Racing Through the Dark: Crash. Burn. Coming Clean. Coming Back. by Millar David

Author:Millar, David [Millar, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2012-06-25T21:00:00+00:00

September 2002, the l’Angliru. Lying on the side of the road after crashing and being run over by a team car on the run into the Angliru, where I would protest by refusing to cross the finish line.

Soon afterward, I went down again, sliding along in the middle of the road on my left side. The car that was following me ran right over my bike—and I still had my feet in the pedals. Now I was furious. I dragged myself to the side of the road and just sat there with my wrecked bike, watching as bloodied riders came by. I love competition on an epic scale, but this had nothing to do with sport. We were being exploited. It was incredibly irresponsible of the organization, but they were getting what they wanted—headlines and TV ratings—at the risk of not only our health but even our lives.

But the peloton had only itself to blame. We, the riders, let them do it to us. We were a bunch of lone wolves, contracted mercenaries who stabbed each other in the back at every opportunity. We couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, I thought to myself as my peers struggled onward. Then I corrected myself—actually, that was probably the one thing we could do.

Eventually, my team car pulled up, with my spare bike on the roof. I got back on, but mentally I had quit the race. Bingen Fernandez, my loyal Basque teammate, finally caught up with me and tried pushing me, but I told him to forget it—we were so far behind that it was over.

It was so dark now that in the pouring rain it felt like dusk. I was covered in blood and had ripped a lot of skin, as coming down on my left side twice had worsened the road rash. I still wanted to finish the stage, even though, at the speed I was capable of, there was still close to an hour of climbing ahead of me.

The last part of the Angliru is the hardest. Over the final 6 kilometers, it averages 13 percent with some passages at 24 percent. Bingen didn’t leave my side, and, as a Basque rider, he was massively supported. Basque fans are among the most devoted in cycling, and they were desperate to help him, but every time they tried to push him, he would wave them away and tell them to push me.

I was a mess: it was all I could do to keep momentum. With just a few kilometers to go, we had to weave through broken-down cars, and the dark misty air stank of burned-out clutches. The fans who were up there had no doubt climbed the mountain on foot and waited all day, but were now trapped behind 2-meter-high riot barriers guarded at intervals by police.

I’d never seen this before at a bike race, and I haven’t seen it since. Clearly, just to guarantee the spectacle, the organization had wanted the bloody stragglers to suffer unaided, without any fans interfering in their bloody battle.

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