Cyclingnews: David Millar interview

Team Garmin-Transitions captain David Millar recently did a feature interview with Cyclingnews about his career and his role on the World Anti-doping Authority’s Athlete’s Committee.

The sport of cycling has arguably suffered more than any other sport from the scourge of doping, and as the antidoping authorities finally begin to get ahead of the dopers (or so we hope) it seems as if the war is being won. One person who believes that this is the case is David Millar, and as a member of the World Anti-doping Authority’s Athlete’s Committee, he should know.

He also is far too familiar with the dark, destructive side of the sport, the one that is full of syringes, vials and pills. Millar has been down that road, having served a suspension for admitting to EPO use in 2004, but unlike some of his contemporaries – Marco Pantani, Jose Maria Jimenez and Denis Zanette – he survived.

Millar has been an outspoken proponent of the anti-doping cause since his suspension, and sees promise for the new generation of professional cyclists.

“We’re in a very healthy place in professional cycling. It’s much cleaner than it’s ever been,” he tells Cyclingnews. “The young professionals coming in are not going to face these huge doping dilemmas. They’ll very rarely even see a syringe in their lives as professional athletes, which would have been mindboggling to even consider a few years ago.”

Yet even with such optimism, he has a stern warning for those who think the doping fight is over: “It’s quite easy to become complacent, but one thing we must never do is to forget our past.

“We can’t think it’s always been like that,” he says of the new culture. “We have a huge history behind us, we’ve gone many dark places. The day we forget about that is the day it will start happening again.”

Read the entire interview:

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Features, Garmin, Garmin Web Site, Home Page, News, Rider Diaries and tagged with cyclingnews, David Millar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.