David Millar should be remembered as the cheat who went straight and fought to help clean up his sport He fouled up, he accepts, and he reckons he deserved to pay for his disgrace, stripped of a world time trial championship and with reputation forever shredded. There is not a day, he says, when he does not regret the path he took, even if he felt there was a silver lining in how his downfall enabled him to "reboot" his life as it seemed to be tumbling into calamitous freefall. Anyway, surely, Millar argues, it was better to reintegrate athletes like him and track and field sprinter Dwain Chambers - in a way pioneers for British sport as the first doping offenders to make comebacks while banging the drum for clean sport - than to make outcasts of them. "That's the way it should be," he told me during an interview in France last year. You should have to rehabilitate yourself in the public arena and prove your worth. You should have to earn your place back within the sport. That's why I think lifetime bans are not correct for first offences because it offers no rehabilitation. It offers no hope nor any way to better the world of sport. Dwain and I, since our returns, have educated people so much more about what goes on. Millar is so eloquent and has been such a passionate crusader for clean cycling since co-founding the Slipstream squad in 2007 - his defence of Chris Froome was total during this year's Tour de France when the race leader was the subject of drugs rumours - that it is certain that he will continue the fight after he retires. After all, it is not as if he does not appreciate how fortunate has if to have been given a second chance. "I've been through so much and seen so much, while in the sport and while being banned from that sport and ostracised, that it's given me a much greater understanding of how lucky I am to lead the life I lead," he told me. And now he will be determined to make the last year of his 17-season career a memorable one with one of his last challenges being the chance to go for gold in the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in Scottish colours. Millar says he feels privileged to have that opportunity and there will be some supporters who hope that the man who has done more than most to prove there can be redemption after doping will ride off with a medal. One won clean and fair.