In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
Pyrenean stage, then winning the same stage in 1984 against heavy odds … I am not ashamed to say that I shed tears of emotion as he danced away to victory, and even now, on the video re-run, I still get glassy-eyed. Knowing Millar, I can safely say, quoting Al Jolson, “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”’
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