When Jonathan Aitken was asked to chair the Tory party's inquiry on penal reform, there was some derision at the idea of a former jailbird in this role. On the other hand, Paul Cavadino of the rehabilitation charity Nacro thought that his experience made him all the better qualified: "Ex-prisoners have a key role to play in improving the rehabilitation of offenders." And so it might be that at a time when the battle against doping is the most important question in sport, above all in cycling, another kind of former offender is the man to set an example.
At least, that seems to be the reasoning behind the choice of David Millar as leader of Slipstream-Chipotle, the new bike racing team, on his return after a two-year suspension for doping. One of the best British cyclists of his generation, Millar was time-trial world champion, and won the prologue of the 2000 Tour de France two seconds ahead of Lance Armstrong. And then, as a Victorian moralist might have said, he fell.
In recent years, one sport after another has been ravaged by drugs, a fact acknowledged with varying degrees of honesty. Baseball shut its eyes and ears as evidence of steroid use mounted, until the scandal engulfing Barry Bonds became a national front-page story. Athletics shrugged its shoulders at Ben Johnson, but couldn't at Marion Jones, not when she finally owned up and returned her Olympic gold medals.
Indeed, confession is in fashion, what with Bjarne Riis admitting this year that he had been doping when he won his frankly inexplicable victory in the 1996 Tour de France, and saying sadly that they could come and take his yellow jersey back. That once great race has very nearly lost all credibility after not a trickle but a torrent of scandals. The 2007 tour saw both the pre-race favourite and the rider in the race leader's yellow jersey slung out. Even the man left standing—Alberto Contador, the quite unforeseen winner—is shrouded in suspicion.
With such a culture, it's easy to understand, if not condone, what happened to Millar. He rode clean up to the 2000 season, he says, but the pressure on him intensified. He was surrounded by other riders illicitly but flagrantly using EPO (erythropoietin), the synthetic hormonal drug that enhances red blood cells, but that also has a tendency to kill you by impairing circulation. Bike racing's code of omertà meant that you weren't supposed to notice when teammates received deliveries of ice, not for the odd refreshing aperitif but to keep their EPO vials chilled.
On the night Millar abandoned the 2001 Tour de France after a gruelling mountain stage, his team manager told him he ought to go to Italy to "prepare properly." No nudges or winks were needed to explain what that meant: get someone to supply EPO and show you how to use it. And so when police raided his apartment in Biarritz in 2004, they found two syringes on the bookshelf. He says that he had stopped doping by then, but kept the syringes as a reminder, or even an unconscious wish to be punished for his fall from grace.
He is now back in training with Slipstream, which, say Millar and the directeur sportif Jonathan Vaughters, exists first of all as a rigorously drug-free team and a good deed in a naughty world. "To me, there was just a lot of honesty in David, and the sport desperately needs that," says Vaughters. Or, as Paul Cavadino puts it, speaking of Aitken rather than Millar: "Reformed offenders often have a passionate wish to 'put something back' and to help others avoid making the mistakes they made."
I'm prepared to accept Millar's sincerity. But the battle is far from won. It sometimes seems it has barely begun. Now that Britain's Christine Ohuruogo has been cleared to run in the Olympics and keep her 400 metres world title, mightn't it be nice if she gave a really candid explanation of how she missed three drugs tests? Better still, she would be the ideal person to insist that in future anyone who misses three—or even two—tests should be ejected for good.
More to sport than football
One the first Wednesday in December, Sri Lanka won an enthralling test match, with English honour salvaged by a sixth-wicket partnership of 109 between Ian Bell and Matthew Prior. The next day, the sports section of the Guardian devoted its front page to a 1-1 draw between Newcastle and Arsenal, with the test relegated to page six.
This isn't just a question of the pitifully diminished status of cricket, which is becoming a minority sport somewhere between snooker and rugby league. Even if it didn't have the brilliant Richard Williams and the great Frank Keating, the Guardian's would be one of the best sports sections around. But like the others, it's ever more dominated by the monoculture of football, which often occupies as much space as every other sport together.
Very likely AJP Taylor was right in saying that, through association football, "the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished." All the same, sports editors could try reminding themselves that soccer isn't the only species of football, let alone the only game. This column's watchword will be: there are other sports.
