CYCLING/Interview with David Millar: Had it not been for an oversight in packing his suitcase last September, today David Millar would probably be celebrating finishing his fourth Tour de France, in which he has won three stages and worn the yellow jersey.

He would be thinking about the Athens Olympics, about setting out to attempt something no British sportsman has achieved: two gold medals at the same Games. He would also still be "living a lie", as he puts it: a highly paid, prestigious lie.

Instead, he is sitting in a bar explaining lucidly and heart-rendingly how he destroyed what could have been a glorious sporting career by using drugs. His eyes are red at the corners and have a distant look.

Occasionally, he seems close to tears. One hand drums almost constantly on his knee. He has always seemed somewhat distrait, but now he has the lost air of a man who has fallen from the heavens into an unknown world, and is trying to figure out where he is and what he should do.

On June 22nd, Millar was detained in Biarritz by drugs police investigating his professional cycling team, Cofidis. He emerged 48 hours later after confessing to having used the banned blood booster erythropoietin (EPO) on three occasions. The key to his downfall was a pair of syringes that had contained the drug, which he had taken before winning the world championship in Canada in October 2003.

"I used them, I forgot about them, left them in my bag, went to Las Vegas, came back, was unpacking and found them. I thought: 'What the fuck has my life come to?' and put them on the bookshelf. It's my most private place, a place no one touches.

"It had scarred me: I had won the World Championship by a huge margin and didn't need to have used drugs. I had got to a point where I had wanted to win so much that to guarantee my victory I did something I didn't need to do. I didn't want to forget about it."

The drug police found them when they searched his Biarritz flat after his detention, and put them in front of him late in his 48-hour detention.

"At first I made up a story. I thought I could still get out of it. After 47 hours they started threatening me, they were flipping out because I had not admitted to anything. It was Thursday evening, they were going to keep me, take me to Paris in a van, keep me in for three days then put me before the judge on Monday.

"I could have carried on. I have a good lawyer in Paris and might have got away with it. But I thought, 'fuck this, I can't live with this'. It wasn't difficult. I was just thinking, 'I can't go through with this, I'm fucked whatever happens, it's not 100 per cent my fault, but I'm not going to live like this'. I could have kept fighting, fighting, fighting, but fundamentally, I'm not a good liar."

He accepts he hung on to the syringes partly because deep down inside he wanted someone to catch him, because he had lost so much respect for himself he no longer cared if he were caught and it came to an end.

"I believe in the power of the subconscious. It was my get-out. I wasn't happy. I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't like the point I'd got to. It was an extreme way of doing it, but it's typical of my style of life."

Born in Malta, brought up in Hong Kong and west London, the 27-year-old Millar is nominally Scottish, but actually rootless, a charismatic young man, part grunge kid, part art student, who opted at 18 to be a professional cyclist rather than go to art college.

Asked how he made the journey from an idealistic youth who was adamant he would never use drugs to a cynical professional who needed "guarantees", Millar holds up finger and thumb. The gap between them is half an inch. "It's that. I was 100 per cent sure I'd never dope. All of a sudden it escalated out of control."

It was, he believes, a form of adolescent rebellion against the demands of his sport. "It was the only thing in life that defined me. I resented that. I didn't think about it, there was no twiddling thumbs and wondering if I should or I shouldn't. I just walked into a room one day and did it."

The turning point came during the 2001 Tour de France. He had won the opening stage in 2000, but a year later he fell in the first stage, and barely clung on for another nine days. Eight days in, he greeted me with hysterical laughter after one tough stage finish in Alsace. "By day nine or 10 I'd started to go mental, the managers said they would fly my then girlfriend in, but when they asked her, she was, 'no, I'm not coming'."

That night, he saw an older professional in the team who introduced him to EPO.

Before the Tour of Spain, that September, he travelled to Italy and was shown how to inject himself with the drug. There was no risk of a positive test, he says, because the drug was used in small quantities and taken well before competition. Nor were there second thoughts.

"You don't stop and think, or it's game over. When the line is crossed, it's crossed. It stops being a sport.

"I had taken on a load of responsibility" - his team was invited to the race on condition that he start and perform - "and I was taking that on, being professional."

It was "mental insurance", and there was nothing to stop him. "There was very little guidance, few options, no coach, no set-up in the team to encourage you not to do that. No other team would have pushed me through what I went through in that year. I was going bananas."

After winning another stage of the Tour in 2002 "clean", Millar used EPO again in 2003. This time, there were financial pressures as well. In 2002, he "had a crap year apart from winning a stage in the Tour de France. I'd saved the team's arse there, but wasn't in the top 100 in the world rankings.

"From making a lot of money I went to the basic that I had in 2002. I felt it was wrong. My salary dropped by 300 per cent. It was like, 'I'll make them pay me a shedload of money and run this team'."

The drugs he took that May and August were in order to keep going during intense training over 10 days: courses of EPO taken to keep up the red-cell count, plus the use of testosterone patches to keep his level of male hormone up. Red blood cells and testosterone drop as the body becomes fatigued, impairing performance. If they are boosted, more intense training is possible.

"It's training hard and taking a certain amount of EPO over 10 days so you can keep doing the training."

As before, stopping taking the drugs well before racing removed the risk of a positive test.

In recent years, since the drugs scandal that almost stopped the 1998 Tour de France, many top professional cyclists, particularly those specialising in the great stage races such as the Tours of Spain, Italy and France, have moved away from building condition through racing to high-intensity training camps, but it is impossible to say whether they are on similar programmes to the one Millar used.

He knows the solution: out-of-competition testing, which is being beefed up by cycling's governing bodies. People in the sport, he says, genuinely don't know whether their fellow competitors are using the drug.

"I only know about me. I didn't ask questions of other guys. Everyone is so paranoid now."

In January 2002, I asked Millar about his attitude to drugs. I didn't ask point blank: Are you using them? Sports journalists, and particularly those who work in cycling, don't: it is like asking if someone beats his wife.

Millar's answer was, "I don't need to dope. I don't have to live with myself doing that. There will always be guys ahead of me who are one step ahead of the rules. I have to live with it, because it's their choice."

There was not an untrue word in the sentence, but it was not a point-blank denial. He looks back and says: "I hadn't refined my answers to be ambiguous." Later, he managed that, but felt uncomfortable.

Ironically, from the start of this year, Millar had turned his back on doping and begun racing "clean" under the influence of a British coach, Peter Keen, and the British Lottery-funded World Class performance programme.

"I wanted to win the Olympics clean, for myself. I wasn't good with myself. I had changed as a person."

He regrets what he has done, and seems relieved that, for the moment, he is through with cycling. "If you go through such a big ethical change in one day it's going to affect you on a deeper level. I was unstable, my self-esteem started evaporating.

"I was living a lie and that's not good for anyone. It is so hard to explain, because I was capable of winning big races clean. I couldn't explain it to myself. It's very confusing. I haven't slept well for the last two or three years."

More sleepless nights must await. On August 4th, a disciplinary commission will decide the length of his ban. He will be stripped of the world title. He will probably sell his "dream home in Biarritz", which he has spent two and a half years having restored but will never sleep in.

Where next? He has no idea.

He accepts what he has done, hopes the ban will not end his career, and now wishes to offer his services "to prevent young riders doing what I have done".

For seven years Millar has been known as "Boy Dave" to me and my colleagues. He earned the nickname when he turned professional at the tender age of 19 and brought a fresh face, glamour, and a bit of rock-star chic to the two-wheeled world. Now, the boy faces a painful growing up.