In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
But Jackie Stewart didn’t become world champion just by pottering around vaguely in cars. He had one singular urge and that was to be the best Formula 1 driver in the world. Racing was his life, just as climbing is my life … there is a group that’s recognised as the world’s best and that’s where I want to be. God knows I’m far enough away from it now, but I’d never have the remotest chance of reaching it with your attitude. It’s difficult for most people to understand a singular strong urge to do something well. You only really take out of something the amount you put in; you get small amounts of pleasure out of many things, whereas I get a huge amount of pleasure out of one.
Haston, just as Millar would do, also repeatedly made a distinction between people like him and ‘normal people’, the implication being that to be considered normal would be construed as a grave insult; and, taking the theory to its natural conclusion, that normality, including any evidence of normal behaviour, was to be resisted and avoided. Normality could only hold you back; the key was to be different, not to fit in, to set yourself apart from your peers.
Millar flew into Charles de Gaulle airport in January 1979 with an address, Rue de Sèvres, in his pocket. ‘No one came to meet me, so I took a taxi,’ Millar told Rupert Guinness for his 1993 book Foreign Legion, which documented the extraordinary impact on world cycling made by the English-speaking ‘exiles’ in a relatively brief period, from Paul Sherwen in 1977 to Stephen Roche, Sean Yates, John Herety and Allan Peiper, all of whom represented the ACBB in the years after Millar. ‘We drove to Paris,’ Millar continued, ‘and came to this place with huge doors. There was no sign, but I walked through to ask a lady there, who came up and asked what I wanted.’ Then, a claim that would have shocked Arthur Campbell: ‘I couldn’t speak any French at all. But I worked out that what she was saying was that the Rue de Sèvres I wanted was on the other side of Paris.’
In The High Life, the hour-long documentary film about Millar, he talks engagingly, if slightly awkwardly, about his first impressions of Paris, confessing that he had been ‘scared to speak at first’. Millar then reveals that as well as the French lessons with Campbell, he had also purchased a cassette course. ‘I did three hours a day until the end of the course,’ he says. He continues, falteringly, ‘It’s a bit kind of difficult at first, when you get off the plane … you’re in the airport in Paris, and you show the taxi driver the address you want to go to, and he takes you there. It’s kind of a letdown. Because you think that everyone’s going to look after you. They see so many guys come [to France] that they don’t really look after you so well. You have to do it all yourself and you feel kind of … let down. It’s a bit of an anti-climax.’
Phil Anderson was settling into his apartment when Millar arrived, to be met by Claude Escalon. The deputy director explained that, with four riders already ensconced in the ACBB-owned apartment, there was no room for Millar. He was shown instead to a nearby gymnasium, which would provide temporary accommodation. There was a not unreasonable assumption, suggested Guinness, that at least one of the four riders in the apartment would crack before too long and head for home, thus freeing up a bed for Millar. ‘There were so many good riders that to survive you needed to be special,’ Millar told Guinness. Four years later, reflecting again on his move to France, he explained, ‘It was like a mercenary thing. You just took yourself there and you did it.’ When asked why the club was prepared to take on so many foreigners at that time, Millar’s response was characteristically glib and self-denigrating: ‘We didn’t ask for so much. If you didn’t speak French you couldn’t ask questions, and you couldn’t understand the answers. What you don’t know you can’t ask about.’
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