scandal in 2004, the cycling champion faces his demons in this eloquent and revelatory memoir. Millar's gutsy slog to restore his reputation is inspirational. * THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH SEVEN Magazine * This is the superbly narrated story of one man's evolution from talented ingenue to disillusioned doper and back again... one of the very best snapshots of professional cycling in the noughties. * OUTDOOR FITNESS * Highly articulate, Millar has written a courageously combative book that both exposes the conditions that create drug cheating and explains how his sport has to confront those conditions if it is to break from this most murky of pasts. -- Mark Perryman * PHILOSOPHY FOOTBALL * The thoughtful British doper-turned-campaigner delivers an eloquent, highly rated memoir about life in troubled peloton. -- Simon Usborne * THE INDEPENDENT *