All sportsmen need to have control over the end of their careers, and though David Millar does not expect to retire until the end of 2014, the Garmin-Sharp team’s decision to pull him out of what would have been a 13th Tour de France is a major blow, given his personal history with the race and the role he would have expected to adopt within the team. It has left the 37-year-old Scot bitterly disappointed and deeply wounded.

Millar had been nursing a chest problem in the run-in to the British national championships last week, but it was improving and he had six days left until the start of the Tour in which it could have been expected to improve further. He had been waxing lyrical about working for Garmin’s latest prospect, the American Andrew Talansky, which would have taken precedence over adding to his four individual stage wins.

With his tally of stages spent on the Tour heading towards 250, Millar had also spoken about “closure” and the feeling that this Tour was potentially “the end of an era”. Without him, without Bradley Wiggins, it certainly feels that way. In its unexpected nature and its probable emotional impact, there are echoes of the frustrating way that his namesake Robert’s Tour de France career came to an end.

In July 1995, Robert Millar was all set to race the Tour as the newly crowned British champion when, a few days before the race started, his team, Le Groupement, went bust. He did not race again; at least David Millar – who is no relation – has a chance to end his racing days in style at the Vuelta a España in September.

David Millar’s Tour career spanned the period from when cycling was a relatively obscure, somewhat geeky underground sport in the UK to the surge in popularity that followed Wiggins’s victory: “When I started I had to explain people that I did this for a living. Now they say: ‘Oh you’re a professional cyclist, which team do you ride for?’ That’s a big difference in a relatively short space of time.”

Millar came to the Tour in 2000 as a callow, impressionable youth who was clearly set to take the race by storm, given his charisma and the articulate way in which he could communicate his passion for bike racing. He was also avowedly against doping, which was a breath of fresh air as the clouds gathered around the hero of 1999, Lance Armstrong. He still has the burn mark from a tyre in a crash at the foot of the Ventoux that year.

In 2006, with his drug ban immediately behind him, and reincarnated as a campaigner against doping, he attempted the Tour with no racing in his legs. Since then he has appeared at the race each year and has come to embody the sport’s potential for reconciliation. He is pedaling proof that the sport can come to terms with its past. “The reason you do the Tour,” he says, “is that it’s a plethora of experience, an emotional rollercoaster, it’s everything. Sometimes the worst experiences can be the best.

“There have been a couple of days when I had a state of grace, which can be amazing – 2002 when I won the stage in Béziers. I was so proud because I was clean for that, I wanted to win a road stage clean, although I’d started doping the year before.

“It’s a lot of experience. Probably finishing the stage in 2010 through the Alps when I was off the back all day fighting to stay in the race was my hands-down greatest ever achievement, bigger than winning any race. That for me is what the Tour is all about. The amount of suffering and turmoil I went through.”

Millar recognised – recognises – that the Tour is not only about winning but about the personal journey that it can be for those who participate. “I’m old-school but that’s what it is. Every single person takes something from it. It’s one of the few sporting events in the world where finishing counts for something. Doping makes that a journey into darker places. It strips away that essence of honesty, that belief you’re giving your best and can be satisfied that’s enough.”

What allowed him to survive so long, he believes, is his basic naivety – “I believe in people, that good can overcome bad” – and he would have no qualms now about his sons going into the sport, whereas a few years ago he would have kept them away.

He has played his part in that process, and in the history of the Tour. That will be remembered as much as his emotional stage win at Annonay in 2012 on the 45th anniversary of Tom Simpson’s death, when he said, “I’m an ex-doper, but I’m clean now and I’m very proud of that. I’ve won today as a clean rider, after making the same mistake that Tom made. I’ve shown where cycling has come in the last 45 years – even the last five years.”

Millar has loved the Tour with a passion that few others have shown. His first Tour ended with an escape on the Champs-Elysées, a stage where he always seemed to enjoy putting on a quixotic display of aggression. His late break in 2013 lasted for several of the laps of the world’s greatest bike-racing circuit. He did not know it then but it was his last act in the Tour. He will be sorely missed and Garmin’s decision will inevitably be questioned.