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Millar's tale of rise, fall and resurrection comes to HBO's 'Real Sports'

Published: Jun. 24, 2008

David Millar of Team Garmin-Chipotle discusses his five years under “constant pressure to dope” during tonight’s episode of HBO’s “Real Sports."

The segment, reported by correspondent Jon Frankel and titled “Clean Slate,” (check your local listings for showtime), chronicles Millar’s journey from suspended doper to advocate for a new model of cycling team.

Millar charges that his former team management and fellow riders urged him to “prepare properly,” which meant cycles of EPO and methods for avoiding detection.

Also, as a partner in Garmin-Chipotle's “new” approach to doping control, Dr. Paul Strauss of the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE) discusses championing longitudinal doping controls as the new model for clean sport.

“We are no longer even playing the cat-and-mouse game of trying to catch the dopers, because we’re no longer looking only for banned substances,” Strauss says.

Producer Mike Sullivan, who has reported on numerous domestic sports, says the ACE testing protocol and the openness of the Garmin-Chipotle team is precisely the program major North American sports may need to clean up their own drug problems.

“This could be very effective for nearly all sports,” Sullivan says.

Nevertheless, team CEO and directeur sportif Jonathan Vaughters, Strauss and Millar acknowledge that despite the battery of tests and nearly constant monitoring Slipstream riders endure, solving the doping problem will require a much larger, more complicated cultural shift by both athletes and fans alike.

The show will be rebroadcast at 6 p.m. June 25, 9 p.m. June 27 and 11:30 p.m. June 29.