Millar's crossing

Sports: Repentant steroid user now part of a cycling team that keeps it clean | Mark Bergin

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In recent years, professional sports have proved that opportunity and the right brand of compromised ethics are all that's necessary to turn a world-class athlete into a world-class doper. But it takes something more to bury such sins beneath vigorous professions of innocence no matter the mountain of evidence to the contrary. Call it ego, call it self-worship, such refusals to come clean smack of desperation to maintain an identity rooted in fraud.

Some consider the prospect of exposure worse than the silent torment of wearing masks. But others, such as Scottish cyclist Dave Millar, have found rest and a path to redemption in the liberating act of confession. In 2004, police found a pair of used Epogen syringes in Millar's apartment. Rather than lawyer up, Millar admitted using the banned substance, a revelation that got him fired, cost him his 2003 world time trial championship, and earned him a two-year suspension from the sport.