“And then everything just turned to shit,” David Millar said the other evening, after watching the first half of a documentary film called Time Trial, which records his final season as a professional bike racer in 2014. He was talking about the turning point of a year in which carefully laid plans to close his career with an extended lap of honour completely fell apart.

Time Trial records his despair at the discovery that, at 37, the first British rider to wear the leader’s jersey in all three grand tours – France, Italy and Spain – no longer had what it takes to compete at the highest level. “Why am I so weak,” he asks himself in a sequence capturing one among many moments of despair, “and why are the other guys so strong?”

Few and fortunate are the athletes who do not experience that painful prelude to the end of their time at the top. Millar was certainly not expecting it to happen during the season in which he was being followed by a film crew, but his hopes of a glorious finale were dashed by several factors, most significantly the dramatic decision of his team directors to drop him from their squad for the Tour de France, the intended climax of his season.

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His emotions were further stirred by the identity of the men making the decision: his partners in the ownership of the team, set up after his return from a two-year ban imposed when he admitted using EPO. Reborn as an anti‑doping campaigner, he had envisaged the project as a standard‑bearer for clean racing. And the 2014 Tour would have been the last hurrah: a Grand Départ in the UK, a final glass of champagne on the way to Paris, maybe even a stage victory en route.

But the team’s priority was to select the best nine riders for the year’s most important event. When he learnt of their unsentimental judgment on his form and fitness, Millar’s initial response was fury at being deprived, by the outfit he had helped create, of a last chance to ride in the very race that had lured him into the sport during his teenage years.

“I couldn’t understand why the team would do it to me,” he wrote in The Racer, his book about that season, published a couple of years ago. “We’d been through so much together. Now I could see it was over. I was no longer needed or wanted by them. I was simply an ageing pro cyclist past his prime, steadily losing his mind, not to be counted on.”

While it was a disaster for Millar in the short term, his absence from the peloton when the Tour started in Yorkshire that July turned out to be providential in two respects. First, he was offered a job co-commentating on the race for ITV, a role at which he turned out to be a natural – cycling’s own Gary Neville, single-handedly raising the level of analysis. Second, while depriving the film of the possibility of a triumphant climax, it provided a new and more compelling narrative arc: one involving failure and humiliation.

The director of Time Trial, Finlay Pretsell, persuaded race organisers to allow a motorbike-mounted camera to infiltrate the peloton during several races in the first half of the season, including Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix. He mounted a miniature camera on Millar’s bike and attached a microphone to his jersey, enabling us not only to eavesdrop on the kind of chatter that goes on between the riders but to hear the non-verbal sounds of the peloton, both mechanical – the clicking, crunching and whirring of gears and tyres – and human, like the groans that go up when a rider jumps away to attempt a lone break.

That moment is followed by a vivid example of old-school peloton discipline as the senior figures range themselves across the road at the front of the bunch in order to deter any further initiatives. It used to happen a lot more, Millar says, in his early days as a pro, when riders like Claudio Chiappucci or Gianni Bugno would impose their wishes.

Equally fascinating is the close-up view of the undramatic moments. We see Millar freewheeling alongside the team car, stuffing water bottles up his jersey. He responds to the benediction of his directeur sportif, the former rider Charly Wegelius – “Have a good day, David” – with a formal “Thank you, Charles” before pedalling back up to distribute the bottles among his team- mates, only to find, when they are all gone, he is short of one for himself.

At the end of a day’s racing, we see him and his Dutch team-mate Thomas Dekker not only sharing a room in an overnight hotel, a common practice in most team sports, but switching off the lights as they snuggle down in adjacent twin beds. “Good night, honey,” says Dekker. “Good night, darling,” Millar replies, as the bedside lamp goes out on the pair’s giggling fit.

It’s a bit of a setup, of course. There’s a camera in the room, and someone to operate it, and probably a director, too. But Millar’s manner tends naturally towards the talkative and theatrical – if this were a feature film, he might be played, with a hint of dandyishness, by the young Richard E Grant – and it’s easy to imagine such an ironic exchange even in the absence of a film crew.

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The visual poetry of Louis Malle’s Vive Le Tour set a high standard for cycling documentaries in 1962, followed by two classics: Claude Lelouch’s Pour un Maillot Jaune and Jorgen Leth’s A Sunday in Hell, recording the 1965 Tour and the 1976 Paris-Roubaix respectively. More recently there have been Pepe Danquart’s Hell on Wheels and Jason Berry’s Chasing Legends, portraying the 2003 and 2009 Tours through the eyes of the Telekom and HTC-Columbia teams.

But Pretsell, whose work includes short documentaries on prison hairdressers, makers of ballet slippers and track cyclist Craig MacLean, offers a different, more intimate and in the end more brutal perspective on the sport. The lyricism of the early sequences – all spring sunshine and swooping descents – gives way to days of racing in the cold and rain, during which Millar begins to rail against the signs of his diminished powers. The film’s producers are planning to submit Time Trial to the organisers of the Cannes festival, in the hope of a gala premiere in May. Having been denied a sweat-soaked apotheosis on the Champs Élysées, Millar could find that an elegant stroll along the Croisette provides his happy ending.