CYCLING:EMOTIONALLY AND physically, David Millar has been through the mill in his chequered 14-year career and this team time trial was no exception. On his bike, he "suffered like a pig". The outcome was something new for him: shared joy when his Garmin-Cervelo team took their first Tour stage win after a host of near-misses.

They were seeded midway down the field and had a long wait before the win was confirmed, which meant, said the Scot, the day felt unlike any other win in his career, which has included three solo stage wins in the Tour.

“It’s not like winning an individual time trial, when you go through all the emotions on your own. This was a team experience, the tension was high, emotions were running. I love it. I’ve won plenty of time trials in my career but this was a whole different ball-game.

“It was a high-pressure experience in the bus, all of us sitting there feeling the same tension. The energy levels were just crazy.”

Millar now lies second overall, with his Norwegian team-mate Thor Hushovd in the yellow jersey.

Their victory at the end of the 23km stage was a slender one, with Cadel Evans’ red-clad BMC team, the Schleck brothers’ Leopard-Trek squad and Bradley Wiggins’ Team Sky four seconds behind. Mark Cavendish’s HTC-Highroad were a further second adrift.

Such margins are lost and won in the twinkling of an eye; a few stints on the front from a rider who is below-strength or a couple of misjudged corners. In an event this short with margins this tight, only perfection is good enough.

Alberto Contador and his Saxo Bank team did not quite achieve that, but they were probably expecting worse. They were ragged but limited their losses to 28 seconds on Garmin, 24 on the Schlecks, Evans and Wiggins.

As for the stage one winner Philippe Gilbert, he had expected to lose the lead as this is not a speciality of his Omega-Pharma-Lotto team, and he is now 30th, 33 seconds behind Hushovd, who is changing colours on a daily basis.

Hushovd, who also led the Tour in 2006, began the race in the world champion’s rainbow stripes and switched – a little incongruously for a sprinter – to the polka-dot king of the mountains jersey for the team time trial after taking third on Saturday’s hilltop finish to Gilbert and Evans.

At 23km, less than 25 minutes riding, the stage was short and more over a course that was essentially out and home, a rapid outward leg with a strong tailwind, a couple of left-hand turns and then a gruesome thrash back into the warm breeze. It left Millar grey-faced and drained.

“I was suffering like a pig. I was on a really bad day. Normally I can enjoy this event but I wasn’t one of the strongest guys.”

It is four years since the Slipstream project was dreamed up by Lance Armstrong’s former team-mate Jonathan Vaughters, with help from Millar. The team grew out of a development squad founded by Vaughters during his final year as a professional, 2003, and has forged a distinctive identity since it expanded into a full professional team in 2008, with Millar one of the first recruits.

In 2009 they guided Bradley Wiggins to his surprising fourth in the Tour, and this year the team have moved forward again, combining with the squad run last year by the Cervelo bike company – who brought Hushovd with them – and taking their first one-day Classic victory in April in Paris-Roubaix with the Belgian Johan van Summeren.

Since Millar’s arrival in 2008, the team have led the way with staunch and vocal opposition to doping, and Vaughters said the win here shows cycling is cleaning up its act.

“I’ve been saying this for some time. The power outputs, climbing speeds and the victories we are achieving shows that the broad majority of the peloton are racing clean. There is no way we could compete if that were not the case.”

Vaughters and Millar’s squad have traded heavily on their status as mavericks doing things in a different way in a traditional sport. For example, their early team kit incorporated Argyle tartan which belonged more to the world of golf than cycling, and there was an outcry from the fans when it was dropped from their 2011 kit.

“Strength and style,” is how Millar sums up the team time trial, and yesterday, with Argyle prominent on their special strip for the Tour, they showed plenty of both