Cycling: Millar Was 'a Prisoner of Money'

David Millar told a French court yesterday that he had taken banned drugs "because my job was to finish in a high placing" and added "you take drugs because you are a prisoner of money and glory".

Millar is one of 10 defendants in a trial near Paris involving mainly former members of Cofidis, the team for which he won three stages of the Tour de France between 2001 and 2004, and faces charges under French drug laws. He has already served a two-year ban after confessing to drug use, and returned to racing this year.

Questioned by the presiding judge, Ghislaine Polge, the 29-year-old Scot yesterday repeated his confession of June 2004 to having used the blood-booster erythropoietin and the male hormone testosterone and said team management had not encouraged him to dope but had not done enough to divert him from it. "The policy of Cofidis was 'get results and for the rest look after yourself'," he said.

Earlier, Millar's former team-mate Philippe Gaumont, an Olympic medallist, accused the doctor now in charge of supervising health checks on French professionals, Armand Mégret, of injecting him with the banned cortisone Kenacort, in 1994. Gaumont added "100 injections a year was not massive for a professional".

It would be understandable if Britain's latest professional recruit, Geraint Thomas, wondered about the world he is entering. The former winner of the amateur Paris-Roubaix classic and 2004 junior world track champion signed yesterday with the Italian team Barloworld.