Читать книгу In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist - Richard Moore - Страница 11

Once you stop school there’s nothing to do. I had the [exams] to have gone to university. For what – an engineering degree? Like my dad, they’re all on the dole.

Robert Millar walked out of the large iron gates of Shawlands Academy for the final time on 27 May 1975, at the age of 16. He had spent five years at the school and had just completed his ‘Highers’ – Scotland’s equivalent of A levels – performing well enough in those exams to earn a three-year engineering apprenticeship at Weir’s Pumps, a sprawling factory in Cathcart on the eastern fringes of Glasgow that provided employment for a few thousand young men – almost exclusively men. Willie Gibb remembers his classmate as ‘not studious’ but ‘smart’, ‘able to pass exams without really trying’.

By then the Millar family had moved up in the world, not literally but metaphorically, having swapped the eleventh floor of the high-rise flat in Shawbridge Street for 73 Nithsdale Drive, a ground-floor flat in a sandstone tenement building that is a copy of a design by the nineteenth-century Glasgow architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. Today it’s a B-listed building, and the flats, with their views towards the north of Glasgow and the Campsie Hills, are much sought after. If it was a Thomson original, like the building housing flats around the corner, they’d be even more sought after. ‘You can’t touch them without permission from Rome,’ joked one of the Millars’ old neighbours when I paid a visit to 73 Nithsdale Drive.

Millar had also graduated from the Glenmarnock Wheelers club runs to full-blown racing, riding time trials and mass-start road races. Though race outings were still comparatively rare – he said later that he competed in only four events in his first year’s racing – he seemed, after finishing ‘sixth and last’ in his first ever race, to make rapid progress. Three months after leaving school he achieved his most significant result so far, if only for the fact that it gained him his first name check in the publication that had proved such a distraction in the classroom and in what he considered to be dull lectures: Cycling magazine. For cyclists aged between 16 and 18 it was the biggest date on the calendar, the national junior road race championship, held over forty-two miles on a circuit in Dundee, some seventy miles to the north-east of Glasgow. The race was won by a rider who was a year older than Millar, and who at that time dominated the junior racing scene in Scotland. Bobby Melrose of the Nightingale Cycling Club sprinted in at the head of a small group of riders, leading for the final two hundred yards and crossing the line a convincing three lengths clear. In fourth place, just out of the medals but in the same time as Melrose, was, reported Cycling on 16 August, R. Miller (sic) of Glenmarnock Wheelers. Sixth was Tom Brodie, given the same time of one hour, fifty-two minutes and fifteen seconds. It would be around eighteen months before Cycling consistently began to spell Millar’s name correctly.

By this stage Millar had also started training on Saturdays with a group known as the Anniesland Bunch (it still meets, incidentally, every Saturday at 10 a. m, at Anniesland Cross, riding a circuit of between seventy and eighty miles known as the ‘Three Lochs’, taking in Loch Goil, Loch Long and Loch Lomond). One of the regulars in the Anniesland Bunch was another rider who was showing considerable promise, and who was a year younger than Millar. His name was David Whitehall. Whitehall remembers Millar appearing at the meeting point at Anniesland Cross and having him pointed out. ‘I remember someone saying, “There’s that new guy, Robert Millar from the Glenmarnock,”’ shrugs the quietly spoken Whitehall. ‘Right away you could see that he had a bit of power. He didn’t have much experience following the wheels in the group, but after a few weeks it shone through that he had class.’

Another member of the group was Ian Thomson, a strong rider in the 1960s and 1970s who also served as Scotland’s national team manager between 1969 and 1986. Thomson recalls his first impression of the 16-year-old Millar. ‘At the bottom of the old Whistlefield, a steep climb fairly near the start of the Three Lochs, he just took off. I thought, “Who is this kid?” There were forty or fifty of us out in the group – the roads were quiet in those days – and on this steep climb this boy took off and immediately put five or six lengths into us. It was February or March. And it was a miserable day, I remember that.’

Gibb says that Brodie was still the strongest of the three friends, but he was beginning to sense a change in Millar’s attitude towards cycling. He had been bitten by the racing bug. While Gibb and others would attach panniers to their bikes and pedal out of the city on touring and youth hostelling excursions at weekends, for Millar, cycling quickly became centred on training and racing rather than riding for fun. Although he hadn’t been studious at school, he applied his brain to this training, and to plotting the progression of his cycling career. It was natural, then, that he should turn to Billy Bilsland.

In 1997, after he had retired, a tribute to Millar’s career was paid by Cycle Sport magazine in the form of an issue devoted to, and guest-edited by, Millar. In it, he was asked who had been the biggest single influence in his career, and he named two people, Arthur Campbell and Billy Bilsland. ‘Arthur helped me find a team and meet the right people, while Billy was my first serious coach. Just saying “thank you” doesn’t seem enough when I think of how much they’ve helped me.’

Campbell’s first encounter with Millar was on a Sunday club run in, to the best of his memory, early 1976. He certainly remembers being struck by both Millar’s natural ability and his reticence. ‘It was a hard, hard Sunday. Billy was there; a lot of the best riders in the west of Scotland were there. It was harder than a race! Robert and Willie Gibb turned up, we met in the centre of Glasgow, and I said to them, “Be careful.” We rode to the highest village in Scotland, Wanlockhead, and after that, climbing up Glen Taggart, he was beside me. The road went up and up, and I said, “Go easy, son, this is really too far for you” – it was about 120 miles. And he just rode away from me, never said a word.’ Campbell still seems perplexed by the Millar enigma. ‘Was it shyness? I don’t know. I always tried to analyse it myself. Most people couldn’t put up with it, or you got the idea that he couldn’t put up with you. One got the impression that he didn’t suffer fools – at all, not even gladly. I don’t think anybody got to know him.’

Bilsland, who is married to Campbell’s daughter, was a giant of the Scottish scene, with stage wins in the 1967 Peace Race (held behind the Iron Curtain and known as the world’s toughest amateur race), the Milk Race and the Tour de l’Avenir. By the time he emerged Ken Laidlaw was still the only Scot ever to have finished the Tour de France, in 1961; only one other, Ian Steel, had even started the great race; indeed, only a handful of Scots had ever gone to the continent and not returned within a season, their bodies – and confidence – shattered. It is a measure of Bilsland’s ability, as well as his mental fortitude, that he stayed for seven years and only missed out on riding the Tour in the most bizarre circumstances. He turned professional for Peugeot in 1970 but when he failed to make the team for the 1971 Tour de France he returned, disappointed, to Britain. Then one of the riders selected instead of Bilsland suffered an injury. A letter was dispatched to his Paris address but he never saw it. He read about his selection in a newspaper, returned immediately to Paris, but he was too late. By then a young Frenchman, Bernard Thevenet, had been selected instead. It proved a stepping stone for him: Thevenet went on to win the Tour twice in the mid-seventies, while Bilsland, who rode for Peugeot for three years, never did get his chance at the Tour.

It is impossible not to wonder how different Bilsland’s career might have been if only his Peugeot team had managed to contact him. But Bilsland would prefer not to. ‘I don’t talk about that,’ he says. And the silence that follows suggests he’s not joking.

Despite that disappointment he enjoyed a relatively long and moderately successful professional career on the continent, finally retiring and returning to Glasgow for good in 1976, when he was still only 30. Bilsland was a renowned hard man, able to survive any race, no matter how tough. He didn’t win many of them, but it hardly mattered. Such riders were of great value to the continental professional teams, where they fulfilled the role of domestique, or team helper. In his seven years on the continent Bilsland was a much-respected domestique for the Peugeot team before moving to the Dutch-based TI Raleigh squad. Coincidentally, his protégé Millar would go on to ride for both teams in their later guises.

Millar first encountered Bilsland in the winter of 1975, at a circuit training class. The following year, with Millar feeling that he had outgrown the Glenmarnock Wheelers, the pair talked. Millar felt ready to move up to the next step, and the next step, as he saw it, was the Glasgow Wheelers. Bilsland’s connections with the club, as well as those of Arthur Campbell, the president of the British Cycling Federation and a leading light in the world governing body, the Union Cycliste International (UCI), convinced Millar that a move to the Glasgow Wheelers would allow him to climb the rungs of the ladder he could now see in front of him, stretching all the way to the continent and, eventually, the Tour de France. It was at this time that he and Willie Gibb went their separate ways, though Gibb also said goodbye to John Storrie and the Glenmarnock Wheelers and joined another club, the Regent CC. Tom Brodie, meanwhile, went with Millar to the Glasgow Wheelers, though his racing career was destined never to reach full flight.

Gibb says that by this stage it was obvious to him that Millar was determined ‘to give cycling a right good go’. They still cycled together, but there was no more chasing buses down the Ayr road, or all-night fishing trips. Millar was not one to talk openly about his ambitions, but Gibb remembers that ‘he started to come up with all these changes to our training. Robert read a lot of books, but there was one in particular, Cycle Racing: Training to Win by Les Woodland. He followed what was in that to the letter.’ When Gibb recalls the severity of these sessions it can bring him out in a cold sweat, even now. ‘When I think back to the training we did, it was way over the top. It was brutal. We were basically over-training, but because we were young we were able to do it and recover from it. Robert was doing all kinds of weight training – he was getting some guidance from Billy Bilsland by now – and I just did the same as him. We did a lot of double sessions, training during the day and again in the evening.’ Gibb was a strong rider himself, representing Scotland at the 1982 Commonwealth Games and winning several national championships. He retired from racing in the mid-eighties to concentrate on earning a living. Then, in the mid-nineties, having established a successful career in the electronics industry, he made a comeback. ‘I tried to do the same kind of training that I’d done with Robert in the 1970s,’ he says, ‘but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cope with the intensity of it.’

By 1976 Millar was racing every weekend and, though still a junior, he was placing regularly in the top three, even in events open to senior riders. After several near-misses he scored his first win on 15 May in the Chryston Wheelers fifty-six-mile road race; two weeks later he won his second bunched race, the Glasgow Road Club fifty-mile road race. In August, in the junior road race championship, he improved from fourth twelve months earlier to first, ‘justifying his Billy Bilsland training’, according to Cycling, ‘with an inches victory from Dave Whitehall, Ivy CC, in the championship over 45 miles in Aberdeen’. He was still appearing as ‘Miller’, and perhaps here, in his apparent unwillingness to point out the mistake to the Cycling correspondent, was the first example of his reluctance to engage with the media. Whitehall gained revenge on his rival in the time trial Best All-Rounder (BAR) competition, which was decided by a rider’s best times over twenty-five and fifty miles. A missing marshal in a time trial in Glasgow cost Millar a chance to overhaul Whitehall, an incident that ‘prompted a furious outburst from Arthur Campbell’.

By now Campbell and Bilsland had seen Millar’s potential and were beginning to assume mentoring roles. ‘I had just stopped racing so I went out training with Robert and the boys,’ says Bilsland. ‘My wife and I didn’t have kids at that time, so Robert would come and stay with us before races, and we’d be up early in the morning and away.’ To this day, Millar is the only rider who has enjoyed such close attention from Bilsland. Despite his years on the continent, in the tough school of professional racing, Bilsland has rarely actively sought to help promising young Scottish cyclists, though he has remained involved with the sport through his bike shop in the east end of Glasgow, and by holding various roles with his beloved Glasgow Wheelers. He has been the club chairman for more than a decade. The most likely reason for his reluctance to mentor other riders is that he would be too realistic about their chances. He knew that most, if they tried their luck abroad, would fail, and fail spectacularly. He didn’t want to waste his time, or theirs. But in Robert Millar he very quickly identified someone who would not fail.

There is a parallel here with Millar himself. As his professional career blossomed he quietly helped several young Scottish cyclists to find clubs or teams on the continent, but there was only one who seemed to enjoy Millar’s unqualified support. His name was Brian Smith, and, while not enjoying as spectacular a career as Millar, Smith did ride as a professional for the best part of a decade, the high point of which was a season with the American Motorola squad alongside a young Lance Armstrong. Millar’s attitude appeared to be identical to Bilsland’s. For both men, a sense of realism prevailed, and at times that could be devastating for those whose dreams were crushed by a cold, hard dose of it – such as me and my fellow young cyclists when, at the training camp in Stirling in 1989, Millar advised us not to ask him about the Tour de France because it wasn’t ‘relevant’ to us. But underpinning this apparently insensitive remark was the conviction of someone who knew what he was talking about, and knew he was right.

When he was in his late teens, on the other hand, Millar seemed convinced that he would be different – that he knew how to make it, and would succeed if he applied certain principles. In an interview in 1991, Bilsland observed, ‘Millar was one in a million. He always knew where he was going.’ He had, he added, ‘an inner hardness’. Bilsland’s conviction on this point has not changed in the years since then. ‘From day one he said he wanted to go to the continent and turn professional,’ he says. ‘That was his aim. And it’s always easier if your father’s gone before you.’ When pressed on his use of the word ‘father’, Bilsland rejects the suggestion that he was a father figure to Millar. ‘Not really, because I wasn’t that much older than him,’ he explains. ‘It was more a case of me saying to him, “Any way I can help you, I will.”’ Bilsland must have been fond of Millar. ‘Yeah, I like him. I think he’s a great guy.’

Bilsland speaks in the present tense sometimes, at other times referring to his former protégé as if he is no longer around. The reason is that he is uncertain about the current state of their relationship. Like everyone else, and despite their previous closeness, he has no idea where Millar is. He has heard rumours, but nothing concrete, and nothing from Millar himself. When Millar was inducted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2003 it was Bilsland who attended the ceremony on his behalf, at the request of the organizers. He didn’t hear from Millar, and he still has the small trophy presented to Millar, in absentia, on the night. Yet he remains fiercely protective of someone he remembers with great fondness. So much so that when I initially contacted him he refused to talk about him. ‘Robert’s a private person,’ was Bilsland’s response. ‘He wouldn’t want a book written about him.’ Although no one else refused to discuss Millar, I did sense, in the case of one or two of his old acquaintances, an initial hesitation, and guardedness. Some seemed to want to protect Millar, though from what, and for what reason, they did not know. That much became clear when they all asked the same questions. Where is he? What’s he doing?

Bilsland’s refusal to talk about his former protégé, however, was a big problem. And one of the difficulties, quite apart from the fact that I considered his input essential, was that I could see his point. Millar had given his consent to my writing a book by email through a third party, which, I had to admit, hardly constituted a ringing endorsement. But it was all I had, it was all I was likely to get; and I felt strongly that the story of Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, the man who had single-handedly turned thousands of us on to the sport, deserved to be written. Bilsland’s knockback was therefore a hard blow. So I wrote to him, outlining my plans for the book and the motivation that lay behind it – and thankfully, he relented. When we met, he couldn’t have been more helpful.

Neither could he have been more convincing in his respect and admiration for Millar. He appears genuinely upset by some of the stories that have circulated around Millar, particularly in relation to his legendary inability to get on with people. ‘I never found that,’ Bilsland insists. ‘He was shy, and OK, to try to speak to him was like drawing teeth sometimes, but I could chat to him. When he came home for the winter he always came into the shop [Billy Bilsland Cycles] and he could be chatty.’ And anyway, suggests Bilsland, to focus on how Millar interacted with people who in many cases were complete strangers is to completely miss the point – or the point of his cycling career at least. ‘Robert did it for himself,’ he says. ‘He didn’t do it for adulation.’ And then he adds, making a clear distinction between romantic notions – or delusions – of the sport and the cold reality of the business of professional cycling, ‘Robert did it for money, which might be the root of all evil, but it’s handy to have.’

Bilsland is matter-of-fact rather than sentimental. A well-built, stocky man who turned 60 in 2006, he is cheerful and friendly. He has a permanent twinkle in his eye and he laughs a lot, a silent laugh that begins deep in his stomach and eventually overcomes him, causing his shoulders to shake. But while he appears more genial and good-humoured than Millar, he can be a straight talker, too. ‘Robert didn’t suffer fools, never did,’ he says. ‘Big words were a thing with Robert. He doesn’t do bullshit. Some people are egotistic, but Robert didn’t have a big ego. I can imagine him now, wherever he is, if he meets someone out on his bike and they say, “You do a bit of cycling?” He’ll say, “Aye, I do a bit of cycling.” That would be it. End of conversation. He’s a downbeat, unassuming guy. A very bright guy. When I think about chatting to him, he was just a good guy. It’s a pity.’

‘If you speak to Robert, tell him I’m still alive,’ he smiles when I leave him at the station in Glasgow.

Apart from Bilsland, Millar was also hugely reliant on his father, Bill, for transport to races. However, although he was close to his mother, his relationship with his father was, by all accounts, strained. Those who knew the family say that father and son were similar: physically small, slightly built, quiet. Bill walked with a limp, often with the aid of a walking stick, as a result of polio.

‘Robert was a great mammy’s boy,’ says Arthur Campbell. ‘His father had a bit of a limp and I think he was a bit … I wouldn’t say Robert was disgraced by it, but he didn’t appear to have the same respect for his father as he did for his mother. His mum was a seamstress, and she never kept very well.’ Willie Gibb gently disputes Campbell’s suggestion, recalling journeys to London and Manchester with Bill Millar at the wheel. ‘He was good,’ says Gibb. ‘He went out of his way to help Robert. He was a quiet guy but helpful. I never picked up that Robert was embarrassed by his father’s limp, though he didn’t always appear grateful for the help he gave him. I think it could be as simple as the fact that his father would have been the sterner of his parents, the disciplinarian of the family. Robert wouldn’t have liked that.’

David Whitehall remembers one exchange between Robert and his father at a race in Aberdeen to which Bill had driven. ‘Robert seemed ashamed to be seen with him; he’d kind of usher him away. It was like his father was the delivery man, taking him to races, and then that was his work done until it was time to drive him home. I remember he put the wrong wheels on Robert’s bike. Robert was furious. “Dad, you put on the wheels with the big tubs [tyres]!” He gave him a right dressing down. And his dad just took it, you know, in a mea culpa type way. He’d kind of be saying, “You know what Robert’s like.” Others found it quite awkward.’

Neighbours of the Millars on Nithsdale Drive remember Bill with affection. Contrary to Millar’s quote at the head of this chapter, they don’t recall him ever being out of work. Rather, he had risen from being an ironmonger’s assistant at the time of Millar’s birth to become a salesman. Describing Bill Millar as the ‘perfect neighbour’ and ‘always well dressed, very dapper’, they explained that his passions were ballroom dancing – which he did with aplomb, despite his limp – and gardening. He tended a small patch in front of the Millars’ flat. Though quiet, he was cheerful, he could be outgoing, and he was, according to those neighbours, ‘quite proud of his boy’.

Bill Millar was occasionally sought by the media for a comment as his son’s career blossomed, though he didn’t appear to be effusive. When in 1984 Robert really hit the heights in the Tour de France his father was approached by Channel 4 and asked for a reaction. ‘We tried to get his father to give comment,’ recalls the Channel 4 commentator, Phil Liggett, ‘but he said, “I’ve got more children than just the one who rides the Tour de France. It’s very good that he’s done it, but I like my other children just as much.” It was a strange interview. His dad didn’t seem to want to know.’ Even later, when a journalist phoned the house to arrange an interview with his son, Bill Millar replied, ‘He is difficult … you had better check with Robert himself.’

It is possible, perhaps, to read too much into Millar’s apparent behaviour towards his father, particularly since most of the anecdotes date from when Millar was a teenager. It is not unknown for teenagers to be unpleasant towards their parents, after all. Millar was perhaps no worse, or better, than Harry Enfield’s horrific adolescent creation Kevin the Teenager. Nonetheless, in the few words Millar ever uttered about his family, when he was well into his twenties, he could be disarmingly frank about his poor relationship with his father. In 1984, in an interview with Jean-Marie Leblanc, then a journalist but the future director of the Tour de France, he was asked if he’d had the support of his family when he left Scotland for France. ‘More or less,’ Millar replied. ‘In fact, I have never got on very well with my father and I decided to live my life as I wanted. I only go back to Scotland for a few days each year since my mother died. Eventually, I won’t go back at all. I will live in Australia or Canada, or I may stay in France, where the standard of living is better than in Britain.’

Speaking in 1985, four years after the death of his mother, he told a film crew that her loss had come as ‘a bit of a let down’. The High Life was a documentary about Millar made by Granada TV and broadcast on the eve of the 1986 Tour de France, and in a sequence filmed so late that it almost didn’t make the final cut, Millar finally opened up about his family. ‘I was a lot closer to my mother than I was – than I am – to my father,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if that’s natural, or what. In our family it was like that.’ He looked down and quietly added, ‘Kind of a disappointment.’ Then the heavily furrowed brow was replaced by a nervous smile. ‘I don’t really miss my family much.’

‘So your mother never saw you reaching the heights?’ asked the film’s director, Peter Carr.

‘Nuh … nuh,’ Millar responded. ‘I saw my father when I went home to race but I might only see him twice a year if I go home again in the winter. I don’t really … I don’t really miss him that much. I have my life here and it’s like a different thing. It’s like going home to something else. It’s like being on holiday.’

The camera lingered on Millar as he stared silently at the ground. A smile flickered across his face but the heavy furrow and the frown quickly returned. Today, Carr, who spent the best part of a year making The High Life, remembers Millar as ‘enigmatic, mysterious, laconic … I thought he was troubled’.

As for Millar’s brother, Ian, and sister, Elizabeth, only scraps are known. Ian worked with Robert at Weir’s Pumps, David Whitehall recalls, though he found this out quite by chance. ‘His brother was the opposite personality, and I knew him, but I didn’t know he was Robert’s brother. Robert never told me; he never spoke about his family at all. One day someone said, “You know that’s Robert’s brother?” He was quite open and outgoing, quite friendly.’ Several of Millar’s cycling friends met his sister, to whom he was closer in age and, according to Gibb, virtually identical in appearance. Elizabeth trained as a nurse and got married. ‘I remember when his sister got married,’ says Whitehall. ‘Robert didn’t go to the wedding because he was doing his weight training that night. There was only me and one other guy who he spoke to at work, and it was this other lad who told me. The wedding was in January, I remember that, so it wasn’t even during the season. I mean, you could understand if it was in June or something … But there was more to it than him snubbing his sister’s wedding. It was an excuse not to go, I think. He didn’t relish social situations. Even cycling club prize presentation dinners. He was just very shy.’

Following the death of Millar’s mother, Mary, in 1981, Bill Millar remarried and moved out of Glasgow, to the small town of Kirkintilloch, a few miles north of the city, by the Campsie Hills, where he died in the early 1990s. Several people told me that Elizabeth still lives in Glasgow, working as a nurse. Billy Bilsland said that she called into his shop a couple of years ago, but he had no idea how to find her. She was married – though the marriage ended – and possibly no longer uses the Millar name. My efforts to find Elizabeth and Ian included dispatching more than two hundred emails through the Friends Reunited website, which drew many replies but only one positive response. ‘You were fortunate to find me,’ read the email. ‘I knew the Millars very well. Elizabeth was a close friend of mine for a long time and Ian was best man at my wedding in 1981 … We all stayed in Wellcroft Place in the Gorbals and [attended] Abbotsford Primary … Ian now lives in the Aberdeenshire area and I keep in touch with a Christmas card every year. I have his address if you need it. I think Elizabeth still stays in Glasgow, but as I said, I don’t know where Robert is now.’

I wrote to Ian Millar on two occasions, but he didn’t respond. Had I managed to speak to either Ian or Elizabeth, I would have asked them about Millar’s paradoxical relationship with his father, who, by most accounts, was a pleasant, gentle, even docile man. Yet he was also his father, and therefore a figure of authority. And, given that Millar seemed predisposed from an early age to dislike and distrust authority figures, Bill might not have needed to be especially strict, or very much of a disciplinarian, to earn his younger son’s disapproval. The question is, was Millar’s personality forged through his difficult relationship with his father, or did his relationship with his father become strained because of his attitude towards authority figures? It might be revealing, in this context, to note that those who knew something of the three siblings report that neither Ian nor Elizabeth shared Robert’s hostility towards authority figures, or, for that matter, towards their father. They were, in the words of one, ‘pretty normal and easy-going in comparison with Robert’.

I do not know whether there was any specific cause for the rift in Millar’s relationship with his father, and those who knew him – Bilsland, Campbell, Gibb, Whitehall – are confident there wasn’t. My inclination is to agree, and to conclude that Millar’s indifference towards his father was simply Robert Millar being Robert Millar. He was fiercely independent, and he wanted to be seen as being independent, so what better way to assert your independence, especially at a young age, than to alienate your father?

It was towards the end of the 1976 season, Millar’s first with the Glasgow Wheelers and his first under the tutelage of Billy Bilsland, that he started to produce the results that would gain him wider attention. It was one thing to win the junior road race title, quite another to finish second in a field containing the best senior riders in the country in one of the classic time trials held at the tail end of the season. On 9 October, in torrential rain and heavy mist, the Tour of the Trossachs, a twenty-seven-mile hilly time trial that climbed the Duke’s Pass by Aberfoyle, was won by Sandy Gilchrist, one of the stars of the British amateur scene. Millar, who had turned 18 the previous month, was second. This and other results earned him a call-up to the Scottish senior squad for the following season. Also in that squad were Gilchrist and Bobby Melrose, another young rider, who became Millar’s regular training partner.

Melrose and Millar were drawn together by circumstance as much as anything else. Melrose was pursuing a career as a professional cyclist, and he made frequent forays to Belgium, sometimes visiting Bilsland. He only worked occasional part-time hours and was therefore able to train during the day. Millar, meanwhile, was also able to train most days. In his case, that was because he was spending less time at work than he should have done.

Weir’s Pumps of Cathcart, the factory that employed around eighteen hundred workers in the late 1970s, was the natural first step on the career ladder for hordes of school leavers in Glasgow. More importantly, it was the only place that could provide many of them with a pay packet. As a first-year apprentice doing an ONC in mechanical engineering as part of his employment, Millar was paid £26 a week. It was enough to keep many 18-year-olds off the streets during the day and in the pub in the evening, but Millar was miserable there. It soon became clear that he was unsuited to work, and, perhaps just as significantly, to the working environment.

By coincidence, one of his contemporaries at Weir’s, starting out on the same engineering apprenticeship, was his main rival in the Scottish junior races, David Whitehall. Whitehall was a year younger, but he and Millar had much in common. First and foremost, both were cyclists. Both were reserved and quiet, too; neither really fitted the stereotype of the garrulous ‘west of Scotland male’, as Whitehall puts it. But there was one crucial difference: Whitehall was conscientious and serious about gaining his apprenticeship at Weir’s, Millar was not. Some days he didn’t turn up; other days he went missing in the afternoon. Even when he was there, it was in body rather than mind, spirit or application. He appeared to relish the challenge of devising ingenious new ways of skiving, of getting one over on the management, or anyone, for that matter, who told him what to do and when. ‘There was a pipe room,’ explains Whitehall. ‘Robert had a very black sense of humour, and he’d say he went in there for a sleep, so he’d be well rested for training. He’d also come out with things like, “I’ve perfected a new way of sleeping in the toilets”, then he’d demonstrate how he could lie, with his head resting on the cistern. Sometimes I wouldn’t know if he was serious. I’d think, “Are you having a laugh?” But he was serious.’

The first twelve months of the three-year apprenticeship included basic skills, using drilling machines and fitting machines, all geared towards the manufacture of water pumps. After the first year the apprentices were ‘let loose’ in the factory, working in castings or assembly. ‘You tended to get moved around every six months,’ continues Whitehall. ‘As a technician apprentice, which is what Robert and I were, you were seen as being a potential manager in years to come. So there was a bit of an “us and them” divide between the apprentices and the workers on the shop floor.’ Whitehall describes the atmosphere on the shop floor as ‘male-dominated, typical west of Scotland’, in the sense that there were two preoccupations among most of the workers, ‘ragging and shagging’. ‘There was a lot of smut, and I think Robert felt ill at ease among all of that, especially among lads his own age. “What did you do at the weekend?” they’d ask, really goading him. “Did you get a burd?”’

Apart from drinking, football and girls, Glasgow’s religious divide was another preoccupation, and it manifested itself at Weir’s in strange ways. The Protestant–Catholic schism was not overt, says Whitehall, ‘but it seemed more than a coincidence that in one particular office everyone would either be a nonbeliever or a Protestant, while next door it would be the other way round. It seemed to be arranged like that. I don’t think it was an accident.’ Although Millar came from a Protestant family, he showed no religious leanings, says Whitehall. ‘Cycling was his religion.’ Interestingly, one of Millar’s teammates from his days riding professionally in France, Ronan Pensec, makes a similar observation: ‘He was almost religious in his dedication to training.’

It was another of the unwritten rules of Glasgow life – in fact, it must be written in the city charter – that in places of work nicknames are compulsory, even if it is only, and most commonly, ‘Big Man’ or ‘Wee Man’. Often one will be used as a prefix to someone’s name – hence ‘Big Davie’ or ‘Wee Rab’. But inevitably there was cruelty in the nickname assigned to ‘Wee Rab’ Millar. He was known in the factory as ‘Eagle Beak’, Whitehall reveals, ‘because of his large nose’.

It would appear that every Billy Connolly-inspired caricature of the Glasgow working-class male was reinforced on the shop floor at Weir’s. Connolly told tales of the shipyards, but by the seventies many of these had closed and factories like Weir’s developed a similar culture, with rigidly applied rules concerning what was acceptable for young males. Working hard, going to the football and the pub, and ‘pulling burds’ was not only standard but required behaviour; falling asleep in the toilets while dreaming of riding the Tour de France was not. ‘Weir’s was Robert’s worst nightmare,’ says Whitehall. ‘It was just like a Billy Connolly sketch – there were these dominant characters, people you’d be a bit afraid of. And Robert was different, not because he was a cyclist, but more because of his demeanour. He was perceived as a weirdo. He didn’t talk much, which was what struck most folk. When people did try to communicate with him they got the impression that he didn’t want to talk to them. I think he just felt he had absolutely nothing in common with them. Robert talked to me a bit, about cycling and races, never family or anything like that. The only other thing he talked about was the boredom of the factory, and how he couldn’t wait to get out. He used to say he found it mind-numbing. “The only reason I’m doing this is to make money to buy bike equipment,” he said. His attitude was that he didn’t want to go to college and he didn’t want to be at Weir’s either, but he had to do something until he could go over to France to get the professional contract. It was a means to an end.’

Racing provided more than a weekend diversion. As 1977 approached Millar took to training with even more gusto. He was now following a programme of weight and circuit training as well as cycling, with Bilsland providing guidance. Bilsland took him to his old interval training circuits, timing Millar and Brodie as they made repeat efforts. ‘There were guys who were better as juniors,’ comments Bilsland, ‘but you could see that Robert had a big margin for improvement. He was so consistent when we were doing interval training and mile reps [repetitions]: he could bang out more or less the same times sprint after sprint, even at 16.’

For the last two winters Millar had also been attending circuit training classes run by Bilsland’s old coach, Jimmy Dorward, held in a large school in the Springburn area of Glasgow. The classes were held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and they always followed the same routine: a twenty-minute warm-up followed by a session of circuit-type exercises – squat thrusts, sit-ups, press-ups – designed to improve strength and overall fitness. The hall was divided in two, with cyclists training at one end and footballers – among them several who would go on to play for Rangers, and one, Walter Smith, who was eventually appointed Scotland coach, and who attended the class at the same time as Bilsland – at the other. Bobby Melrose was a regular. ‘The warm-up was severe, never mind the circuit training,’ he recalls with a grimace. ‘The footballers only did the warm-up, then they would lie at the back of the hall on mats while we did our training. Then we played football with them at the end. It was brutal.’

‘It was a great night,’ says the ageless Jimmy Dorward, now in his fifth decade of coaching cyclists. His description of the warm-up doesn’t quite tally with Melrose’s – actually, it is amusingly at odds with it. ‘General callisthenics,’ is how he describes the class, his hands flailing dismissively, ‘limbering up, stretching, a little jogging and so forth. I drew cyclists from all over Glasgow for those classes. But it was a great night and the lads loved it. I tried to get the footballers to join in when Alex Willoughby, a midfielder with Rangers, came along. But they said, “No chance, we don’t want to be shown up.” But then, cyclists have tremendous dedication to training.’ To illustrate the point, Dorward, who was Bilsland’s coach, told me what his pupil told him on his return from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. ‘He came back and said that the cyclists hadn’t really mixed with the other athletes, many of whom seemed to be there to enjoy themselves. The ones they mixed with best were the boxers. The boxers know that if they don’t train they’re going to get a leathering. The cyclists were the same. So the cyclists and the boxers behaved impeccably – they had that in common.’

Dorward is modest about the significance of his role in running the legendary Springburn circuit training classes. ‘It wasn’t on my account that it was a fantastic class. Billy used to go, and he sent Robert. I watched him in circuits and he stood out there. He drove round, you know? He was a very good example to everyone. I remember Robert as being special, even when he was 16, 17. You don’t get many of that calibre.’ Dorward didn’t coach Millar, but he would have liked to. ‘It’s like a cabinet maker,’ he reasons, ‘if you see a nice piece of wood you’d like to work with it.’

Almost certainly as a result of all this dedicated training, Millar made an immediate impact in 1977, his first senior year. In the first event of the season, a handicap race in Ayrshire in mid-March, he sprinted in first, just beating Whitehall. Two weeks later, the Tour of the Shire provided a sterner test. According to Cycling, ‘Sandy Gilchrist and Dave Brunton [both seniors, who tied for first place] were red-faced when junior road race champion Robert Miller [sic] was only ten seconds down’ in a race run off ‘in tough conditions, with an icy crosswind’. Next up was one of the biggest events on the Scottish calendar, the Easter weekend Girvan 3-Day in Ayrshire. With his performance here, in the colours of Strathclyde, Millar offered ‘hope for the future’, according to Cycling; ‘a fine fifth place by Scottish junior champion Robert Millar [clearly he was making an impact: it was the first correct spelling of his name] on the final stage’. But the revelation of the weekend was another young rider, an Englishman by the name of John Parker. His and Millar’s paths would cross again two years later.

Millar continued to perform well and earned selection to the Scottish team for July’s Scottish Milk Race, which was certainly the biggest race in Scotland and second only to the Milk Race – the two-week stage race held in England – in Britain. At 18, Millar was the youngest in an international pro-am field that included the leading British professional riders and amateur teams from Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Five days long, the stages ranged from 83 miles to 105 miles, and took the riders the length and breadth of the country, from Glasgow to Aberdeen and Ayr.

Millar’s race almost came to a disastrous end on stage 3, Arbroath to Aberdeen, when he skidded on a gravelly bend and broadsided into a bridge parapet, colliding with a spectator who was sitting there. Rider and spectator disappeared over the side of the bridge, falling twelve feet, though Millar was able to use the unfortunate gentleman ‘as a cushion’, reported Cycling. Unhurt, Millar got back up and rejoined the field. (It is not known what happened to the man who’d provided a soft landing.) Early the next day, ‘his left thigh red from the crash’, Millar attacked repeatedly on the 103-mile stage from Stonehaven to Aberdeen. It got him nowhere, but it did get the Scottish team talked about, prompting Cycling to hail them as ‘the best band of triers the host country has recently produced, forcing their attentions on the race and taking the suffering that went with it’.

On the final day, Millar produced a sensational performance, placing second on the ninety-four-mile stage having attacked with seven miles to go. ‘The field was shredded and patched up many times over the 900-foot moors,’ Cycling reported. ‘With 30 miles left in the unabating wind [where] horizontal bars of driving rain replaced the brief sunshine, a long gradual climb to exposed moorland cut the field to 31.’ With fifteen miles to go, and a Swiss rider out in front, Millar punctured, but he quickly rejoined the group of thirty-one riders and at seven miles to go launched an attack. ‘It promised the waiting crowds something to hope for, but his gallant attack, like so many made by the Scots, was to fail. Second place was still a superb ride, Scotland’s best.’ In his first international race, in his first year as a senior, Millar finished seventeenth overall. Ninth was Gilchrist, the top-placed Scot. ‘We had been under a lot of pressure to do well in the Scottish Milk Race,’ recalls Melrose, another member of the team. ‘There was always the threat that they’d pull the plug on the race if the home riders didn’t do well. Generally we were struggling, but that day that Robert got second, I couldn’t believe it. The wind was unbelievable. I was nearly crying. It was some ride.’

Several weeks later Millar again shone in a field containing riders several years older than him, placing second in the Scottish road race championship, held over a ninety-one-mile course in Dundee. Having been in a late escape with Sandy Gilchrist, and despite being hailed ‘the most courageous of the Scottish under-20s’, he was beaten to the line by another prodigious talent. Jamie McGahan, just 18 and thirteen days younger than Millar, was the new Scottish senior champion. Clearly Millar was not the only young Scot with huge talent.

Unlike Millar, McGahan really could claim that he came from the wrong side of the tracks. He was brought up in Possilpark, one of Glasgow’s most notorious districts, in a tenement flat with no hot water. ‘It was one of the things that motivated me,’ he says, ‘I’d come in from doing 120 miles in the cold and then I’d have to heat a big pot of water for a wash. I remember thinking that everyone had a shower except me, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. Poverty’s relative, isn’t it?’ McGahan had been on the same Strathclyde team as Millar at the Girvan Easter stage race, earlier in 1977. On the first stage he crashed heavily, bent his bike and was swept up by the ‘broom wagon’ – the vehicle that follows the race, picking up crash victims and stragglers. Though it was early in the stage there was another rider in the broom wagon, with a functioning bike. McGahan asked if he could borrow it, then followed roads that he didn’t know until, quite by chance, he came to a junction on the race course some ten miles from the finish. A plan was instantly hatched in his 18-year-old brain. ‘I hid behind a wall,’ he recalls. ‘I must have been there three quarters of an hour. The leading group came past and I thought, “I’ll let them go.” It would have been too obvious. Then the next group came along, and I jumped out and joined them. But because I was so fresh I decided they were going too slow for me, so I jumped up to the next group. I really just wanted to stay in the race. But at the finish the guy in the broom wagon reported me. I remember this guy, in front of everyone, shouting, “Stand up, Jamie McGahan! You took a short-cut!” I was really, really embarrassed.’

Like Millar, McGahan realized in 1977 that he wanted to turn professional. But, again like Millar, he learned that in his path would be various obstacles, some real, others existing in the minds and attitudes of others. ‘I was aware straightaway what Robert’s ambition was. It was mine, too: we wanted to be pros. But people told us, “The best thing you can do, son, is go and get a job.” That was definitely the prevailing attitude in Scotland.’ There had been an indication from Millar earlier in the season that he would not only resist but rail against prevailing attitudes, and that he would repeatedly place himself in opposition to the authorities, no matter the consequences. A bizarre example of this is a Millar story that has passed into Scottish cycling folklore, concerning an extraordinary ‘double disqualification’ during one weekend in 1977.

It was a weekend when Millar contested two one-day events, both in the vicinity of Glasgow. On the Saturday, in a circuit race in Bellahouston Park, Millar was in the lead group, but he could only watch as one of his fellow competitors – most likely Tom Brodie – sprinted clear to win the race, crossing the line with arms held aloft in the traditional celebration, just like the professional stars did when they won big races on the continent. Unfortunately, this being amateur racing, there was a rule against taking your hands from the bars when it was deemed by the commissaire (race referee) to be dangerous. The rule wasn’t always applied, but on this occasion it was, and Brodie was disqualified.

The next day, in a race on the outskirts of Glasgow, Millar found himself in the lead group as they hurtled towards the finish, and this time he won the sprint and unashamedly raised both hands in the air to celebrate the ‘win’. The commissaire, Jock Shaw, was aghast. ‘There was a substantial bunch of riders and Millar shot out of it with two hundred metres to go,’ says Shaw. ‘Then he sticks both his hands in the air, the day after his pal has been disqualified for doing so. I said, “What did you do that for? I’ve no choice but to disqualify you.” And he just shrugged. “My pal did it yesterday. I was checking you knew the rules.”’ What he really wanted to do, suggests Shaw, was to catch him out. Perhaps another motivation was to give him a stick with which to beat the commissaire who’d disqualified Brodie the previous day. The race was of secondary importance. ‘He was neither up nor down about being disqualified,’ suggests Shaw. ‘He didn’t seem to care.’

This couldn’t-care-less attitude is seen time and again with Millar; it was either this or its polar opposite, righteous indignation, that he tended to display towards officials. But the question is, was there any basis, beyond his innate rebelliousness, for Millar to be suspicious of the motives and actions of others, in particular fellow riders or race officials? Later in his career there was spectacularly so. But later in that same year, 1977, there was an incident that he consciously committed to memory, in the same way, perhaps, that Lance Armstrong would later claim to ‘store on the hard drive’ any perceived wrongs by perceived enemies.

One of Millar’s final events of the 1977 season was the Tour of the Peak, a prestigious 90-mile road race in the Peak District. Millar made it into the race-winning break, but, as they raced into a driving headwind, he suffered a puncture. He made a quick stop and was handed the spare bike from the service car while the mechanics repaired his machine. He chased and re-captured the break; but a little later, on the approach to a climb, the service car drove alongside Millar to offer him his own bike back. Gerry McDaid, a Scottish official on duty at the Tour of the Peak, observed this and was horrified to see Millar accept the invitation to stop and swap bikes. In fact, McDaid suspected that the mechanics, knowing that a steep climb was approaching, might have been toying with the unknown and inexperienced young Millar. Having lost his momentum at such a critical point, Millar never regained contact with the break. McDaid reproached him at the finish: ‘You made a big mistake there, Robert.’

‘I know,’ Millar replied. ‘It’s in my little black book. I’ll not do it again.’