There are various ways of putting David Millar’s personal voyage through cycling since 1997 into context, but the most salient one is that on Sunday, the Scot will start his last race as a professional after 17 seasons in the saddle. In a sport where it was once estimated that the length of the average career lasted two and a half years, that is an eternity.

Not surprisingly, Millar lists as his proudest achievement the fact that he is still pedalling at the age of 37, “that I made it through and finished when I am still loving it, even if it’s a different, more mature love than the blind love I felt in my youth”. His farewell year has been a tough one; he will end it with a broken right hand sustained in one of the worst crashes of his career close to the end of the Vuelta a España. Getting through that race has damaged his fingers to the extent that his next appointment will be in an operating theatre.

“It was the biggest impact crash I’ve ever had. My front wheel and bars hit a bollard. You get home with a broken rib, all the skin off your left side and two broken fingers, and you can’t pick up the kids. I’ve always had a Houdini-like ability to come out of things, so when you do that in one of your last races, you think it’s time to get out. The only circumstances in which you carry on after a crash like that is if it’s your last big Tour, or maybe the Tour de France.

“It’s been a happy year but it’s been a bit of a struggle, which is mainly why I’m stopping. I’m in a place where I can appreciate it. I love it, but it’s not overwhelming. There are no bad feelings or regrets, it’s just time. Form is becoming harder and harder to get and training is harder to make productive.”

Millar turned professional when John Major was resident in No10 Downing Street, Lance Armstrong had yet to return from cancer let alone earn his current reputation, mobile phones were far from ubiquitous, and Twitter was for birds. Few other Britons have extended their professional careers to a comparable length, Barry Hoban (1964-1980), Robert Millar (1980-1995) and Sean Yates (1982-96) being the names that stand out.

It will, however, all be over in what should seem like no time, for a rider with 19 three-week Tours under his belt. The Bec Cycling Club climb up Titsey Hill, near Limpsfield in Surrey, is all of 700 yards long and should take Millar around two minutes. “I’m going to get my head kicked in,” he said. “I’ve never done a hill climb before, I’m riding with a broken hand and I can hardly get out of the saddle.”

David Millar turned professional when John Major was resident in No10 Downing Street and Twitter was for birds Photograph: Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

Then again, Millar had been saying similar things 14 and a bit years ago before his first Tour de France, when his precise words were: “I’m shitting it – I don’t want to know the state I’m going to be in in the third week. I’ve got the fear about being pooped out by the bunch and having to ride by myself.”

Millar went on to take the yellow jersey in the first stage of his debut Tour, confirming the precocious promise which had drawn the attention of no fewer than six teams who were after his signature at the age of 18. He eventually opted for one of cycling’s greatest talent-spotters, Cyrille Guimard, who had launched the careers of the five-times Tour winner Bernard Hinault and the double champion Laurent Fignon.

Open in his disdain for the drug culture within cycling – initially at least – with a joyfully uninhibited racing style and a glamorous image that earned him the nickname Le Dandy, Millar looked to have a star-studded future as one of the biggest stars on two wheels. In August 1997, his mother Avril had taken out a bet for £100 that he would win the Tour de France within five years, and his early years did nothing to dispel the possibility.

In June 2004, however, he was busted for doping, an event that would define his career and his life. Millar chose a path that was unprecedented for a professional cyclist – and remains rare even now – in opting to come back after his ban, acknowledge his guilt, express profound regret, and work hard to rehabilitate himself and his sport.

That trajectory was not an easy one. “I was very idealistic,” he says now. “I had a higher purpose when I came back, borderline altruistic. I wanted to fix things, redeem myself. I get criticised for being naive [but] that’s what has helped me to survive, still be here and do my thing.” The key turning point came at the end of 2007, when Millar was able to assist Jonathan Vaughters – another ex-doper, albeit one who had not confessed at that stage – in developing the Slipstream squad. Backed by Garmin, the team has been at the forefront of cleaning up the sport from the inside.

With or without his doping, Millar’s record stands comparison with those of his namesake Robert, Yates, Hoban or Chris Boardman, whose career ended just as his began. He can boast 10 solo stage wins and two team time trial stage victories in the three Grand Tours, a plethora of wins in smaller stage races and medals in the world time trial championships, as well as one gold medal that was stripped from him.

He has managed to author one of the defining accounts of life within cycling’s doping culture, his autobiography Racing Through the Dark, published in 2011. And there have been support roles, most obviously the team captain’s job at the Great Britain team as Mark Cavendish raced to the world elite road race title in Copenhagen in 2011. Since Slipstream’s inception, Millar has been a constant presence as a variety of obscure stars in waiting have climbed the Tour ladder – Bradley Wiggins and Ryder Hesjedal being the best examples – and it could be argued the US team missed his cool head in this year’s hectic race.

David Millar rode in his first Tour de France in 2000 Photograph: Alessandro Trovati/AP

Looking back on his Tour de France career, Millar recalled, “a couple of days where I was in a state of grace – 2002 when I won that road stage [to Béziers], and I was so proud because I was clean. I’d doped the year before, then I wanted to win a road stage clean. I remember winning that road stage clean and thinking ‘you know what, I am one of the best riders in the world’. The Tour is a plethora of experiences; sometimes the worst ones can be the best.”

Because of that, he recalls one day with particular pride: the Tour leg through the Alps to Saint-Jean de Maurienne in 2010, when he finished 45 minutes behind the winner after being off the back all day with two broken ribs. “It would probably be my greatest achievement. I still can’t believe I did that. It was bigger than winning any race, the amount of suffering and turmoil I went through. The Tour is about a personal journey, everyone takes something from it. It’s one of the few sporting events where finishing is as important as winning for 98% of the people who finish.”

His final victory came two years ago with his third Tour stage win – he has asked for a time trial win in 2003 to be erased from the record books as he was doping at the time – in the town of Annonay, on the 45th anniversary of Tom Simpson’s death. Afterwards, he said: “I am 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.”

It was an extraordinary statement, but Millar’s path through cycling has been way outside the norm. Few convicted drug-takers achieve redemption in any form, let alone make a contribution to improving the sport. Cycling is now, he says, an arena in which he would be happy to have his children compete, whereas a few years ago, he would have actively dissuaded them.

After retirement, Millar expects to stay within cycling, but will change direction. He will probably create his own brand – not altogether surprising for a man who turned down the option of art college in order to race a bike – and attempt to make cycling “less hipster, less outside, more cool. I need distance from racing, I need to challenge myself again, to move out of my comfort zone.”

Having come into cycling when it was still an obscure pastime practised by outsiders, before the massive change wrought by Lottery funding, Millar has been an intrigued witness as the sport has grown to its current national stature.

“It veered massively for me when Team Sky came in and Brad won the Tour – that was the tipping point. It had been building for years and years before that, with an underlying sense that cycling was coming back – it’s easy to forget that [Britain] is where it all started, it’s in our blood. The sport had been growing through the Armstrong era, with its Anglicisation, the Nike adverts, everyone falling in love with Lance – all of a sudden it was a perfect storm: London Olympics, Brad winning. When I started, I had to explain that I did this for a living and that I didn’t have another job. Now, all of a sudden, I can say I’m a professional cyclist and people want to know which team I ride for. That’s a big difference in a short space of time.”

Millar sounds a little nostalgic for the lost days when he first fell in love with cycling. “The irony is I no longer fit in. The team has become an identity for a rider; before, a rider would transcend the team. It’s become robotic. I liked the dysfunctionality, the cult-ness, the randomness. Obviously that led to the criminal aspect, the corruption, the madness, but I didn’t know that when I fell in love with it.”

The event in which Millar has chosen to bring the curtain down on his career is suitably quirky. The short, abrupt, intense hill climb is a purely British discipline, with a tradition going back to the heyday of time trialling in the 1920s. To add an old-fashioned touch being a hill climb run outside British Cycling rules, hardshell crash hats are not compulsory. That was how it was in his early days, when he started riding 10-mile time trials for the High Wycombe Cycling Club. “I’ll be able to wear an old-school racing cap,” he says, with relish in his voice.

Five highs



2000 Wins Tour de France opening time trial at Futuroscope to take yellow jersey, only the fourth Briton to do so and beating Lance Armstrong in the process. He holds it for three days

2006 Returns to the Tour after a two-year doping ban to complete the event on zero racing – defying conventional wisdom – after which he wins a time trial stage in the Vuelta a España

2007 Wins national road race title in Wales – collapsing afterwards from the heat – then takes an early lead in the polka-dot jersey in the Tour de France after a breakaway through Kent following the Grand Départ from London

2010 Wins Commonwealth Games time trial gold in Delhi for Scotland; in his book Racing Through the Dark he describes this as the moment he felt complete redemption after his doping ban

2011 Becomes first British rider to wear leader’s jersey in all three major Tours when he holds the pink jersey in the Giro d’Italia, an achievement overshadowed on the day by the death of the Belgian Wouter Weylandt

Five lows



2001 Crashes in prologue time trial of Tour de France at Dunkirk and withdraws from the race after a painful week-long battle against his wounds. It is after this Tour that he decides to start doping

2002 Pulls out of Vuelta a España in protest at difficult racing conditions: he stops half a metre before the finish line on the Alto de L’Angliru and removes his race number

2004 Arrested by French drugs police shortly before the Tour de France as part of an inquiry into his Cofidis team, confesses to doping in 2001 and 2003 and is banned for two years

David Millar arrives at a doping trial at a district court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre in November 2006. Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

2007 Reduced to tears on the Tour de France rest day in Pau when he hears that Alexander Vinokourov has tested positive for blood doping. His verdict: “If a rider of his stature and class has done this, we might as well pack up our bags and leave”

2014 Is pulled out of Garmin-Sharp’s Tour de France team five days before the start in Yorkshire due to doubts over his fitness. “I’m devastated that the team don’t trust me to the job as I’ve always done,” he says